I am an owner of a ‘21 GLC 43. Love the car overall and had minimal issues. Upgraded to iOS 16 yesterday (final version that was just released). For one day CarPlay worked totally fine as it did before but last night the infotainment would refuse to connect the phone and say the message “CarPlay cannot be started.” I have an iPhone 13 Pro. And yes, it’s not a cable issue.

I played around with iOS 16 a month or so ago when it was in beta and it did the same thing with the car. Worked for a couple of days and then crapped out and wouldn’t start upon plugging in. Back then I tried everything thinking it could maybe be the car and not the phone — reset the infotainment, restarted the phone many times, changed out lightning cables, even thought Siri might be the issue. Nothing worked. The phone works briefly after you restart it but then refuses to connect to the car again with the same error message on the infotainment. When I reverted back to iOS 15, there were no issues.

I thought this would be fixed with the final release of iOS 16 but it clearly wasn’t. So be careful about upgrading if you haven’t already and if you have, hope you have a backup handy if you love your CarPlay as much as I do.

If anyone has any insight on this issue or how to fix it, feel free to let everyone know.

ring an Apple CS bell, around same crap happened to my wifeys s22 ultra, AA died completely after latest update ( cant connect to the phone etc ) and thousands of angry and frustrated ppl started to bang google and samsung door and they rolled out OTA fix in like 2 weeks.

I have figured out the problem. It's the Express VPN app. Once I turn off the VPN and exit the app, everything works as it should.

Is there a way to exclude that app from vpn? I use adguard which acts as a local vpn and filters all the ads and i can exclude apps with connection issues.