OK. Got it. I didn't read as closely as I should have.

I guess my next cynical observation is that carmakers have little incentive.
The Alpines of the world will eventually settle on a standard or two,
but the car manufacturers will have their own OEM solutions soon enough.
(Which will be fine by me if they run Empeg-team software and have an
upgrade port.)

But they will only pursue this standard if they realize that people refuse to duplicate
their collection in two or more places. People want to sync-up their on-the-go
player, and then plug it into the car, or the rental car, or their boat.

They most emphatically don't want to reload/re-rip the same CDs multiple times
in multiple locations.

(And techies like most of us here, don't want to leave the quality of the
encoding to whatever random ripper/encoder is built into the firmware.
But that is a non-issue for most consumers.)