Wireless Apple CarPlay Not Working or Can't Connect? How to Fix and Troubleshooting

Today I'm going to be showing you how to connect your phone to Apple CarPlay. If your Apple CarPlay is not working or not connecting or you're having trouble, I'm going to go through some quick solutions to get you back up and running. Welcome back to the video here, guys. My name's Christopher from Cars Unlocked. So, previously we did a video showing how to connect to Apple CarPlay and what you can do if it's not working. That was mainly for the wired connection. if you're using your cord to connect. But now a lot of the cars are coming with Apple CarPlay wirelessly. So, we've been getting a ton of comments about people not being able to connect. So, that's why I wanted to make this video for you. So, first thing you want to do is make sure your car is compatible with Apple CarPlay Wireless. Now, if your car is newer, it most likely is, but not all cars are compatible with wireless Apple CarPlay. A lot of them you do still need to plug in your cord. It's fair to assume that if your car is a 2021 or newer, it's going to be compatible. But if you're older than 2021, you're most likely your car is not compatible with Apple CarPlay Wireless and you have to still plug in. But you can go see a list on Google of all the cars compatible or you can look at your owner's manual and make sure it's compatible or a spec sheet of your car and it should tell you if it's compatible. You want to also make sure your iPhone is compatible. Now, majority of iPhones with the updated software are going to be compatible. So, as long as your software is up to date, you should be working. The first thing you're going to want to do is see if the car is the problem or the phone is the problem. And how you can test that, you can grab a friend's phone, a partner's phone, wife's phone, and you can try to connect their iPhone. And if their iPhone connects to Apple CarPlay and yours doesn't, then obviously the problem is with your phone and not the car. If both phones don't connect, then obviously the problem is with the car. So, let's start with the problem being with the phone. So, majority of the time, the quickest solution to fix a lot of glitches is just restarting your iPhone. So, just turn it on and off again or do a restart. That usually fixes a lot of minor glitches. If that still doesn't fix it, you want to make sure your Bluetooth is enabled and you want to make sure your Wi-Fi is enabled. You need a stable data connection. You need Wi-Fi and you need Bluetooth. So, you want to make sure your Bluetooth is connected to your car. So, this phone is being paired to Bluetooth now. Now, here's another kicker. Right. When I pair my phone, it asks if I want to connect to CarPlay or use Bluetooth only. If you've selected this in the past, it might default to only selecting Bluetooth. So, you want to make sure you hit connect there. So, it automatically connects. Now, there is some tr sometimes some trouble with cars. So, you can see here it's asking if I want to use CarPlay on the device. I want to hit yes. So, you want to make sure you follow the prompts properly on the screen. So, you also want to make sure your Apple CarPlay is not restricted on your phone. So, you want to go into your phone settings and search. It could be restricted by your screen time. So, you want to search for screen time and click that. and make sure that all your apps have properly restrictions by going to content and privacy restrictions and seeing if you have any restrictions set on any apps because if it's set to restrict Android Auto, it's not going to work. So, we've shut off all of our privacy restrictions. That should solve that problem. You also want to make sure your Siri is enabled. If you don't have Siri enabled, it might not work either. So, make sure your Siri is enabled. And like I said at the start, you want to make sure it's set to auto join. So, when you automatically connect your car, is it going to automatically connect to Android Auto? So, what you're going to do is you're going to go into general and you're going to see in general CarPlay and then here it's showing the cars, my car, and here I can customize. And I want to make sure that it's set to auto join. If it's still not working, you can go to this car and you can forget this car and you can try reconnecting it. That's another solution. If you hit forget this car and then reconnect, that should get you back up and running again as well. The last thing I would recommend, well, there's a few other recommendations, but I would try plugging your car in to the USB port and then connecting the oldfashioned way with the cord. Once you connect with the cord, you should be able to unplug and use it wirelessly. If that is still not working, there's a few things you can do in your car settings and you can put your phone down and go through your car settings here. So, couple things that we can display on here. If I go to connections here, it's I can turn on and off. I want to make sure it's active. So, you see it says Apple CarPlay inactive. I want to make sure that is active. Okay. Now, your car may be a little different. You want to make sure everything is active and that it's going to automatically turn on when you start and stop the car. The other thing you want to do is make sure your vehicle's software or your infotainment screen is up to date. So, I can do this by going into general system and go system updates. And then I can make sure I have the updated software. You also want to make sure it's updated on your phone. So, you want to make sure you update the CarPlay app on your phone so that you know both your app and your car are up tod date. If that is still not working, sometimes starting and stopping the car could be the a solution. You can also do a factory reset on your vehicle's screen. erase all data and that's going to restore the car to factory settings and you should be up and running once you repair your phone through Bluetooth and connect how I showed you at the start of the video. If that doesn't work, your be all and end all solution could be factory resetting your phone. You're going to lose maybe all your data. So, I would recommend you back up as whatever you need saved photos, contacts, etc. because that's going to wipe your phone clean and you're going to be starting fresh. But that should get you up and running. So, hopefully one of these solutions helped you guys. If you guys have questions and you still can't get it working, put it in the comments. If you guys found a solution that I didn't mention in the video, please put it in the comments to help others who are struggling with the same problem. And we will see you in the next one. Have a great day.