List of cars with good CarPlay

Software
41

I’ve been driving a 2019 Toyota RAV-4 for 6 months, and Apple CarPlay has been awesome. The screen is large (a bit ugly when turned off — it’s not an elegant implementation) and the touch-responsiveness is good. Not the same as an iPhone, but unlike other touchscreens this one doesn’t annoy me.

The wired connection is rock solid; I’ve only had two experiences when CarPlay wouldn’t connect. In those instances, the only solution was to turn off the car and turn it back on again. Sometimes it can take 30-45 seconds to connect, however; I’ve never been able to figure out why. Phone calls are completely solid.

CarPlay’s maps are higher resolution than the built-in navigation ones, and they’re far less ugly, so I use CarPlay for any trip requiring navigation or traffic monitoring. In other words, I use it a lot.

My model of RAV-4 (not sure if it’s on the base models) has steering wheel controls, too. Play/pause, forward/reverse skip, volume. And a button to invoke Siri.

That last one is a bit of an oddity, because I have a friend whose 2019 Toyota Avalon has the same button, but it invokes the car’s voice assistant — even when it’s in CarPlay mode. The Toyota voice assistant is awful. I don’t know why my button works as I would expect; possibly because I never used the Toyota voice assistant or moved contacts to it?

With iOS 13, CarPlay’s interface continues to improve.I like the multi-pane view, and the touch controls are even easier to hit.

I’m surprised at how good the touch controls are; I vastly prefer buttons and knobs that I can navigate by touch. CarPlay is acceptable since the most vital functions — stopping playback or changing volume — can be controlled by a button on the steering wheel.

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42

I’ve now got a rental car with CarPlay, so I’ll post my experience here.
I’m driving a 2019 Toyota Camry for a few days.
The built in display works ok, not great. I usually listen to podcasts while I’m driving, and I’ve been using PocketCasts exclusively. There are times when the podcast just stops. Often it will resume on its own but not always.

PocketCasts allows you to adjust playback speeds in very fine increments when you’re using it in the phone (without CarPlay). When using PocketCasts allows changing playback speeds in increments of .5 only. This is extremely coarse. I have reported this to the developers, they haven’t responded yet.

I may be upgrading to iOS23 this weekend, let’s hope my CarPlay experience only gets better.

One bad thing about car-connectivity is- you can’t just reboot the car if something goes bad, as you can with the phone or tablet. You have to pull over, turn the car off, wait, then restart the car and hope that Bluetooth or Carplay were reset completely.

I’ve had to do this in my Prius several times.

43

So far I have been happy with CarPlay on my new 2019 Ford Edge. I primarily use Waze and Overcast. Both have been working fine. I haven’t done much with Music and have given Apple Maps a bit of a try.

The only thing I haven’t figured out how to do (or it doesn’t work) is voice entry for search in Waze.

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