Hopefully picking up a 2017 Honda Civic with Apple Carplay this coming week. I had a demo in a Jetta the other day whilst I was looking and it was really intuitive and easy to use, so i'm quite looking forward to getting the Civic. I'll post my thought as and when I get it but i'm super excited!
So I've had my Civic for about six weeks now and it just turned 1000 miles. I have to say that I use Carplay daily whenever I am in the car. I connect my iPhone 6 up to one of the USB sockets, sit it in the central well, just in front of the gear stick, and Carplay pops up pretty quickly.
Apple Maps is nicely integrated and is incredibly accurate when it comes to predicting 'time to destination', even through the hellish Los Angeles traffic on the 5, 134 and 101. Route guidance is super easy to turn on and off and my car (well my iphone) has learnt my journeys and times, so it can usually accurately predict where i'm likely to want to go at certain times and on certain days. Guidance is also pretty good at offering me alternative routes should traffic build up badly. Also, i've noticed Maps offering me a different route in the event of an accident, which is pretty cool. The screen is nicely laid out and the touch screen pretty accurate too.
The messages app obviously reads messages out rather than display them on the screen and I love the way Carplay reads out what it thinks the emoji means (smiling pile of poo, for instance). Clicking the button on my steering wheel offers me Siri control of my device and there's nothing that I have noticed over and above what the phone would normally do with Siri, except for searching the internet, which it won't do obviouly.
The Music app always defaults to Radio whenever I connect my phone, regardless of what setting it was last on, which is a real pain as I have about 40gig of music on my phone and I would rather it default to the last setting I had, which is usually to sort by Artist. Other than that, the Music app is OK but changing tracks is slow. Far slower than using my 128Gb USB stick I have plugged into the other USB socket hidden in the centre console. The delay is so annoying that I usually just use the USB stick to play music, rather than my device.
I have a Pandora account and it has a Pandora App installed. I sometimes use that too and it seems to be far quicker than using my iPhone to play music too.
Phonecalls are also as easy as pressing the Siri button on my steering wheel and saying "Call <person's name>." It has no issues with connecting the calls and the stereo system in my car (which is upgraded from the base model) makes communication clear for both parties on the call.
I haven't really used any of the other apps installed in the car at all, so can't really comment on those.
I wish there was a way to integrate other third party apps, without the 'specially selected' few that Apple has allowed. I would add Waze and possibly Skype (voice calls only, of course) if I could.
Overall, I love Carplay and I am glad that I got a car with it although honestly, I wasn't really in the market for a car that didn't have it. With the advent of the new iPhone 7 being rumoured not to have a headphone jack, I wanted to get as much car integration as I could, although I am strongly considering not upgrading my 6 at all until next year as I reckon the tenth anniversary iphone will be more of a radical design, and i'm happy with my iPhone 6 anyway.