Every car I test, whether it’s an EV or Aston Martin, now arrives wireless CarPlay (some even come with CarPlay Ultra). The press releases always makes a big deal of it. If you’re buying a car, the salespeople mention it before they mention the boot space. And every single time, after a week of trying it out, I dig my trusty USB-C cable back out of the glovebox.
I’m not a luddite about this like I am about somethings (let’s bring back physical buttons and proper doorhandles, amirite?) I like wireless everything else – headphones, speakers, err, keyboards… the lot. But CarPlay is the one place where going wireless has made my life measurably worse, and here’s why I keep going back to a length of USB-C.
1. It doesn’t drop the connection
Wireless CarPlay routes through Wi-Fi Direct and Bluetooth simultaneously, and that handoff is where things often go wrong. Drive under a motorway bridge, get a bit too far from the pairing module, or have another phone in the car fighting for the same spectrum, and the connection stutters or drops out.
A cable is a cable. As long as it’s not damaged it doesn’t care about signal interference, and it doesn’t need to renegotiate a wireless handshake every time you start the engine.
2. Setup is instant, every time
Plug in, and CarPlay is up before I’ve got my seatbelt on. Wireless, in my experience, is bit of a lottery: sometimes it connects in two seconds, sometimes it hunts for thirty, and sometimes it simply doesn’t and I have to dig into the car’s settings menu to force a re-pair. I prefer to have wired consistency before I set off.
3. My phone charges, instead of draining
This is the big one for me. Wireless CarPlay, with constantly running GPS and a network connection, is a big battery drain. Unless the car also has a wireless charging pad, you’ll watch your battery drain before you finish an episode of Off-Menu.
Even if the car does have a wireless charing pad, wireless charging is a slow, sometimes they’re badly positioned or too small, and, unless they’re cooling pads (which do exist), will cause your phone to overheat.
A USB-C cable charges the phone while I drive to the station in the morning, so even if I’ve forgotten to charge my phone overnight, I arrive with a full battery.
4. Audio and calls are more reliable
Wired audio doesn’t have to compete for bandwidth the way a Bluetooth-plus-Wi-Fi wireless link-up does, so it’s more reliable.
I’ve had wireless CarPlay podcasts stuttering non-stop, and phone calls occasionally cut out, which is pretty annoying in this day and age.
5. It avoids the double phone mix-up
Any household with more than one iPhone knows this problem. My wife and I get in the car, and it’s paired itself to the wrong phone, so someone has to dig through the settings menu and switch it over before you can set off.
It’s worse if my phone is sitting on the sofa in the living room and my wife starts the car, it’ll happily try to connect to mine anyway, because it’s still the last one it remembers.
Plug a cable in, and there’s no ambiguity: whoever’s phone is connected is the one the car uses. You choose, not the car.
6. One cable does double duty
I carry a USB-C cable for literally everything else I own, so plugging in isn’t an inconvenience, it’s just what happens when I get in the car.
The “convenience” wireless is supposed to offer doesn’t outweigh the admin of occasionally having to troubleshoot it. For me, wired is the one that actually gets out of the way.
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