The new Siri is so much better than it was BUT, by far, the best new feature is that CarPlay does not start playing automatically when it connects! This has been drving me nuts since I got my first (and so far only) car with CarPlay in 2017. I thought it was a Honda bug, and maybe it is, but it’s no longer happening!
Has anyone else noticed this? Did/do other people have the problem?
The feature to automatically start playing when reconnecting is a must-have. That is, if audio was playing when I disconnected, it should automatically start where I left off. However, if I manually paused/stopped playback before disconnecting, then it should not autostart when reconnecting. It has mostly worked that way for me for the past few years. Although admittedly it is annoying when it gets it wrong in either direction.
@ACautionaryTale what is not clear to me from your report is if you manually stop playback before disconnecting (and it was autostarting upon reconnect anyway) or if you never want autostart under any circumstances. If it is the former, then this is good news. If the later, then that is rather disappointing.
This should be a user selectable option. I absolutely hate it when I get in the car and I get blasted with music or a podcast.
It was this, combined with the fact that CarPlay didn’t always seem to remember what, exactly, I’d been listening to and would sometime just fire up music for reasons that are beyond my ability to explain 
I haven’t tried having something playing on the phone and plugging in while it’s playing, nor have I tried not pausing playback when disconnecting and then reconnecting later. I’ll give both a try after work today.
For me, there’s an approximately exactly zero percent chance that I want anything at all to start playing when I connect my phone, though I appreciate it when the correct app shows up automatically and paused.
I hope that your preferred mode hasn’t been mucked up as a result of mine being fixed!
On long trips, I just want CarPlay to pick up right where I left off with my music when I get back in the car after a rest stop. I really don’t want it randomly starting some other playlist I wasn’t even listening to.
Previous to iOS 27, the behaviour that I saw was mostly the former, but also sometime the latter. It was a mess 
I hadn’t really thought about it, but it sounds like you have wired CarPlay. You physically connect and disconnect your phone. In that scenario, I suppose you would be manually pressing pause before disconnecting and pressing play after connecting.
I have only ever had wireless CarPlay. In my case, I just turn the car off which stops playback. Then when I turn the car back on, it reconnects and picks up where I left off (most of the time). I’m usually listening to podcasts (with Overcast). It is rare that I am not listening to a podcast in the car, so I like the convenience of not needing to manually restart playback. I leave my phone in my pocket and never need to tap any controls on the dash. It just works… at least when it works at all.
Update: As long as I wait until the infotainment system is up and running before connecting my phone, it respects the state that the phone was in when it disconnected (pause or play). That seems to be the best thing for everyone.
If I connect the phone before the infotainment system is up, or before I start the car, it defaults to playing.
Whenever I get in my car Apple Podcasts app starts playing. I have not looked at the settings to see if I can change it.
So that is the advantage of wired CarPlay then. You have control over when your phone connects. With wireless CarPlay I have no control and sometimes the phone connects first and other times the infotainment system boots first (occasionally the phone connection fails completely, and I need to manually start the connection). That would explain the inconsistent behavior I see.
I’ll have to pay attention to this the next time I rent a car with wireless CarPlay
Thanks for pointing this out! What I had noticed previously (which irked me terribly) was that CarPlay would start playing music (after I had previously stopped it) when I was performing some other (completely unrelated) action on my iPhone. This annoying behavior now seems to have vanished!
And, for those keeping track of such things:
a) I had mainly been using wireless CarPlay in a recent model Honda;
b) I am one of those people who often prefers silence to music or podcasts, and definitely don’t want any kind of audio stream to start unless I have explicitly requested it.