by Dan Moren
A week with CarPlay Ultra
Writing at Ars Technica, Michael Teo Van Runkle gets to spend a full week with CarPlay Ultra on the Aston Martin DB12 Volante. The new system mostly gets good marks, though it’s not without its issues:
Call me old-fashioned, but I still enjoy seeing a tachometer, speedometer, drive modes, and fuel level versus range remaining and a digital speed—especially on an engaging performance vehicle like the DB12 Volante. Apple might be skilled at making new tech easy to use, but it’s hard to beat the power of millions of minds adapting to analog gauges over the past century or so. And in this case, Ultra’s tach(s) showed a bit of latency or lag while ripping that 671-hp twin-turbo V8 up through the revs, something I never noticed in the native UI.
It’s an interesting and more thorough look than we’ve gotten from some of the previous overviews, and well worth a read. It’s still a bit weird that Aston Martin continues to be the only car company who’s shipped this integration, but we’ll see if that starts to change this fall.