Midway through 2025, Aston Martin announced it would be the first automaker to feature CarPlay Ultra, Apple's most advanced phone mirroring software to-date. Whereas CarPlay only takes over the main infotainment screen and allows users to perform phone-related tasks, CarPlay Ultra can now extend to the gauge cluster and has access to integral car functions, such as climate control and audio settings. In theory, this is the perfect solution to have one familiar layout for all makes and models in the future. But how does it work in practice?
Since Aston Martin is currently the only brand to have CarPlay Ultra, CarBuzz needed to borrow one for a few days to live with the system. It just so happens the car we were sent was the 2025 Aston Martin Vanquish Coupe, which carries a $429,000 starting price and an as-tested sticker price of $552,600. Was Aston Martin smart to let Apple take over its half-million-dollar car? We found out.
A Longer Setup And Connection
Setting up CarPlay Ultra isn't much different from standard CarPlay, although there is no option to set it up using a cable. Once you pair your phone via Bluetooth to the vehicle, it asks to enable CarPlay Ultra, which takes a few minutes to initialize on its first setup. This was a pretty painless setup, but it is less immediate than you might be used to with traditional CarPlay. Connecting to the car subsequent times doesn't take as long, but it does take a brief moment after the initial start-up before anything shows up on the screen. It's difficult to know if the longer connection time is a CarPlay Ultra issue or a processing issue with the Aston Martin Vanquish, because there are no other vehicles we can use to sample this system.
Beyond the longer connection times, once you decide to activate CarPlay Ultra, that decision is locked in; you can not exit out to the native Aston Martin infotainment system in any simple way. We experienced a phone issue mid-way through the week, which caused the gauges to not display properly on the Vanquish. This required us to completely disconnect the phone, delete it as a device in the car, forget the car as a connection on the phone, and set up CarPlay from scratch. Perhaps there is a reason why Apple and Aston Martin decided to lock users into CarPlay Ultra once activated, but we can't think of what it could be.
Controlling The Car
Being able to leave CarPlay Ultra isn't strictly necessary, since everything you could possibly need is now available within the system. In all previous incarnations of CarPlay, tasks that didn't involve the phone required users to exit back to their native infotainment system: changing a radio station, adjusting the climate, tuning the audio, or turning on a safety setting. All of those functions are now available within a CarPlay application, and temperature controls can even be adjusted via shortcuts that remain fixed on the screen. Siri even has access to most of these functions, so you can adjust them with just your voice.
We loved having all of these functions available in one place, so we didn't have to leave a podcast to turn off lane keep assist. It was particularly useful on the safety front to turn off the overly attentive steering correction, and for adjusting the fabulous Bowers & Wilkins audio system, which has many fun settings. If we're being honest though, the Vanquish is not the most useful car to deploy CarPlay Ultra because it still has buttons and knobs that make it quick and easy to adjust the fan speed or deactivate safety tech. This system will be far more useful in a car from BMW or Mercedes-Benz, for example, where nearly every control is on the touchscreen, and these tasks require entering and exiting CarPlay frequently.
Does It Match An Aston Martin?
When we first booted up CarPlay Ultra, the first thing that stuck out was the lack of colorful backgrounds that usually grace standard CarPlay. For a tech company that prides itself on beautiful design, the black background seemed a bit dull. There is a menu where you can change the wallpaper, but it only seems to impact certain themes, which are connected to which gauge style you have displayed. Our favorite set of gauges, for example, only seemed to show a plain black background, while our second-favorite was paired with a swirl graphic behind the app icons.
There's nothing wrong with how CarPlay looks, but in a car costing over $500,000, we wouldn't mind more customization. Apple allows iPhone users to customize how their icons look, and we think something similar is in order for CarPlay, albeit scaled down.
Customization, while important for the main screen, is even more important in the gauge cluster. Including the full map display, CarPlay Ultra gives users six stylish gauge styles to choose from. If we were in a vehicle besides a V12 Aston Martin, these gauges would be perfectly adequate. Out of the six, only one felt like it belonged in an 824-horsepower super GT car, while the rest either looked too plain or too futuristic. Aston Martin reportedly collaborated with Apple on the clusters, but we wish the British automaker would have had a little more fun designing them. Remember the metal analog gauges in the DBS and Vantage? Why not replicate them digitally? Or go even further through history to create a DB4 cluster, like Ford did recently on its Mustang gauges. A screen can look like anything, so why limit yourself to modern-looking gauges?
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This article originally appeared on CarBuzz and is republished here with permission.
