Want Apple CarPlay Ultra? The Cheapest Car That Runs It Is $200K.

Apple CarPlay is a people pleaser. It plays nicely with so many cars’ infotainment systems (those big screens embedded in dashboards), and if you plop yourself down in a car made in the past few years, it’ll almost certainly integrate—to an extent.

CarPlay Ultra, on the other hand, is ultra exclusive and spreads its controls further throughout a car than vanilla CarPlay. The Vantage is Aston Martin’s cheapest car, although a car whose price begins at roughly $195,000 could hardly be used in the same sentence as “cheap.”

It won’t stay that way, though. CarPlay Ultra is headed for the masses. Someday.

from the top of the market downward

Apple says that CarPlay is only debuting on Aston Martin’s cars. It’ll come to other brands, the kinds most of us can actually buy, later.

“Many other automakers around the world are working to bring CarPlay Ultra to drivers,” said Apple in an announcement, “including newly committed brands Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis.” Apple doesn’t offer a timetable on when we can expect to see CarPlay Ultra roll out to more affordable brands, though.

When it arrives, it won’t look identical from one car to the next. “CarPlay Ultra allows automakers to express their distinct design philosophy with the look and feel their customers expect,” according to Apple.

“Custom themes are crafted in close collaboration between Apple and the automaker’s design team, resulting in experiences that feel tailor-made for each vehicle.”

Differing from the vanilla CarPlay we’re used to, CarPlay Ultra lets you add iPhone-style widgets onto the main screen and, if the vehicle has a digital dashboard, into the gauge cluster.

It’ll also let you use the car’s physical buttons, onscreen controls, or Siri to control not just the usual CarPlay features, such as navigation and music, but also aspects of the car-specific systems, such as heating, air conditioning, performance driving modes, and more. “Hey Siri, put my car in sport mode” has a nice ring to it.

CarPlay Ultra is available to Aston Martin buyers in the US and Canada beginning today, with a global rollout over the next 12 months. Current Aston Martin owners will have the Ultra update available in the “coming weeks,” which they can have downloaded into their cars at Aston Martin dealerships.

For the rest of us non-Richie Riches, we’ll have to wait until the CarPlay Ultra migrates down into the middle-class rides, at least.