After having wireless CarPlay, not sure I can ever go back. It’s really nice to get in the car and just go, and everything from my phone is automatically on the dash and controllable with the car’s native controls.

The last thing I want is for my car to be another device with its own subscription, accounts, applications, configuration, etc.

It's a bit of a pain if two people share the car. Even worse if two people share more than one car. There never seems to be an option to force use a specific phone when more than one is possible. They all seem sticky to a phone and it always seems to be the other one.

I guess a good thing about carplay is that when traveling with someone else, they can use their phone to update things like maps, and we're not completely locked out of it until we come to a stop.

Toyota's wireless carplay lets you switch in the Settings very quickly (10-15 seconds to get there). So they're not universally bad at least.

10-15 seconds is an eternity. I can switch the bluetooth phone connected in a 10 year old car in 10-15 seconds.

Eh, I frequently switch. I just do it while I wait for the AC to kick in, not a huge deal.

I have a much older car from 2007 so no Android Auto or Apple Carplay for me but I thought I was supposed to sit there after I start my car for at least half a minute?

Maybe not needed for newer cars?

I start the car and wait for the dashcam to chime. I start driving once it chimes. I have an older Aukey, not hard wired, so it takes about half a minute for it to chime which I thought was perfect timing.

Assuming temps over -20°C and a car newer than 30 years, I think you’re fine to drive away as soon as the engine is stable after starting. That’s probably well under 5 seconds and, unless you’re trying to do an old LeMans race start, isn’t something that I’d consciously wait for.

The CarTalk brothers agree: don’t wait, just drive.

10-15 seconds is an eternity. I can switch mine in about 1-2 seconds. Any reason why you seem to be slow?

1-2 seconds is an eternity. I can switch mine in about 0-1 seconds. Any reason why you seem to be slow?

Because it's an old Kia and there's three menus to click thorough and one confirmation screen. I'd guess 15 is a little long, but on average it takes at least 10 seconds.

Right, this is my main problem with Bluetooth too. It’s much better if you can just plug a cable into the phone you want to use and have it just work (and keep the phone charged too).

You can’t quite do that with any car I’ve been in. CarPlay is close; it would be great if that became an open standard with standard connectors.

I really liked wireless CarPlay when testing the Enyaq and wondered about the multi user situation. Already today Bluetooth always seems to get exactly the wrong phone. In our current setup we just have a phone holder with plug in which we shove the phone. Then it is done. It takes longer to pull the phone out of the pocket than to connect it.

The only downside to CarPlay is that the battery stays at 100% charge. I wish I could limit that to 80%. Especially if we take long drives this degrades the battery unnecessarily.

Care to elaborate? Are phones not supposed to be charged to 100%?

The batteries used in phones degrade quickest below 20% and above 80% of charge. This is already at room temperature. When the batteries or phone is hot the degradation at those state of charge (SoC) is even worse. In the car when using CarPlay the phone can get really warm, especially if it is in the sunlight which tends to happen easily. When left in the shade it gets hot due to restricted airflow.

Therefore I would like to limit the SoC on my phone to not excessively degrade the battery. I very rarely, if ever, need more than 80% of the design capacity of my iPhone anyway. So I prefer it to last longer.

Aren't there some internal safeguards already in place to prevent overcharging?

100% isn't over-charging. It's just not the GP's preferred spot on the battery energy (hours of charge) vs battery lifetime (days/years) curve for daily use.

I do wish phones would provide more control here. I would also take 80% charge many (but not all) days in exchange for my battery life after a year staying higher.

lmgtfy: Its the extremes (0% and 100%) that degrades LiIon the quickest, if you want the longest life ideally you'd keep it 30-70% the whole time, ymmv (and also thresholds).

And it is a pity manufacturers don't support you in doing stop-charging-at-x if you wanted, e.g. a simple thing for software to do, but impossible without rooting on Android.

ASUS Zenphone has a setting that lets you set a charging limit at 80, 90, or 100%.

Samsung S22 Ultra (at least) has a 'Protect Battery' setting which limits charge to 85% .

Its been a feature since at least the S9. Source: Had to 'fix' my girlfriend's phone only charging to 85%. Was a mystery how that setting got randomly enabled, really.

I can't recall for certain if my old S7 had that option but I don't think it did.

You're mistaken. Most Androids today have that charge limit function natively.

BTW, on long drives, do take care to not let the phone heat up. That’s way, way worse than letting the battery sit at 100%.

I have it turned on and it helps when charging during the night. It will charge until 80% and then charge until 100% for just in time when it thinks I need it.

But then when I get in my car it will just stay charged at 100% all the time.

> The only downside to CarPlay is that the battery stays at 100% charge. I wish I could limit that to 80%. Especially if we take long drives this degrades the battery unnecessarily.

I think that fast charging is just as bad, if not worse.

Yes. Indeed. That is why I don’t use it. It is something I can control externally by using different chargers. I can’t control how far it charges.

My wife and I share a VW Tiguan and this is a constant annoyance. To switch devices you have to go out of CarPlay -> Settings -> Swipe left to the second screen of controls -> Mobile Device Settings -> Select device.

