How Many Phones Can Connect To Apple CarPlay At Once?

Apple CarPlay is a great solution for accessing your iPhone's apps and features – including Siri — on your car's infotainment screen. While some carmakers may be getting rid of CarPlay in their future vehicles in favor of their own systems, it's still very much in demand, and the likes of Tesla are even considering adding CarPlay support after years of staying away from it. All you need is an iPhone, and you are ready to get all the CarPlay benefits on the road.

However, if your family or friends often travel with you in the car, there are bound to be requests from passengers trying to connect their iPhone to CarPlay to play their favorite music, podcasts, or something else. So, the question arises: how many iPhones can you connect to CarPlay simultaneously, and is it possible to use Apple CarPlay with multiple phones? The short answer is that while you can pair more than one iPhone for wireless CarPlay, only one can work as a CarPlay source at one time.

If your car supports wireless Apple CarPlay, it's possible to pair more than one iPhone to your car's infotainment system for use with CarPlay. However, you can't do so if your car only supports wired CarPlay. The number of iPhones and other devices that can be paired depends on the car manufacturer. For example, BMW says you can pair a maximum of eight devices simultaneously to use Apple CarPlay. But you'll only be able to use one iPhone for CarPlay at a time. When you need to switch between iPhones, you can navigate to the car's devices section, stop CarPlay on the connected iPhone, and start it on the other iPhone. There are no workarounds for this. Select cars featuring newer infotainment systems from the likes of Lexus have started offering a dual Bluetooth feature.

But even in such cases, while you can have two iPhones connected to the car at the same time, only one iPhone can be used for CarPlay, and the second will be used with the car's own system to manage calls and texts. Fortunately, iPhones have a built-in feature called SharePlay, which is one of the most underrated features of CarPlay and somewhat mitigates the need to connect multiple iPhones for playing music. It allows the car passengers to control the music playback. But for this to work, everyone needs an Apple Music subscription and to be on an iPhone with iOS 17 or newer. If you and the fellow passengers use Spotify, then Spotify's Jam feature can come in handy.