Which device?

A phone may not be better than AA, but a dedicated tablet could be. I haven't owned a car in a while now so I'm not sure what the current scene is like, but back in the day there used to be dedicated custom ROMs for cars (Timur's ROM for eg), which had various optimisations for car usage. I used those ROMs in combination with Tasker and Greenify, so that my tablet (a Nexus 7 and later a Nexus 9) would automatically activate and launch my GPS apps and Spotify when I turned on my car, and when I turned it off, it would enter into airplane mode and go into deep sleep. With this, I could leave my tablet in my car and have it behave like a built-in infotainment system.

I also had it hooked up to my car's OBD2 port using an adapter, and could get realtime car stats like the speed and temps. There's was also a This third-party car home app (I forget the name, Speedometer or something), which, IMO, was a much better (and customisable) interface than AA.

Compared to the setup I had back then, AA feels like a joke in comparison. Mind you, I don't think the concept of AA irsel isn't bad, but at least in my experience and use case, I felt it was quite restrictive and clunky compared to using a full-fledged Android with third-party apps. The best part of this setup was that there was no reliance on my phone, no reliance on my car manufacturer, and no reliance on Google.

I'm considering getting a rear view mirror that has integrated a Android Auto functionality so I can use Maps without ever looking away from the road. Even better than dash

I dislike the latest updates to waze on Android auto. I always refresh my route before going to the freeway on my commute but now the routes button moved to the top right corner and is tiny. For that reason I prefer my phone on my click in wireless charger in my car which has the better phone waze ui

You got lucky. I also bought the wireless dongle and my phone was not compatible. Only the latest phones are but the requirements are nowhere to be found. I also tried a simple phone with android Go but turns out Go does not support android auto at all. This is also not said anywhere on android auto page. Now I have another ohone and a cable and it does mostly work but the voice assistant (like the most important feature when driving) is buggy, the screen gets all messed up from time to time, support for it in apps is still not great and of course it all goes through google so bye bye privacy. Of course it's better than the infotainment systems that all the car brands had because it's does support more apps and the big car display is better than phone holder but overall it still sucks. A truly open standard that would let phones just display stuff on the car's screen and get input from it would be so much better but of course there's no hope for it.