Infotainment Review: Hyundai’s Apple CarPlay

The Hyundai Infotainment system would be considered somewhat bland if it were not for the inclusion of Apple CarPlay. Thankfully, however, the thought that Apple engineers have put into the interface means everything is pretty slick to use.

Connecting an iPhone via the conveniently placed USB port in our test Elantra instantly activates the CarPlay system. This enables the safe use of a number of smartphone features via the responsive 7.0-inch touch-screen.

Large, familiar icons are displayed across the screen indicating CarPlay enabled applications.

The standard set of CarPlay options includes the rather handy iMessage SMS voice read-out and compose function.

Siri – the iPhone digital assistant – uses her pleasant, but insistent voice to competently read out those pesky texts that tend to arrive when all we want to do is spend time behind the wheel.

For the busy person on the go, the pop-up calendar alerts can be integrated into the navigation system, including allowing built-in notification of when to leave in order to get to the address in your next calendar entry.

Siri can also get involved with reminders, if you tell the assistant to remind you to do something when you “get in the car” or “get out of the car” then up on the screen they will pop as appropriate.

Apple Maps is improving against the slick competition from Google and other map navigation sources. Using Siri’s voice input is the easy way to set a destination point for navigation.

By design CarPlay does not use a keyboard on the screen, so voice commands are your friend for searching what you need. The input cognisance is reasonable forgiving, so whilst you can mumble, or try relating that target destination with a mouth full of Lolly-Gobble-Bliss-Bombs, chances are it will work fine, but it is not recommended.

In our Hyundai Elantra test vehicle, the voice command activation button is located on the centre dash, there is no handy steering wheel button available, which was somewhat annoying if you had the urge to use the system often.

iPod music and podcasts are available on the CarPlay home-screen and If you own any audio versions of books purchased through the iBooks section of the App Store, these are also available from an icon on the same home screen.

The App Store also has a number of CarPlay ready applications, most are streaming radio stations, podcast players and music streaming systems such as Spotify. Pandora and Deezer. There is also plenty of individual radio station and DJ’s putting out their own CarPlay compatible applications.

Hopefully the more inventive app developers out there will find less obvious ways of introducing software into our daily drive via this well thought out interface.

Just remember, when you use the apps via the CarPlay system, they remain running on your phone when you park and stop the car. This is important for data and battery management on your phone, those GPS-dependent applications in particular can be awfully hard on a smartphones central processing unit, and therefore power consumption.

Without a CarPlay smart device hooked into the system, the Hyundai infotainment is certainly lacking some pizazz and feature bullet points.

It does feature Bluetooth connectivity and the option to plug in USB attached media, but without those capabilities you will be listening to your old favourite AM or FM radio station.