Make your car more like your smartphone.

THE NEWEST BMWs have this function that makes my geek heart sing. Foot on the brake, you hit the start/stop button, and the infotainment system – that big screen in the centre of the dashboard – fills up with a tiny version of your phone, condensed down to the half-dozen or so apps you need while driving. You don’t even have to take your phone out of your pocket or purse. Unlike most other cars with Apple CarPlay, BMW’s system connects over WiFi, so you don’t need to plug in a Lightning cable. Brilliant, borderline dystopian convenience.

I’m probably alone in loving CarPlay so much. The tech is five years old already, so you don’t really hear about it anymore outside of car dealerships or Apple developer conferences. Consider that flattery, because the bestdesigned tools are intuitive to the point of being ignorable.

Part of that is its speed. CarPlay makes the default systems in modern cars feel obtuse and lethargic. An expensive car with wonderfully responsive steering, acceleration and braking still feels cheap when it takes several counts to skip to the next track.

And CarPlay is arguably safer than mounting your phone on the windscreen or dash. The system blocks the stuff that you shouldn’t be doing while driving. If you tap on Messages, you can select a text convo. But if the car’s moving, the screen won’t show the text – it reads them to you, then asks if you’d like to dictate a response. (Yeah, voice-to-text is still fallible, but it’s good enough to curb my texting-at-traffic-lights habit.)

Count me among the remaining few who consider it a joy to drive really far on an unfamiliar route. There’s the kinetic satisfaction of operating a big machine smoothly through a turn. And I enjoy the existential simplicity of having no responsibility except to keep going. CarPlay preserves all that, then adds just enough functionality to satisfy the modern part of my brain that’s grown accustomed to being able to know exactly where I am on a map, and instantly listen to any song in history. The Tesla software update that gives us sci-fi-grade Level 4 autonomy is still far away. And until then, this is how I’ll drive.

/ BY ALEXANDER GEORGE /