CarPlay Ultra Adds the Gauges. Your Car Decides.

CarPlay Ultra is CarPlay on every screen the driver can see, including the instrument cluster, with the radio and climate controls moved inside it. Standard CarPlay stays on the centre display and never touches the dials.

The phone is almost never what stops you. Apple asks for an iPhone 12 or later running iOS 18.5 or later, and says nothing else about the phone. The car is the part that decides, and Apple’s only published rule for the car is a footnote: “CarPlay Ultra is available on select 2024 and later models.”

What Apple says Ultra adds

Three things, in Apple’s own description of them.

The instrument cluster. Ultra “provides content for all the driver’s screens, including the instrument cluster”, with options for the speedometer, tachometer, fuel gauge and temperature gauge. Apple says drivers can mix iPhone content — maps, media — with data that comes from the car, naming driver assistance and tyre pressure.

The car’s own controls. Radio and climate are handled from inside CarPlay under Ultra, by touch, by physical buttons, or by Siri. Apple also names vehicle-specific settings such as audio system configuration and performance modes.

A per-automaker look. Apple says themes are designed with each carmaker’s design team, and drivers pick a cluster theme and adjust its colours and wallpaper.

None of that is standard CarPlay, which Apple describes throughout as running on “your car’s built-in display” and which leaves the car’s own interface in charge of the car.

What it requires

	CarPlay	CarPlay Ultra
iPhone	iPhone 5 or later, per Apple’s list	iPhone 12 or later
iOS	not stated separately	iOS 18.5 or later
Car	over 800 models listed	“select 2024 and later models”

The phone half is low enough to be nearly a non-question. Every iPhone Apple lists for iOS 27 clears it except two — the iPhone 11 family and the iPhone SE (2nd generation), which run this year’s iOS and sit below Ultra’s floor. If you are unsure which side of that line you are on, Apple’s iOS 27 lists sort iPhones into three tiers.

Wireless CarPlay is not a separate requirement Apple states. Its statement of what Ultra needs names a phone and an iOS version, and no connection type. The Apple page that does explain wireless CarPlay is the iPhone User Guide’s “Connect iPhone to CarPlay”, which walks through cars that are USB-only, cars that are wireless-only and cars that are both — and which does not mention Ultra anywhere. So wireless is a property of the car you are asking about, not a box Apple asks you to tick for Ultra.

Which cars, exactly

This is where Apple’s publishing thins out, and it is worth being plain about how thin.

Apple runs a CarPlay availability page listing over 800 models across 91 carmaker names, updated often enough to carry 2025 models. That page never uses the word “Ultra”. It does mark a sub-feature when it wants to — vehicles that support digital car keys carry an asterisk — so the omission is not a limitation of the page. Apple’s feature-availability page lists Apple CarPlay by country, and has no CarPlay Ultra entry either.

What Apple has named is in one release, from 15 May 2025:

• Aston Martin, shipping. Standard on new orders in the US and Canada from that day, with global markets promised within twelve months.
• Hyundai, Kia and Genesis, described as “newly committed brands”. Committed is not shipping, and neither Hyundai’s nor Kia’s own US software-update notices mention Ultra today.

Aston Martin’s own release names the models: DBX, Vantage, DB12 and Vanquish — the cars carrying the infotainment system it built in-house and introduced on the DB12 in 2023.

Apple has published nothing about CarPlay Ultra since. We checked its complete newsroom sitemap, which runs from 2000 to this month; the May 2025 release is the only CarPlay item in it. Where the promised global rollout has reached is therefore something we cannot tell you from Apple’s own pages, and we are not going to guess at it.

If your car has standard CarPlay only

There is no iPhone-side upgrade path, and Apple describes none. Ultra arrives with the car’s own hardware and software.

• The aftermarket does not cover it. Apple lists seven aftermarket brands — Alpine, Blaupunkt, Clarion, JVC, Kenwood, Pioneer and Sony — under the line “You can add CarPlay to your current car with an aftermarket system.” CarPlay, not Ultra. A head unit cannot redraw a cluster it is not wired to.
• An existing car gets it through the carmaker, if at all. Aston Martin’s route for cars already sold was a software update through its dealer network, and only for cars already carrying its next-generation infotainment system.
• Nothing you have stops working. Standard CarPlay on the centre screen is unchanged by any of this, and Apple’s requirement for it still starts at the iPhone 5.

That last point is worth holding onto if you are weighing a new car partly for this. The gap between CarPlay and Ultra is real, and it is a gap in how much of the dashboard your phone draws — not in whether maps, music, calls and messages work. We have written before about how often the newer thing turns out not to be the upgrade.

What this cannot tell you

Apple publishes no CarPlay Ultra model list, so “is my 2025 model one of the select ones” has no first-party answer short of asking the dealer — which is what Apple’s own footnote says to do. It also gives no price and no mention of a subscription for Ultra either way; Aston Martin says it is standard on new orders, and that is a statement about Aston Martin.

And whatever screen it is drawn on, CarPlay is your phone working hard behind a windscreen. Apple’s own advice is not to leave the device in a parked car, and what heat actually does to a phone is a separate piece of reading for anyone about to mount one on a dashboard in July.