If you pay close attention to Apple news, you might remember that the company spent a decade and billions of dollars on an electric car project that ultimately went nowhere. Multiple factors are to blame, although the leading contenders are the challenges of self-driving technology, and management’s flip-flopping on what exactly they wanted Project Titan to be. At one point, executives resigned themselves to producing a platform, rather than a full-on EV.
CarPlay Ultra feels like it might be that platform, though Apple has only ever teased what happened during the Titan years. Unlike the Apple Car, Ultra is out in the wild — and we might finally see broader compatibility by the end of 2026. Here’s everything you need to know about the prospects.
What is CarPlay Ultra?
As close as you’ll get to a true Apple Car
The standard version of CarPlay is often a must-have for car shoppers, since it lets you project apps for navigation, music, and more onto your dash, instead of forcing you to mount your iPhone or pull out a paper map. It’s a lot less distracting. There has, however, been a big drawback: to control other systems in your car, you have to switch out of CarPlay completely if you can’t use physical knobs or buttons.
Effectively, Ultra gives CarPlay total reign. You can, for instance, adjust all of your car’s climate control systems, or tune its built-in radio. Where Ultra doesn’t have a built-in template for something, an automaker’s native software can briefly poke through without closing Apple’s layer.
There’s a lot more. For some of you, the highlight may be the ability to take over every display, including the instrument cluster, and merge vehicle data with the functions CarPlay has traditionally excelled at. You might, for instance, see Apple Maps directions or your current podcast directly next to your battery/gas levels and speedometer. Apple has also been collaborating with automakers to enable custom themes appropriate to each make and model.
The major obstacle has been adoption. Over a year after Ultra’s launch in May 2025, there’s still only one automaker selling Ultra-enabled vehicles, and that’s Aston Martin. Given that models like the DBX707 have six-digit pricetags, Ultra might as well be vaporware for most iPhone owners.
It’s worse than that. Brands like Mercedes-Benz have reportedly resisted the platform, preferring to focus on proprietary operating systems, despite the widespread popularity of CarPlay. There’s some logic to it. Handing so much control over to a third party can limit flexibility, and there’s the possibility that Apple will attempt another EV someday — in which case Ultra will provide it with a lot of data to work from.
What are Apple’s expansion plans for CarPlay Ultra?
A fall announcement might be in store
Beyond Aston Martin, here are the other automakers that have promised Ultra support so far:
- Acura
- Ford
- Genesis
- Honda
- Hyundai
- Infiniti
- Jaguar
- Kia
- Land Rover
- Lincoln
- Nissan
- Porsche
Critically, a Bloomberg report from February 2026 claimed that the feature will be coming to at least one Hyundai or Kia vehicle “in the second half of the year.” Those companies were some of the earliest adopters of the original CarPlay, and both are far more affordable than Aston Martin. In effect, fall 2026 could mark Ultra’s “real” launch date, even if the tech probably won’t debut on the cheapest available models.
If an expansion is imminent, some sort of announcement is likely during Apple’s September iPhone event. The company will simultaneously be revealing the full feature set for iOS 27, and it would make sense for a refined and expanded Ultra to be a part of that. Indeed, it’s possible that one reason for the delay in expansion plans was the overhaul of Siri and Apple Intelligence, since Apple no doubt wants that in cars rather than outdated tech that would make Ultra look backwards.
