Every year, your iPhone gets a big update that you probably put off installing for as long as possible. I don’t blame you—they tend to break more than they fix, or add. But this year’s iOS 26 update, which Apple just released on Monday, actually proves to be a handy one for CarPlay. That’s a fortunate thing for those of us who refuse to use our car’s built-in infotainment systems.
Now, Apple is of course limited as to how far it can push CarPlay, because automakers only allow basic phone projection to touch the media experience. If you own a car with CarPlay Ultra—which, you probably don’t yet, because the only automaker that’s deployed it so far is Aston Martin—then you’ll be able to do much more with it, like tweak HVAC settings and redesign the instrument cluster.
As for basic CarPlay’s enhancements, the first thing you’re likely to notice is Apple’s Liquid Glass user interface design, which is sort of like if somebody brought Frutiger Aero kicking and screaming into the influencer age. OK—it’s not as terrible as that sounds, and I’m kind of getting used to it.
Beyond that, the first welcome new feature I noticed after updating my iPhone is that Live Activities now show up on the CarPlay Dashboard page. This is big for me, because every night the current Yankees score shows up on my phone’s lock screen as a Live Activity, to help me keep tabs on the latest winnable game they’re throwing away, and now I can do the same while driving my car.
Now, to the left of that is a new page that you’ll have to enable in your phone’s settings to see. Here, you can pin widgets to CarPlay—though I’m finding the implementation to be a little clunky on day one. First of all, I’m only permitted to fit one widget on my GR Corolla’s tiny infotainment screen, and additional widgets can be shown by swiping up or down. Right now, the options consist of a weather widget, a calendar widget, and, honestly, nothing else of obvious value. This could become a really powerful new capability within CarPlay, but as with the iPhone widget experience, developers have to take advantage of the opportunity first.
CarPlay’s own settings app—not to be confused with CarPlay’s settings within the iPhone—holds a few new valuable options, too. A new feature called Smart Display Zoom will resize text to better fit your car’s screen. This, too, is important for me and my Corolla. Although the hot hatch has only an 8-inch touchscreen, the default text size was larger than it needed to be, and now, CarPlay can present more information at once.
If the adjusted text is smaller than you’d like, you can experiment with turning Smart Display Zoom off or choose a larger size or bolder font within the settings. CarPlay in iOS 26 also brings new wallpaper designs—which, whatever—but I dig the new red one because it goes well with my car’s exterior.
Two more things. Now, when you get a phone call while using CarPlay, it doesn’t have to dominate the whole screen. Instead, it’ll present as a bar overlaid above your map or music app or whatever you were looking at before, which is nice. But the one I think a lot of people will be very excited about is that CarPlay will now allow you to beam videos to your vehicle’s screen over AirPlay, so long as the car is not moving—in theory.
I say this because, try as I might, I could not get the feature to work with YouTube or while playing videos from the built-in iOS Photos app. Maybe someone who subscribes to Apple TV+ can tell us if it works there. Apple insiders 9to5Mac report that developers will be required to enable CarPlay viewing in their own software before we get to use it, so the best is likely yet to come. Watch Google make it a paid YouTube Premium feature.
Anyway, that’s what iOS 26 is bringing to CarPlay. It might not seem like a lot, but I’d argue the system was already pretty close to perfection, for my needs anyway. Now, if only they could make Siri competent at answering prompts at any level.
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Backed by a decade of covering cars and consumer tech, Adam Ismail is a Senior Editor at The Drive, focused on curating and producing the site’s slate of daily stories.
