Intro; CarPlay has been around since 2014, so there’s
a good chance that you’ve either driven a car with it, or been in a car where someone
else has been using it.
But be honest, beyond using it as a GPS, do you actually know how to use Apple CarPlay?
This stock iPhone function is actually really impressive, but you need to know how to get
the most out of it, to get the most out of it.
Stick with me until the end of this video, as I show you everything that you can do in
Apple CarPlay, running on the latest version of iOS16 for this video.
OK, let’s get into it.
Pre Reqs; Very quickly before we begin, when we talk
about CarPlay, I’m talking about you connecting your iPhone to a compatible car entertainment
unit, so that you can see a CarPlay dashboard, like the one you can see on the screen now.
There are two types of CarPlay connection, wired and wireless, and the one that you can
access will depend on the multimedia unit that you’re operating.
For example, in our main car which is a relatively new Audi, we’ve got the option of both a
wired and a wireless connection.
In our secondary car, which is a 2008 Ford Focus, we’ve also got the option of both,
but that’s because I installed an aftermarket unit which offered both.
You’ll need to check your setup to see what options are available to you.
Wired is by far the most common, but then regardless of what kind of display you’ve
got, the beauty of CarPlay is that it will function exactly the same in any vehicle once
you’re connected.
Also, to connect your phone to your car, you’re either going to connect via a USB to lightning
cable and follow any on-screen instructions on your phone and car, or if you’re using
wireless carplay, you’ll need to connect via Bluetooth.
The exact method of connecting is going to be slightly different for each car and multimedia
unit, so you might need to refer to your manufacturer’s instructions.
Navigation; So the entire point of CarPlay is to try and
give you a very ‘iphone’ experience, but within your car, and that’s pretty clear
when you view the main screen.
You’ve got very familiar tiles, and tapping on each one will open the relevant app up.
The dots at the bottom represent the different pages of apps, just like on your other Apple
devices, and you can swipe to scroll between the pages.
If you keep swiping from left to right on the screen, you’ll move back pages and eventually
you’ll get to a dashboard view.
This is where CarPlay will display what it thinks is the most relevant information for
you, split into sections.
The map will always take up the majority of the display here, but you might also be able
to see the track that you’re listening to on Apple Music or Spotify or whatever you’re
using, perhaps your next calendar appointment, maybe a more detailed explanation about the
next turn that you’ve got coming up.
If you want to view any of these apps in full screen mode, simply tap on them.
So tapping on the map section of the dashboard for example will jump you into the Maps app
in it’s entirety, and you could then tap the Dashboard button to get you back to the
dashboard.
Your most recent 3 apps will show here as well, along with the time, your current cell
signal, and battery status if you’re using CarPlay wirelessly or if your connected phone
is charging.
The little person icon that you can see on my screen here is my current Focus mode, but
I’m going to cover Focus modes later on.
This sidebar might show on the right or the left of your screen, depending on your CarPlay
setup.
Siri is everything; Obviously when driving, the most important
thing is that you’re keeping your hands on the steering wheel and your eyes on the
road, and so in general you’re going to be using Siri a lot while you’re using CarPlay.
You can input things using the keyboard, although your access to this is going to vary from
vehicle to vehicle, and whether you’re driving or not, some car manufacturers will remove
the ability for you to use the keyboard while the vehicle is in motion for example.
Essentially, when you open Maps and then tap on Search, if you have the keyboard option
you can use that, otherwise you’re going to use Siri.
In terms of navigation, you can be specific and ask it to direct you to a certain location,
or you can search.
So you could ask it to get you directions to a specific store or business in a particular
town, or you could ask it to take you to a specific postal or zip code or residential
address.
If you’ve got an address stored against a contact, you could ask Siri to get you directions
to that specific contact, so if I’ve got an address stored for John Smith, I could
just say Get me directions to John Smith.
You could ask Siri to find you places to go for coffee near where you are, or find a nearby
gas station or petrol station as we call them here in the UK.
If you own an electric vehicle, you can ask Siri to search for EV chargers near your location.
If your phone knows where your home address or your work address is, you could ask Siri
to get you home, or get you directions to work.
You can access Siri at any time while you’re driving, and there’s a few methods for how
you might do this.
If you’ve got the trigger phrase enabled, that I’ll write on the screen now rather
than speaking it out loud, you can say this while you’re driving and Siri will respond,
just like if you were doing this on your phone or your watch.
Alternatively, you can press and hold the dashboard button on your car’s entertainment
screen for a second, or if you’ve got a voice control button on your steering wheel,
like we’ve got here in our’s, you can tap and hold that for a moment and it will
do the same thing.
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Apple Maps; One of the great things about CarPlay in it’s
current form is the ability to use lots of different maps apps, so you might decide to
use Google Maps, or Waze or TomTom, go with whatever suits you.
