Pick a car, any car: Adventures with CarPlay
A lot of car stuff happened this month, where we needed to go from a one-car household to two. We bought a new car, but it wasn’t going to be delivered in time, so I’d need to rent a couple of cars in the meantime.
The thing that made the rentals tolerable was knowing I could rely on Apple CarPlay.
CarPlay is one of the best pieces of software Apple has ever made. It’s a little magic trick where a car’s infotainment system gets a projection of a virtual display generated by your iPhone with all of your audio and navigation apps filled with your data. You don’t download music files to the car or sync location data; it’s just instantly available to you.
It also lives separately from the software your vehicle needs to function safely on the road. The partition of what’s the automaker’s responsibility and what’s Apple’s responsibility is crystal clear because the software from the automaker looks and behaves differently. That’s a feature, not a bug.
When I picked up the 2025 Nissan Altima that smelled like hamburger grease, I was relieved that I didn’t need to use any of its much-older-than-2025 software stack for navigation or media. If anything, that 2018-era display became a window to the best of present-day technology.
The 2026 Chevrolet Trax hasn’t fallen victim to GM CEO Mary Barra’s long-term, anti-CarPlay plans. I couldn’t get wireless Apple CarPlay to work (Mary, is that you?), but the USB cable did just fine, and the screen was more than decent. The way CarPlay reflows and expands to fill a larger screen has greatly improved over the years. iOS 26 has a few issues with button edges getting trimmed by their container, but it generally makes good use of the space.
At no point did I need to create an account with each automaker for each rental car, or log in with credentials for other services. I didn’t need to use Bluetooth for rudimentary media playback for unsupported apps. I didn’t need to read addresses off my iPhone and manually type them into the car’s navigation system.
I did really need those services, too, as I was commuting to an office three days a week and had no idea what traffic patterns would coagulate in the roadways of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. I needed routing, and importantly, a routing system that I knew the ins and outs of. I wasn’t going to learn the quirks and features of software that was only temporarily in my possession.
I also needed a voice assistant, one that was absolutely terrible, but absolutely terrible in a predictable way for the limited types of requests I had while driving and not relearning what commands I needed for assistants. Sharing my ETA to time dinner, or to figure out if I needed to stop on the way home. Not fiddling with some other voice-to-text system that needs to sync my contacts.
Why can’t we all get along?
Some automakers want to reset the relationship they have with customers for services. They will never be able to match CarPlay for personal choice, or data portability—and especially not for context, like what directions were you just looking at on your iPhone before you got in your car.
On a recent episode of The Verge’s Decoder podcast Nilay Patel talked to Mary Barra about CarPlay, and she said CarPlay was confusing to customers. Then her Chief Product Officer, Sterling Anderson, cited Steve Jobs as the reason for their move away from CarPlay, and talked about the possibility of federated IDs for logging into your car.
These are not people interested in replacing CarPlay with a better solution for motorists, just a better solution for GM.
Oddly enough, there’s a rumor that Tesla might add CarPlay support. Men would rather add CarPlay support than go to therapy.
I don’t begrudge Tesla adding CarPlay support merely because I don’t like the company, and especially its CEO. The whole point is that every automaker should have it, so the power and personalization are in the consumer’s hands.1
Ultra, shmultra
That same empowerment of consumers doesn’t extend to CarPlay Ultra. With CarPlay Ultra, Apple is also misunderstanding the balance of the relationship all three parties are in between automakers, consumers, and itself.
People might have forgotten it, but there were a few years where Apple marketed this as “next generation CarPlay” and stalled out development on regular CarPlay. It was the Apple /// successor to the Apple ][‘s CarPlay.2
CarPlay Ultra is a priority for some Apple executives who want their car’s interface to look a certain way. It doesn’t extend to real control of the vehicle. No portability of car settings in multi-driver households (that’s for the automaker’s profile selection screen), or integration with assistive driving tech, etc. Ultra is about making the climate and volume sliders look like Control Center sliders.
Apple’s continued efforts at improving CarPlay in iOS 26 instead of letting it go stale in some effort to push Ultra adoption are a huge relief.
We’ve got widgets now! I haven’t really found any personal utility in them so far, except the Overcast widget that lets me more easily resume playback of my most recently listened to episode. Still, it’s great that it’s there, and with 26.2 you’ll apparently be able to squeeze in another column of them on certain screens.
It’s been a long road
CarPlay is such a boon that we take for granted. Any attempts to veer further into Apple’s control, or swerve back to automakers, ruin that. Staying between the lines is pretty key to CarPlay’s success.
The ability to literally get up and go with any car can’t be overestimated. Whether that’s my month of rental cars or it’s the reliable, everyday vehicle that someone’s been using for years, it’s worth reflecting on how CarPlay has helped reduce friction in our lives.
- If the people with “I bought this before Elon was crazy” bumper stickers also get to use CarPlay as an update, and it makes it easier for them to transition to another CarPlay vehicle the next time they buy a car, then that’s an unintended side effect I’m totally fine with. ↩
- If you’re old enough to get this reference, make sure your eye prescription is up to date before renewing your driver’s license. ↩
[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]
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