To improve CarPlay Ultra, Apple needs to fix CarPlay

Here’s the problem with CarPlay Ultra: It’s still CarPlay.

Based on what we’ve seen of CarPlay Ultra, Apple believes that if it controls the appearance of the displays in cars, then using the car will be a good experience. I’m not sure that’s an assumption I’d make, especially when styling isn’t directly connected to function—as is the case with most of what distinguishes CarPlay Ultra from CarPlay.

The real hallmark of Apple is a bad settings screen. (Image: Top Gear.)

There’s so much more Apple needs to do with CarPlay, fixes that would also benefit CarPlay Ultra. I use CarPlay all the time, and there are plenty of issues that don’t seem to be on Apple’s roadmap. If Apple improves CarPlay, it also improves CarPlay Ultra. That being said, here are some of my biggest outstanding issues with CarPlay today.

At the center of things

Whether you’re driving a fancy car with CarPlay Ultra or you’ve just got basic CarPlay, the interface in your vehicle’s central touchscreen is the main stage of things. In early CarPlay Ultra demos, that very familiar CarPlay interface is still front and center.

The entire approach to notifications needs to be rethought. When a new notification appears, it displays for a second and then fades away. If you’re busy driving the car and, you know, paying attention to the road, you won’t know that you have missed the text message that your friend is running late or has canceled. If Messages is not in the dock, there is no visible badge, and it’s not added to the dock based on incoming notifications, but rather on when you last used it.

A glanceable, non-distracting indicator that there are active notifications that need attention would be nice. Perhaps Apple could even use some of that vaunted Apple Intelligence to detect what sorts of messages were a priority in the context of driving a car.

When notifications appear, they also float above existing tap targets in the interface. If I am parked and trying to select my dentist’s office in Apple Maps, a calendar alert reminding me to go to the dentist will appear and block me from completing my task. CarPlay Ultra adds even more new overlays, like vehicle warnings and climate controls. I don’t know what the answer is—push down the screen? have a dedicated area of the screen for warnings?—but it’s a problem in need of a solution.

Organizing the apps displayed on CarPlay could also be improved. Right now, this is accomplished by using the Settings app to reorder the list of apps on a per-vehicle basis, but the vertical list offered in Settings doesn’t match how those items are displayed in their icon grid in the car! Since the settings are per-vehicle, Apple knows the exact dimensions of the screen, so it knows how many rows and columns there are, and where the page breaks will be. It should also be easier to sync these layouts across devices. I’m not a current Apple Music subscriber, but it’s the second app in any default CarPlay homescreen, and there’s nothing I can do to prevent that from appearing in every rental car I connect to my phone.

Connectivity quirks

I had a Honda with CarPlay, and my boyfriend and I currently share an Audi with CarPlay. Even though both use wired connections, both periodically flake out. We’ve rented numerous cars with both wired and wireless CarPlay when traveling, and there has been no consistency in connectivity in any of these vehicles. The wireless version in one Chevy car had unacceptable lag that made the screen unusable, requiring a wired connection. In a recent Toyota rental, the wired connection didn’t work, but the wireless connection was rock solid.

There’s no quality guarantee from Apple or automakers about how well CarPlay will work with any given car, but I’ve built a mental list of which cars seem to work better than others through trial and error. That list informs my animus toward certain makes and models that can persist even if the CarPlay experience has improved, because there’s no rating system or seal of approval. I’m not sure what Apple can do here, but some sort of CarPlay certification process might allow Apple to inform automakers about choices that lead to unreliable connectivity and unhappy customers.

Apple also needs to improve its attention to detail when it comes to CarPlay: it recently broke CarPlay connectivity for some people with the release of iOS 18.4, and it took two weeks for Apple to ship a fix in 18.4.1.

CarPlay Ultra disconnects won’t affect the instruments and essential functions of the car because they’re rendered locally by the vehicle. I have no safety concerns about dropped connections. However, we haven’t seen how gracefully the phone-generated part of the non-essential interface degrades when there are connection issues. I don’t believe Apple wants to be the one to show people anything less than ideal function, even if we all know that’s not realistic.

Regardless of what the connection failure states are: If Apple pushes out a buggy iOS release again, will people drive their CarPlay Ultra cars around with only essential, locally-rendered instruments for two weeks, or revert to their car’s interface and be hesitant to go back?

