Hello guys, thank you for the two helpful responses and sorry for this slow follow-up. In the interim, we've had a lot of communications with VW and with our dealer. I thought this would be a simple technical matter. It isn't, and I'd recommend any buyers interested in a secondhand VW to read over the following.

Recent VW passenger cars have had Apple CarPlay facilities. People encounter CarPlay when they engage with Apple's paid media but it's actually a separate piece of software that handles just the interaction between your Apple phone and the car -- it's like the hands-free phone thing, but for media. It's advertised as a VW feature. Gill's a vinyl junkie and really wanted to listen to her music through the car stereo.

Her car is a recent Golf that the previous owner bought on the Motability scheme and didn't use much. We got it for a good (not knockdown) price and expected CarPlay to be functioning from Day One. It wasn't. As my first post indicated, I thought this was a connectivity issue. In fact, the connections are fine. The problem is that CarPlay has been disabled by the manufacturer.

There's a particular reason for this -- the previous owner upgraded the media services on a paid subscription which he or she allowed to lapse. When I contacted VW's helpline, they reviewed the VIN and told me that the CarPlay facility had gone along with the contract. We pointed out that we'd bought the car in the expectation of using CarPlay, and that I'd expected to get access to the basic CarPlay service (as we would with a new car). They told me that they don't allow such downgrades once a vehicle is more than three years old.

If this really is VW's official line, it mean that people buying secondhand cars from the company shouldn't expect to access the contents of their mobile phones unless they pay a substantial subscription -- even though people who buy new cars enjoy such access as a matter of course.

We're extremely annoyed about this state of affairs, which wasn't made clear to us at time of purchase. I wonder how others react?