I had the V60. It was a little big, but audio was great. I miss the headphone jack. I’m sad they don’t make phones anymore.

If you want to look at mp3 players, they are also called DAPs for Digital Audio Player. There are a few options nowadays. Some are touch screen android devices, some are more simple with button controls and some can be loaded with Rockbox. The Echo mini is a little limited, but works pretty well. They came out with the Echo at some point which seems a little better made. If you go that route, keep an eye on fiio’s website. They’ve made some interesting updates to the firmware over time.

As I understand it, automatic transmissions are a lot less common in Europe and manuals are almost non existent here in the US. Maybe a manual transmission forces you to be more engaged with driving than an automatic?