As electric vehicle adoption has grown, so has the availability of EV-specific apps for CarPlay. There are a number of great CarPlay apps to help take your EV experience to the next level, including planning trips, finding chargers and more. Read on for a growing list of CarPlay apps that every EV owner should check out.
Electric vehicles that support CarPlay
Almost every EV on the market offers support for Apple’s CarPlay platform, including the Ford Mustang Mach-E, Volkswagen ID.4, Kia EV6, Chevy Bolt and many others. The two main exceptions here are Tesla and Rivian, neither of which support CarPlay and neither of which have shown any indication that they plan to add CarPlay support. GM, of course, is also ditching CarPlay starting with its electric vehicles in 2024.
CarPlay, for those unfamiliar, is Apple’s platform that basically maps your iPhone to your car’s infotainment system. You can access specific apps designed for CarPlay, including Apple’s first-party apps, third-party apps in a handful of different categories, and interact with Siri.
To review the best CarPlay apps around the world all App Store categories, be sure to check out our detailed review right here.
Apple is also planning a major overhaul for CarPlay that will begin appearing in the first supported cars sometime in late 2023. This “next generation of CarPlay” provides content for all the driver’s screens in the car, including the dashboard. It will also add support for vehicle-specific features like climate and drive mode controls.
The best EV apps for CarPlay
Apple Maps
Edit: EV routing in Apple Maps is currently only supported on the Ford Mustang Mach-E, F-150 Lightning, and Porsche Taycan.
If you’re an Apple Maps user who wants to stick with Apple’s navigation platform, the company has done a great job of adopting some EV-specific features over the past few years. As you’d expect, these EV-specific features are also supported via CarPlay. This also includes support for multi-stop navigation routes, a feature added in iOS 16.
The main feature here is EV routing support, meaning the Maps app can help you plan trips that include support for charging stops for your EV. Apple Maps, when your iPhone is connected to CarPlay, can track your car’s charge level. In some cases, you’ll also need to download the automaker’s app from the App Store.
Apple Maps takes into account a number of different factors to determine when and how often you should charge. This includes the availability of chargers, the speed of those chargers, altitude, your driving speed and more. It will then automatically insert charging stations along your route. Additionally, if you drive until your battery is too low, Apple Maps will present an alternate route to the nearest charging station.
With iOS 17 this year, Apple further expanded its support for electric vehicles in Apple Maps by adding information about real-time charging availability. This means that Apple Maps will now show the total number of stalls available at a particular charging station and how many are currently occupied.
To make sure you use all available EV features in Apple Maps, update your iPhone to iOS 16, which is available as a free download.
Google Maps
Google Maps offers a handful of options for drivers of electric vehicles, but not at the level of Apple Maps or some other applications on the market. For example, Google Maps on CarPlay does not offer support for electric vehicle routing. The app does not have access to your car’s battery data and will not direct you to an electric vehicle charger during a long drive.
Google Maps offers a feature that selects the most efficient routes for electric vehicles. The app will ask you to select the “engine type” of your car, and you can select “electric” from the list of options. Google Maps will then select the routes that are the most energy efficient, while also taking into account traffic and other data points.
Google Maps also includes support for manually finding electric vehicle charging stations. It will also show a few useful details for these chargers, including port types and charging speeds. Some stations on Google Maps will also show if a charger is available or if all spaces are full.
If your car has Google Maps built in natively (meaning outside of CarPlay), EV features are more advanced. Unfortunately, this is not the case for using the Google Maps application via CarPlay. Let’s hope that changes in the future.
Waze
Like Google Maps, Waze has a fairly limited selection of features for electric cars, and the same goes for the Waze app via CarPlay. The only thing Waze offers EV owners is the ability to find nearby charging points and chargers on your current route.
My belief is that Waze is best used alongside another navigation app. But as Apple Maps continued to add Waze-style features, I became less and less reliant on them. Poor support for EV features doesn’t help the situation either.
A better route planner
If you’re an electric vehicle driver and haven’t tried a better route planner, commonly called ABRP, you’re missing out. It’s a powerful routing app and service for electric vehicle owners that offers more precision and control over your route than any other option on the market. I have yet to find any app that creates plans as precisely as ABRP, or one that offers the level of control that ABRP does.
ABRP allows you to select a vehicle model, enter a destination and get a complete trip plan, including charging stations, total charging time, total travel time and more. You can use the app as your main navigation interface via CarPlay, allowing you to see your plan in real time. This can affect changes, traffic and other things that can affect your route and billing plan.
If you don’t want to use ABRP for navigation, you can create your plan in ABRP and then use another app to navigate to each of the ABRP stations, such as Google Maps, Apple Maps, or Waze. Having all that information available through CarPlay is a big help while driving. You can also view a post-trip report that breaks down driving time, charging time and how they compare to planned estimates.
ABRP is a free download with a $4.99 monthly subscription ($49.99/year) to unlock full functionality. If you’re an EV driver, this is the easiest $5 a month to spend, in my opinion.
Interestingly, Rivian recently announced that it has acquired A Better Route Planner. What this means for the future of the app remains to be seen.
Electrify America
Electrify America is the largest alternative to Tesla’s Supercharger network, which offers nearly 800 charging stations across the United States. The company offers a CarPlay app that makes it easy to find nearby Electrify America charging stations; the app can also direct you directly to those charging stations.
In addition to helping you find charging stations, the Electrify America app also provides some information about those stations. This includes things like the number of available chargers, charging speeds, available port types, pricing, inactivity fees and more. There are also filtering options available for most of these things. For example, you can filter nearby charging stations to show only chargers that have charging speeds over a certain threshold.
Additionally, you can use the Electrify America app via CarPlay to select a specific stand at a charging location and start charging. This opens up a more plug-and-play charging experience and means you don’t have to use your iPhone to do it.
Unfortunately, as of now, the Electrify America app for CarPlay doesn’t display any information while your car is charging. You’ll need to jump into your car’s native charging interface to do this, or use the Electrify America app on your iPhone. However, the CarPlay app will tell you when your car is done charging.
ChargePoint
ChargePoint is similar to Electrify America in that its app is focused on its own network of chargers. So many of the same features available in Electrify America’s app for its chargers are also available in ChargePoint for its network: finding nearby chargers, filtering those locations, favoring chargers and more.
ChargePoint also offers a similar “Start Charging” button for its network of chargers via CarPlay. The app will contact the charger, start a session, and then ask you to plug in the car. Charging will then begin without any further interaction from you.
PlugShare
PlugShare is a popular third-party service that aggregates electric vehicle charging stations across all networks and types. It is by far the most powerful platform for locating charging stations of all types, ranging from 120V outlets in random locations to Electrify America and Tesla Supercharger information.
The CarPlay app for PlugShare offers many of the same features as the PlugShare app for iPhone. You can see nearby chargers with detailed details on things like number of stalls, plug types and more. PlugShare will also show the average rating of other PlugShare users for a charging location, which can help you weed out locations that aren’t currently working.
SpotHero
If you’re an electric vehicle driver, you’re probably familiar with the process of finding a parking space at your final destination that offers electric vehicle charging. This is especially useful if you know you have a long drive ahead of you after you finish whatever you were doing at that location, since you can return to a fully charged car.
SpotHero is a CarPlay app that includes the ability to filter parking spaces based on the availability of EV chargers. By using this, you can ensure that your parking garage or parking lot will have EV chargers available.
And more
These are just a few of the EV apps available through Apple’s CarPlay platform. Here are some of the others:
We will continuously update this list as more apps are released. Do you have a CarPlay app for electric vehicles that you like? Let us know in the comments below.
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