Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
I think I’m still confused how the phone would leave Ron’s home network and attach to the AAWireless if it’s the phone that’s being the source of data for the device.
It has no bearing on who has the data to transmit, it’s all about the mechanics of wireless signals and how their connections are negotiated between the phone and the wireless Access Points it knows how to access. Since the device in the car acts like a wireless AP and the phone knows the SSID and password, and since the phone sees a stronger signal from the AP in the car than one some distance away in the house so it switches to the stronger signal.
But I’m confused about why the AAWireless device is an AP when it has no 3G data connection to bridge.
I think the way Android Auto wireless works is it uses WiFi for whatever protocol runs between the phone and car head unit. Has nothing to do with data connections. So the AAWireless device adds the WiFi functionality to an earlier head unit that doesn’t have it.
Ron mentioned the main gotcha. You flatten your phone on a long journey. And if you’re going to plug it in to charge, no need for the wireless 
Cars where it works well have a wireless charger too.
They use WiFi for the connection… who knows why that and not Bluetooth… but given that it’s WiFi, there are two choices. Normal (in your home for your Internet) WiFi is called “infrastructure mode.” In this mode, you have a AP accepting connection (by validating the password matches the SSID) and clients. In this mode with your cell phone, it is the client. (There is also the possibility of the phone being an AP itself, this is called “hotspotting,” but let’s ignore that, because it wouldn’t be automatic enough for what the in car device wants.) The other choice is “ad hoc” WiFi. I don’t know a lot about that mode, but I assume there is limited security because it’s normally used peer to peer for file sharing and such.
The in car device wants the phone to be able to pair once and then from that point only, it should be “magical” and just work. The phone is used to being a WiFi client in your house, or at your work, so by making the in car device just another AP the phone will just magically connect to it when it is near (i.e. when you are in your car.)
What I’m thinking is that maybe once it connects to the AAWireless’ SSID, the App (which needed to be granted a lot of permissions) then turns on the hotspot, turns its AP off, then connects to the phone’s hotspot. That sounds like the kind of Tasker routines I’d write 