Which new cars have a CD player? 

I want to buy a new car to replace my five-year-old Jaguar XF Sportbrake. I have identified several potential candidates: Ford Focus Estate, Range Rover Evoque, Volkswagen Golf Estate, Volkswagen Passat Estate and Volvo V60. The car needs to have an automatic gearbox and either a conventional petrol engine or a mild hybrid petrol.

Although this might seem like a bizarre deal-breaker, the new car must have a CD player, because I have more than 1000 CDs. 

Can you confirm if the models above do come with CD players and if there are any others I can add to my list? 

Julia Ayrton

What Car? says…

Hardly any new cars come with CD players any more, because they’ve been replaced by newer music playing options, such as Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, which let you use many of the apps on your smartphone via the car’s infotainment system, so you can play music that you’ve stored on your phone or connect to a Spotify account or YouTube.

Of your list of potential new cars, only the entry-level Volkswagen Golf Estate S comes with a CD player as standard; higher-spec versions come with Apple CarPlay instead. And from a trawl of car maker brochures, the only other new car models we could find with a CD player as standard are the Lexus ES and Mazda 6 (above). 

Rather than limiingt the number of cars by rejecting any that don’t come with a CD player, there are a number of potential solutions to your dilemma. You can either buy an aftermarket CD player and have it fitted to your new car, or you can download your music onto your phone or onto a USB memory stick that can be plugged into a port in the car. This last option should enable you to put many of your CDs onto a stick so you can listen to them in the car.

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Read more: What is Apple CarPlay >>