For many years I have connected my iPhone to my car’s audio system with a cable from the phone to the car’s 3.5mm analogue auxiliary jack socket. (It’s a 2009 VW Eos. The best car I ever owned and I’m not swapping it for something more modern just to get Bluetooth and a fancy audio control centre!) Originally I connected the phone using its audio output port; then it became the Lightning connector; now with my latest iPhone 16 it’s the USB3 port. It used to be that I could listen to music, or podcasts, or a phone call through the car’s speakers. I could hear a phone caller on the car’s system, while the phone’s microphone was perfectly good at picking up my voice in order to have a conversation.
Somewhere along the way that stopped happening. Maybe it was the new iPhone; maybe OS 26. I’m not sure. But now I can still play music and podcasts through the car stereo, but phone calls—and, I noticed the other day, Siri—only come out of the phone’s speaker, which makes having a handsfree phone convo, or hearing what Siri is telling me, impossible while driving.
I have checked all the apparently relevant settings on the iPhone. Settings → Accessibility → Touch → Call Audio Routing (a weird place to find this if you ask me) is set to Automatic. Settings → Apple Intelligence & Siri → Siri Responses → Spoken Responses is also set to Automatic.
Is there a setting I haven’t unearthed? How do I get calls to route through the iPhone’s USB port? And what has changed since I last could?
Thanks for any advice/suggestions