Yet another iOS 18.4 bug breaks CarPlay this time

Macworld

iOS 18.4, Apple’s latest iPhone software update, appears to contain yet another major bug, or group of related bugs. Multiple users driving multiple brands of car say iOS 18.4 has caused serious problems with CarPlay, in some cases rendering it completely unusable.

At the milder end, users complain that post-update CarPlay no longer shows Now Playing information in the instrument panel.

“Before, the music being played on CarPlay would appear on my dash as well,” says the author of a busy Reddit thread. “Since I updated to 18.4 today it no longer does it and is just blank now.”

Others report issues with Siri through CarPlay, either not being able to read out texts or losing audio capabilities entirely. And at the most extreme end CarPlay simply refuses to launch until users reconnect their devices, sometimes as many as five times.

The bug is not specific to any one brand or model of car, so we can rule out an issue at that level. Autoevolution, which broke the story, says it’s aware of the problem affecting “the 2025 Honda Civic Hybrid, the 2025 Mazda CX-30, 2024 Hondas, multiple Volkswagen models, the 2023 Audi S3, and the 2023 Nissan Frontier,” and I also spotted the Ford Territory and Fiesta, the 2020 Subaru Forester, and an unspecified Jeep in the thread.

This is an embarrassing development for Apple, after iOS 18.4 was also reported to have caused issues with lossless audio on the AirPods Max (although that’s since been fixed) and unwanted apps to appear unexpectedly on users’ iPhones. To some extent such bugs are understandable because 18.4 is a major update with numerous tweaks and new features: before these bugs began to appear we optimistically listed 15 reasons to install it right away.

If CarPlay is a major part of your iPhone usage, we would now advise caution; it may be worth waiting until Apple acknowledges the bug and rolls out a fix before updating. If you’ve already installed iOS 18.4, keep an eye out for another update (likely 18.4.1 or similar) which could contain a fix. Open the Settings app and go to General > Software Update to see the latest version available.