Because it’s the stock app that every iPhone owner has access to, I’m going to mainly
focus on Apple Maps.
So for this example, I’ve asked CarPlay to find me a route from my current location.
If you notice on the map, you’ve got a route marked out in a deep blue colour, but if there
are other routes available to your chosen destination, those would show in a lighter
shade of blue, and you can tap on the different routes to choose one.
CarPlay will typically choose the route that requires the least amount of time to get to
your location, but you can see that you’ve always got the option to choose an alternative
route if one’s available.
If a route involves tolls or similar costs, that route will be marked with a currency
symbol to let you know.
At the bottom of the screen you can see your estimated arrival time, the time to get there
and the distance, and this will of course update in real time as you’re traveling,
so if you hit traffic or the system sees you’re about to, that will fluctuate accordingly.
This might be on the bottom left or bottom right for you, it will all vary depending
on your car’s screen.
Also, where it’s available, Maps will display the direction that you’re travelling in
and the speed limit of the road that you’re on.
Once on the route, you’ve got a few different buttons that will change various settings.
At any point, if you tap on the compass arrow icon, that will give you the detailed 3D map
view with turn by turn directions.
That button will then turn to this squiggly line icon, which is essentially representing
a point a to point b view.
If you tap on that, the map view will zoom out, and show you the route in it’s entirety
in 2D.
You can use the plus and minus buttons to zoom in and out of the map, and if your screen
is touch sensitive, you can swipe to move around the map, so if you’re looking for
something or you want to look ahead at the route for example.
At any point you can then tap resume, but if you wait a moment the map will bounce back
to your current location without you having to do anything anyway.
Also, whilst on the route, you can tap on the upward pointing arrow in the ETA section
to access some additional options.
You can share your ETA with someone via a text message, you can add a stop to your route,
and you can report a crash, a hazard or a speed check.
I’ll be honest, this isn’t as up to date as a purely community sat nav app like Waze,
but it’s pretty good.
The audio button allows you to choose how much Siri should speak out turn by turn directions
to you.
If you tap on that, you can then choose between directions being spoken, or everything being
muted, or just having important messages and warnings being spoken to you.
I’d recommend that, if you prefer to not have directions spoken out, at least have
this one enabled, as Maps can now also include warnings of things like hazards in the road,
broken down vehicles and speed cameras while you’re on route.
A nice feature for speed checks is that it will always warn you about them, but if you’re
speeding, it will also remind you to slow down.
It’s not as good as a mapping service like Waze, but it’s very good and might help
keep you safe.
And a bonus tip, while we’re discussing turn by turn directions, one annoying feature
that I hear people ask about often is their Apple Watch buzzing on their wrist while they’re
driving, each time they come to a turn.
This might be something you find useful, I really don’t, so there is a way to disable
this.
If you open the Watch app on your iPhone, then select your Watch, then scroll down to
Maps, ensure that Turn Alerts are disabled for both Driving, and Driving with CarPlay.
Additional Siri Commands Siri can do more than simply help you access
the map and directions, but like anything related to Siri, you need to know how to ask
for what you want.
So for example, if you want to call someone, you would simply ask Siri to call that person,
and if they have multiple phone numbers, like a work phone and an iPhone for example, you
could specify that you’d like them to be called on the iPhone.
You can send someone a message, and you can do it via third party apps, not just Apple
Messages.
What’s quite handy here, is that your iPhone will recommend a preferred method of sending
a text for you, based on what you usually do.
So for example, I typically message my sister using Whatsapp, so if I ask Siri to send my
sister a message from the car, it will reply and say “you usually text your sister using
Whatsapp, would you like to use Whatsapp for this message”.
You can also send an audio message from the car if you like, although I believe this only
works via Apple Messages.
You would simply say ‘send an audio message to’ whoever you want to send it to, rather
than ‘send a message to’, and your phone will begin recording you speaking.
You can set Reminders while you’re driving.
This is super helpful to me, especially if I’m driving on my own, I tend to get my
best ideas when I’m driving or in the shower, so if I think of something and I want to be
reminded about it later, I simply access Siri and ask it to remind me of whatever the thing
is.
A much more practical example is whenever my wife and I use the Dartford Crossing, which
is a paid crossing here in the UK.
You have to remember to pay for it within 24 hours of making your crossing, so whenever
we do it, I immediately access Siri and say “remind me to pay the dartford crossing
charge tonight at 7pm”, or whatever time works, and it will remind me at that time.
For entertainment purposes, I find it best if you specify the type of media you want
to listen to.
So if I wanted to listen to the Off Menu podcast, I would ask Siri to play the latest episode
of the off menu podcast.
If I wanted to listen to the album Illmatic by Nas, I would say “play the album Illmatic
by Nas”.
