CarPlay can do a lot more than just deliver driving directions. Here are a dozen easy tips to help turn your car’s dashboard into the ultimate mobile command center.
Apple CarPlay makes things easier when you’re behind the wheel. By connecting your iPhone to your car’s Bluetooth or USB port on supported models, you can rely on CarPlay to help you get driving directions, listen to music and other audio, make and receive phone calls, and listen to and respond to text messages. You can even accomplish most of these tasks by talking to Siri directly instead of fiddling with touch-screen controls that take your eyes off the road. Apple continues to beef up the capabilities of CarPlay by adding several new features and jettisoning a few annoying obstacles. Recent updates allow for multitasking, improve Siri integration, add EV charging stations on Maps, and introduce a new calendar view One of the best improvements is the change to allow a passenger to check the connected iPhone without disrupting what you see on the CarPlay dashboard. Below are a few tips and tricks that should help you use CarPlay even more effectively.1. Focus on Your Driving With iOS 15, Apple revamps the iPhone’s Do Not Disturb option into a new mode called Focus, which can help control notifications. One of the categories in Focus is for driving; set this up under Settings > Focus > Driving and enable the switch next to Driving. To allow notifications from certain contacts, tap the People section under Allowed Notifications. Here, you can add or remove specific people and set whose calls can go through. Under the Options section, you can set up automated messages to alert anyone who tries contacting you that you’re currently driving. Tap the entry under Turn on Automatically to determine when this Focus should be used.2. Multitask While Using CarPlay In the past, CarPlay would simply mirror whatever app was open on your phone, but that wasn’t always helpful when trying to do two things at once. For example, if you had Maps open on your car’s dashboard and someone opened the Music app on your phone, you would lose your directions. With iOS 13 or higher, that won’t happen. Your passenger can open any app on your phone, and the dashboard view remains the same.
