CarPlay Ultra hands-on reveals its standout best new feature

6 days ago 2

iOS 26 is one of CarPlay’s biggest updates in years, but we shouldn’t forget that Apple has another major CarPlay launch this year. CarPlay Ultra has officially arrived, and a hands-on published today identifies its strengths.

Customization is the biggest strength of CarPlay Ultra

Bradley Iger at The Verge got to spend some time with CarPlay Ultra in the Aston Martin DBX707. It’s currently one of the only vehicles that offers CarPlay Ultra—and it took years to get to this point.

Aston Martin told Iger that developing CarPlay Ultra was “a learning experience for both the automaker and Apple.”

Apple learned about the “labyrinth” of international safety regulations dictating in-vehicle instrument clusters
Aston Martin learned about Apple’s approach to designing user interfaces

The development process sounds like it was extremely collaborative, with Apple apparently giving the automaker “a blank template” for its engineering team to populate with “the functions that they expected drivers to use the most often.“

Iger’s hands-on with the new system revealed one standout CarPlay Ultra benefit: customization.

There are…quite a few more personalization options available as compared to the standard version of CarPlay. Aston Martin developed its own bespoke CarPlay Ultra theme for the digital gauge cluster, and there are a number of other Apple-supplied gauge cluster “themes” to choose from which can be further embellished with different colors and wallpapers. In the DBX707, the gauge cluster theme options as well as the choices for the information displayed in the center of the gauge cluster can be scrolled through using the small touchpad on the steering wheel…

While there’s a sense that aesthetic continuity is the main attraction here, there are also some features that provide genuinely new functionality as well. For example, with CarPlay Ultra you can set it so that Apple Maps shows you navigation instructions on both the gauge cluster and the infotainment system with different visual orientations for each, so if a section of the route is unclear from the view on the gauge cluster, you can simply look over at the infotainment system display to see it from a different perspective.

Standard CarPlay, despite gaining some CarPlay Ultra capabilities in iOS 26 such as widgets, doesn’t have nearly the level of customization options described here.

It seems Apple is not only building a unique CarPlay Ultra setup for each automaker, but also empowering users to make the system their own.

One other important note from the hands-on: anyone concerned about delays or unresponsive input for key in-vehicle controls shouldn’t be worried.

Iger writes: “Despite the fact that CarPlay Ultra communicates with the vehicle wirelessly regardless of whether or not the phone is plugged into a data port, its response to inputs was immediate and free of any unsightly hiccups or choppy transitions.”

You can find The Verge’s full hands-on piece here.

What are your thoughts on CarPlay Ultra after reading the hands-on? Let us know in the comments.