This is handy as it stops Siri from mistaking albums for songs.
You can do this for playlists too, and you can also specify what platform to play the
music on.
Your car will default to Apple Music, but if you say “play such and such on Spotify”
for example, your car should then oblige.
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Settings You can access various different CarPlay settings,
some from the car and some from your phone, but you can’t access everything from everywhere.
On your iPhone, if you go to Settings, then General, and then CarPlay, you can then view
the CarPlay options for the cars that you’ve got setup on your phone.
If you tap on a car, you can toggle CarPlay on and off, as well as forgetting the connection
with that car.
If you choose Customise, you can enable or disable apps, and change the order of the
apps, as they’re going to show on the Carplay screen, and this goes from top to bottom.
If you go to your car, and choose Settings, you can choose to switch your driving focus
on or off.
You can then choose the settings for how Siri should announce messages when they’re received
while you’re using Carplay.
Under appearance, you can choose whether you view using light mode, dark mode or have your
device automatically choose it for you, and in wallpaper, you can choose a wallpaper.
Siri and Suggestions is exactly what it sounds like, as is Show Album Artwork.
Driving Focus Mode I mentioned driving focus mode earlier on,
and it’s worth taking a moment to talk about this.
If we open Settings, then choose Focus, and then Driving, we can start to customise our
driving focus mode.
A focus mode is essentially a way of changing your iPhone’s look and behaviours during
a certain period of time.
So the example that I use the most is having one for work and one for personal, where the
work Focus mode has different apps showing on the homepage, and mutes notifications from
certain apps and people.
We can set one up for driving, which will automatically enable when your phone is connected
to CarPlay.
The driving focus mode is slightly different to other focus modes, in that it won’t allow
you to choose apps to override this, like you can with other focus modes, it’s essentially
a case that only calls and messages will come through while you’re driving, which is a
good thing if we’re being honest here.
But you can tap into where it says People, and give certain people the ability to always
contact you while you’re driving, or specifically stop certain people from contacting you while
you’re driving, whatever you’d prefer.
You can choose to customise your phone and watch screen if you like, I wouldn’t bother
with this personally but it’s there if you want it.
Some Final Tips So to finish up the video, let me show you
a few tips that are a bit more general, and don’t really fit in any of the other categories,
but that I still think you might be interested in knowing.
You can share your ETA, your estimated time of arrival with someone while you’re driving,
via Siri.
You would simply access Siri and say Share my ETA with whoever, and Siri will send a
text message to that person, letting them know when to expect you.
You can take a screenshot of CarPlay if you ever need to.
I’ve used it for certain parts of this tutorial today, so it’s pretty handy.
Simply take a screenshot with your connected iPhone the way that you normally would, and
your phone will take a screenshot of both your phone screen and the connected CarPlay
screen, and both will show in your phone’s photo library.
Your car can remember your parking location.
If you’re using CarPlay, simply disconnect and walk away, and your phone will remember
the last location where it knows you and your car were, and it will mark this on Maps as
your parked car.
Simply open Maps and search for Parked Car, to find your way back to where you were.
I mentioned earlier in the video that there are other maps options available to you, other
than Apple Maps.
These are going to vary based on region, I’m in the UK so I can only really speak on the
ones available here, but Google Maps and Waze are the main two competitors that I know people
use a lot over here.
Waze is great, it shows you all kinds of user information that you don’t get on the other
apps, and Google Maps is good if you want a satellite view while you’re driving.
It’s also worth you having a look in the App Store to see if there are any other CarPlay
compatible apps that you might find useful.
Here in Kent for example, almost all car parks are managed by a company called RingGo, where
you can pay for parking via your phone.
They’ve got a really good iPhone app that’s compatible with CarPlay.
You can literally get directions to a specific carpark using their app, it will just route
you via your mapping software, and once there, you can pay for your parking without having
to get out of the car, or even access your phone.
Final tip - be careful with in-car wireless charging.
Our Audi offers this, and I thought this was great when we first got the car, but we did
a 90 minute journey with my phone on the wireless charging pad, and when I took the phone out
at the end of the journey, it was so hot it was almost too hot to touch, and it lost a
percentage of battery health in the process.
Wireless charging is good, provided the charging pad is ventilated.
If not, I’d advise against it, and switch it off if you have that option.
End So there you go, that’s everything that
I think you need to know about CarPlay, right now in almost the middle of 2023.
Apple have said that a major change is coming to CarPlay later this year, and if that’s
the case I’ll cover that when it launches, but for now I think this should cover pretty
much all of your CarPlay requirements.
What do you think?
Any CarPlay tips that I should have included here?
Are you excited about the next version of CarPlay?
Drop me a comment and let me know.
And as ever, if you found this video useful, do please consider leaving me a like, and
subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future.
See you on the next video.