iPhone 15 Pro Plus auto playing music on 2023 VW Tiguan speakers

This seems to be a fairly new issue for me in this car. The latest operating systems in IOS force / auto plays the last played song from either Spotify, YouTube, or YouTube Music.

First of all - this is annoying, inconvenient, and embarrassing. Imagine when you have colleagues hop into your car and your kid’s Wiggles music to start blaring. Or when you strap your baby into the car and metal music or base heavy rap starts up and scares him. Secondly - I often have my phone packed away in my bag so cannot immediately do anything about it because even when I pause the song using my car’s media system, the song just force plays again. So, effectively the functions on my car media player become useless. It also is wildly distracting from any in-car navigation routes that I am trying to bring up.

I have checked all through my car settings, Spotify and YouTube settings, and phone settings, etc. but cannot find anything to override this auto play command. I have done all the unpairing-repairing and restarting steps too.

I’ve seen this issue reported all over various forums with different cars and even other iOS versions. Yes, I’ve seen many suggested workarounds such as:

• forcibly shutting down the apps after use (but when I needed to grab my phone and use those apps, then the workaround is ineffective because the last played song immediately starts blaring)
• turning the sound off in my car (Just, no. Ain’t nobody got time for that nor do we necessarily remember to do so)
• switching from media player to radio
• turning Bluetooth off

These so-called workarounds are just not viable solutions. We need an actual fix. Does anyone have a proper solution or awareness if Apple has this in their sights as a bug fix? This has to be a buggy command, surely, especially if it’s rendering Bluetooth speaker functions ineffective and there are multiple complaints about it.