Talking to Siri

Ideally, when you’re driving, you’re not fiddling with touchscreens, but talking to Siri and keeping most of your attention on the road. I believe it’s one of the reasons Apple marketing VP Bob Borchers said, “This next generation of CarPlay gives drivers a smarter, safer way to use their iPhone in the car.” (Emphasis added.)

CarPlay Ultra isn’t adding or augmenting lane guidance, crash avoidance, or self-driving features, but in theory, it’s safer because you can now tell Siri to turn on the seat warmer.

But we’ve all used Siri. It doesn’t just fail, but can also execute the wrong command with utmost confidence, causing a distraction! With CarPlay Ultra, Siri can now cause a distraction over car functions, not just by playing the wrong music.

There’s also another issue at the crossroads of Siri and connectivity, and that’s what happens when Siri can’t connect to the Internet. I’m sure you’ve all had the pleasure of getting in the car, pulling out of the driveway, and saying, “Hey Siri, give me directions to a place,” only to have it spin or glow and give up. Not only can it not get the directions, but it also eats the command, and you have to say the whole thing over again.

This needs to be smarter. The iPhone should recognize that since it’s just connected to a car, its nearby Wi-Fi connection is likely to disappear, so prioritizing the cellular network might be a smart move. And if there is a temporary connectivity failure, perhaps Siri should hang on to that command and send it again when connection resumes, or offer to resubmit the request instead of requiring me to do it personally.

(Remind me: I’m a person and my iPhone is a computer. Which one of us should be doing the repetitive tasks, again?)

In the event of a failure, I also never notice Siri attempting to use the iPhone’s on-device dictation model to decode my instructions and pass them on to Apple Maps, which has been helpfully preloaded with offline maps.¹ Remember to be online when you want to use your offline maps.

When sharing isn’t caring

The car has a volume settings for audio playback, and separate ones for navigation audio, but it isn’t per-device, so the different audio settings on my iPhone and my boyfriend’s iPhone result in one of us getting into a very loud or very quiet car, or the navigation audio being too loud for him in Google Maps and too quiet for me in Apple Maps.

This is the lowest level annoyance of all the annoyances, but it’s worth mentioning in light of how it might apply to CarPlay Ultra. To what degree are my settings carried over to my iPhone, including climate, radio, and instrument cluster layout? To what extent does my iPhone simply set those things in the car at the time of my request, and then pick up whatever state the settings are in when my iPhone reconnects later?

If it’s like audio settings are right now, where the settings are just whatever they were when the last person drove the car, then what are we even doing with our smartphones connected to these cars instead of relying on Android Automotive profiles?

It’s even more complicated when both of us are in the car with our individual devices. With wired CarPlay, the phone plugged in is the CarPlay phone. But with wireless CarPlay and multiple phones, it’s a crapshoot—it’s which phone gets in range first, or maybe which one was connected most recently. CarPlay doesn’t offer a switcher if it connects to the wrong phone, or if you just want to switch from one phone to another.

When the locally rendered instrument cluster in CarPlay Ultra boots up before it connects to my iPhone, is it what my boyfriend had the instrument cluster set to? Does it change to mine while I’m using the car, and back to his, or will we be overriding each other each time we connect to the car, as we are currently with volume settings? Are we overriding each other’s climate settings?

I would love to know if CarPlay Ultra offers a more seamless user switching experience, but I’m unsure if it has occurred to Apple that we’re not a two-Aston-Martin household.

Put it in the parking lot

Apple improving CarPlay would help everyone. It would be a better sales pitch for CarPlay Ultra, because “All the same annoyances as before, but across your whole dashboard!” is not a great slogan.

I would never buy another car without CarPlay, because even when it’s flakey, or Siri bumbles something, it’s handling my media and my personalized navigation better than any car can. I can’t say the same thing about CarPlay Ultra, which feels more like applying an iOS-styled WinAmp skin to the speedometer. For CarPlay Ultra to succeed, Apple needs to do more than woo reluctant automakers. It needs the discipline to address the long list of existing CarPlay annoyances. A rising tide lifts all boats. Er, cars. You get what I’m saying.

[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist, writer, and co-host of the Defocused and Unhelpful Suggestions podcasts.]

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