My empeg setup in my old car used a Linksys router in the trunk and a long cable run to my empeg dock. In the new car, I can probably replicate that with a much shorter run from the empeg in my glove box to a router under the passenger seat, but one of those tiny wifi routers might make things even easier.

Can you do WDS with one of those little routers? In my old car, I had my empeg connecting to my home wifi network via the in-car router using WDS, which let me use an app on the empeg to initiate an mp3tofid sync to pull down music from my file server. I'd like to get that working in the new car again, but adding the phone connection complicates things, because it sounds like there's no way to enable both phone and empeg connectivity without using hotspot mode, which means the phone's the thing serving the wifi network, which means no WDS capability. Not sure how to square that circle.