Speaking to #3, the idea of wireless CarPlay is that it uses your phone's cellular data connection, which can be a problem if you're relying on Wifi at your house because you have weak or non-existent cell coverage. But if you are in an area of good cell coverage your phone should still be connected to the internet if you just pick it up and use it. Wireless CarPlay also uses Bluetooth to establish the connection.

I have very weak cell coverage at my house, so my phone is using my home Wifi. Then when wireless CarPlay becomes connected, I lose the Wifi connection to my house and have no internet connection on my phone at all until I drive to a place of real cell coverage. In the meantime, Tidal will log me out because I am attempting to use it without an internet connection.

I can imagine that the situation you had could also happen because the phone's networking typically either uses Wifi or cellular data. But in CarPlay mode it's kind of using both, and perhaps the Tesla app is written in some way that can't deal with that situation or maybe the phone gets into a state where it forgot about the cell connection somehow.

Wireless CarPlay, like all phone to car radio features, is nice when it works. But it's kind of a hack on top of the way a phone normally operates and we all know radios are unreliable. I've never used it in a car where it really worked 100% of the time. It's better than it was a few years ago, where I would have to go through some ridiculous Bluetooth process to re-establish the setup every few weeks. But if I had a choice I'd pick wired CarPlay every time.

 

1: I think this is generally a software issue with the microphone that soft resets correct briefly. It's odd though since CarPlay is still using the car mic when active (I'm assuming) and yet it's generally not encountering the same issue. Maybe they are using different APIs? I will say I encounter this much less frequently with GA after the last update.

3: CarPlay uses an additional WiFi connection to the car as that has a lot more bandwidth than bluetooth so you get better audio quality etc. By definition though that cannot be directly interfering with your internet connection or you wouldn't be able to stream anything, get map updates etc as that is all coming from your phone. i.e. CarPlay just projects your phone on the screen - it's not using the car's internet connection. Personally I've yet to encounter a problem using CarPlay but I haven't tried to use any app not on the car's screen. Out of curiosity Rex4, when you say you are disabling that wifi connection, what are you actually doing?

 

I just click on “Forget Network “ in my Wifi settings to disable the Carplay wifi connection

 

The CarPlay WiFi connection does not interfere with your phones internet connection. All apps on the phone will work regardless of whether they are projected via CarPlay. I have three cars, one has factory wireless CarPlay and on the other 2 I have dongles (one Carlinkit and on the Polestar an Ottocast) and it's the same on all of them.

 

Do any of you that are using CarPlay have to connect it each and every time you get in the car?

I paired my phone via bluetooth, and they said in order to make CarPlay work was to make sure in WiFi settings of the car, turn that off. I have done all that and can connect and use it, until the next time I get into the car, if I was away for too long it is no longer connected and I have to go through the process of going to the bluetooth screen and tapping the CarPlay icon next to the iPhone.

 

There is a known issue with iOS 18.4/18.4.1 that causes wireless CarPlay to stop working properly. This manifests as the phone not being able to connect to the internet or complaining that the WiFi connection used to connect the car to the phone cannot connect to the internet.

This issue is not specific to Polestar and will need to be addressed by a future iOS update. Some people have reported that removing the bluetooth profile for the car from the phone fixes this (if you want to do this be sure to remove the bluetooth profile for the CarPlay connection, not the digital key!)

For me, if I toggle WiFi off/on on the phone and then reconnect bluetooth in the car, I can access the internet again through CarPlay. Also if you see the popup stating that the car WiFi will not connect to the internet and tell it to use cellular, it will work properly again. Although this has to be done on every drive, which is rather annoying!

Here is a link to a discussion on the Apple Developer Forums about this:

CarPlay is not working after iOS 18.4.1 u… - Apple Community

discussions.apple.com

 

Thank you p3mit, good to know it is an Apple iOS bug