I’ve been having a problem since updating my iPhone to iOS 16 and I wonder if anyone has had a similar experience, or even found a solution.  To give some background, to provide WiFi in my car, I use a Huawei dongle with a Three data only Sim, which I replace when it’s expired, and which gives me 24gb for up to 24 months.  I’ve used this in my previous cars, where I wasn’t using CarPlay because I couldn’t be doing with a wired connection, and this has worked perfectly.  When I took delivery of my facelift Karoq, I decided to try the wireless CarPlay.  In the WiFi settings of the Amundsen, I enabled the WiFi, which disables the built-in e-sim, and then selected my WiFi dongle from the list of external devices.  To connect to CarPlay, I followed the correct route of first pairing the phone via Bluetooth and once it had connected, selecting “use CarPlay”.  For the first 6 months or so, this worked perfectly.  I would start the car and CarPlay would be activated in the car and my phone would connect to the hotspot (My Skoda nnnn) and I never had to give it a moment’s thought.  Since updating to iOS 16 (and the subsequent minor updates), CarPlay starts up fine most of the time, although I get the occasional error message, but my phone stubbornly refuses to connect to WiFi.  I can see the network Id of the Hotspot in the “My Networks” list on my phone, and I have to manually select it to connect to WiFi, although on the very odd occasion, it does connect automatically (I do have Auto-Join set on).  Weirdly, if I select the “information” button next to the network name in “My Networks”, then select “Join this network”, the phone says it needs to disconnect from “My Skoda nnnn” (even though the phone is not yet connected to the Hotspot), then it reconnects but then says the password is incorrect.  I type in the correct password, but it still says it is wrong.  The only way of connecting is to go back and select the network from the “My Networks” list.  I’ve also tried connecting my wife’s phone, also on iOS 16.1.1 and the same problem exists.  Trying with an old iPhone 7, which is on iOS 14, there’s no problem.  Apologies for this long-winded diatribe, but I’m intrigued to know if anyone has any wisdom to offer.

I'm somewhat amazed that there have been no responses to this post, even if just to say that the same problem was being experienced.  I became convinced that iOS 16 was responsible and that Apple had "broken" this facility when introducing that version.  This belief only increased when reading on a variety of forums, including Apple's Community Forum, that other people with cars from other manufacturers were experiencing this same problem.  In case it might be of use to anyone else, I've finally managed to get round this problem.  I felt the only way would be to revert to a version of iOS 15, but that's not possible through official Apple channels.  However, after much trawling, I found a guide to do this very thing.  It took around 40 minutes in total to complete, and I'm now back on iOS 15.6.  The result is exactly what I wanted, in that when I get into my car and start up, my phone automatically connects to CarPlay and the car's wifi hotspot, and all my cursing and swearing have disappeared.  For anyone interested, this is the link to the guide:-

 

https://www.iphonetricks.org/downgrade-ios-16-1-to-15-7-1-how-to-guide/

 

I was unable to get to iOS 15.7.1 because that version isn't available over air, but 15.6 is fine.  It would be really nice if Apple would fix this problem in iOS 16 at some point, but I'm not holding my breath.