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I use bluetooth in my dad's Honda Fit EV (pretty recent), but the darn thing has a ~5 second lag (noticeable when you change songs), and the pause/backward/forward controls don't work (at least with my old Galaxy Nexus, not sure about my other devices). And the audio quality seems to be a tad worse than 3.5mm input. Sometimes I wonder why they bothered with BT at all...

I have a 2003 Creative Zen Xtra that was originally 30GB but has a 120GB drive in it now. Sadly it has a 128GB LBA limitation. But I only have it about half full anyway. The last firmware update turned it into a MTP device thankfully. So any Windows recognizes it without any special software.

I've tried using phones as music players but when you're driving it is vastly better to have real buttons that you can work by feel.

I get a kick out of how people don't even know what it is most of the time.

If the Clip+ with a microSD card doesn't appeal to you for some reason, you could look at the Fiio X products. if you want to go whole hog, there is the X5 with dual microSD slots. It costs $350 and has audiophile-type DAC and headphone opamps. They promise future upgrades for larger microSD cards, and have apparently been good with firmware updates in the past. There is also the less expensive X1 for ~$100. The only downsides to them is merely fair battery life, but they are probably better than an iPod classic in the regard anyway.

The Egg wrote:

To this day, I've yet to find a car stereo which can access external HDDs without some sort of bizarre file/folder limitations. It's generally somewhere around 10,000 files or 1,000 folders, often less. For whatever reason, this same limitation never exists when using an iPod.

AFAIK most head units with iPod in usually lets the iPod play the music itself via line-out (or sometimes digital-out), and the head-unit only connects as a controller. It isn't subject to file/folder limitations because the head-unit isn't actually accessing the files.