And since the device it initially chooses to connect to sometimes takes 30 seconds or so to be fully connected (during which time you can't make any selections in this menu), you have to sit and wait until it connects the device you don't want to be connected before you can switch to the one you do want. And then you wait about 30 seconds for the correct device to connect.

Pretty sure mine has a setting where you can prefer which phone is selected when connected.

We've done this in numerous rental cars. Many variations of the same problem -- it picks the phone it picks. We've had to resort to deleting one phone from the car (and the phone's bluetooth) to get it back on the other phone.

It's inconceivable how the pairings are so bad and there isn't just a button for each phone connected that just works. Even when switching does work, all it takes is one blip and it hops over the other phone.

Again, this is on multiple cars on long road trips where we have at least two people to work on it and literally hours to figure it out. We generally settle on a single phone per car now, because it just isn't worth it.

Given the trouble my rental has connected wired CarPlay I am not convinced about wireless CarPlay.

Also, I find google maps navigation to drain quite a bit. Don’t you wanna charge?

If I want to, sure. Otherwise the data port you plug in to for your wired CarPlay is usually a really slow charger. I prefer to use my 12v charger. So I got a MagSafe charger and a wireless CarPlay adapter.

Haven’t had a problem in my vehicle and I’ve been using wireless CarPlay daily for close to 2 years.

On a longer trip I’ll pull my phone out of my pocket and put it on the Qi charger, but around town I’ve never seen much drain

What, you don’t want an expensive subscription that fades into the background of your life while providing a significantly worse experience?

I ruled cars out of my last purchase that didn’t have CarPlay. I didn’t realize wireless was available now. Having to hook it up is the one major pain. Wireless CarPlay will definitely be a requirement on the next purchase.

CarPlay is also a requirement for me. Wireless not so much. The adapters are pretty good these days.

Recommendations? I purchased a device that lets me watch video in the head unit (runs Android and uses CarPlay protocol), and adds wireless CarPlay. However, it's shocking at how slow it is at going into CarPlay mode.

I bought this 2-3 years ago https://cplay2air.com and it has always worked wonderfully. It takes around 5 seconds to connect, which is fine for me since the entertaining system of my car it’s slow to startup anyway (totalling ~10 seconds from turning the key to carplay)

What adapter do you use? My car has a USB A port that accepts a regular iPhone charging cable - takes all of five seconds to connect as I'm getting in the car.

This one https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BBG4QRPX

I love CarPlay but I’ve given up on wireless. The idea seems nice, but in practice I have two issues.

First CarPlay just takes a fair amount of power so you’re going to notice it’s effect on battery life.

Second is the audio playback lag. I can’t stand it. It feels like seconds (though maybe it’s not that bad). The interface is ok but hitting pause or play or next track takes noticeable time to happen.

I’ve only ever tried it in my car. Maybe it’s fine in other vehicles. But it’s useless to me. It’s extremely responsive when connected by cable, so I just ended up going back to plugging in.

Wireless CarPlay in my 2022 Kia EV is way less enjoyable than wired CarPlay in my 2005 Toyota with an aftermarket Sony head unit with CarPlay support. Latency is much, much lower in the Toyota and there's never any trouble with switching between my iPhone and my wife's. Whoever's is plugged in wins—the end. As opposed to the Kia where it's always a crapshoot and plagued by endless Bluetooth connectivity issues.

I think you can use wired CarPlay in Kia even though it has wireless. I use wired in my 2023 Kia and love it!

Interesting...I'll check this out next time I'm driving. Hope you're right! I'd love to be freed from the tyranny of Bluetooth :)

Note that usb-c doesn’t work for carplay, you will have to use usb-a

Just rented a car with wireless Android Auto, and while it was convenient when it worked, it occasionally dropped the connection and I had to manually restart it (and sometimes it would refuse to connect). On one day where I was on a road trip, this happened several times.

Also, when I wanted to turn it off temporarily, there's no easy way to do so on either the phone or car. Gotta turn the car off or dive deep into infotainment settings. It looks like neither the auto manufacturers nor Google have thought this through.

The first and only time I tried Android Auto, I asked my wife to look up directions to a place on my phone. It kept saying not to use the phone while driving, and effectively blocked it.

I mean, I get the spirit, but the experience was terrible.

I was using Waze a couple days ago while connected to CarPlay, but at a dead stop with the car in Park. The route selection screen on the phone wouldn't let me choose a particular route (HOV route) but it also wouldn't say why. It just either didn't respond to the input or else the route label flashed but didn't actually activate. The CarPlay screen only included the non-HOV versions of the routes, so I just plain couldn't pick the route I wanted.

I unplugged the phone for two seconds, picked the HOV route, and then plugged it back in, but I was infuriated by it.

This is not a knock on CarPlay, but rather Waze's UX decisions. It requires GPS access to function, it can tell if I'm stopped or not.

Oh yeah that's awful. Even dumber, that's only true for Android Auto, not CarPlay (even with Google Maps still).

I have a BMW and my Apple CarPlay kept doing this to me where it would disconnect and then take like 30+ seconds to reconnect itself. When I looked for support, the stuff I read was unclear whether it was a CarPlay issue or an issue with the BMW software, but eventually it did fix itself and I rarely have an issue with it anymore (and when I do, it's more of a "blip" than a full disconnect).