This tiny gadget turns your CarPay or Android Auto wireless – without upgrading your car

TwelveSouth has carved out a fairly delicious niche for itself over the last decade and more, making high-quality accessories for all sorts of devices, but I'd say it's fair to label one of these as by far its most successful – the AirFly.

This little dongle has, for years now, been a top recommendation if you want to use your own Bluetooth headphones on a flight, since it turns basically any 3.5mm jack into a broadcaster to avoid you using terrible in-flight earbuds. Now, though, TwelveSouth is bringing that same sort of wireless wizardry to a new arena – your car.

The newly unveiled AirFly Drive is a smart little dongle that can plug into your car to turn wired CarPlay or Android Auto wireless – just like that. For those of us who have cars new enough to feature either system, but not new enough for them to be wireless, it's potentially a bit of a godsend.

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After all, the annoyance of dealing with cables in your dashboard can be pretty tiresome, and banishing that issue for just $39.99 or £39.99 is pretty persuasive. The AirFly Drive is tiny, too, with just a USB-A connector on the back and a pairing button on its outside.

So long as your car has a USB port, it's likely to be compatible, but you can also use TwelveSouth's compatibility lists here to see a bit more detail about the brands and models that should work with it. If your car has a USB-C port, not USB-A, don't worry: there's an included adapter.

Best of all, the dongle isn't just limited to one phone connection – you can pair two phones to it and switch between them with just a press of the button. That means if you share a car, as so many of us do, there's no fiddly re-pairing all the time.

If it works as it sounds like, this is most likely one of those slam-dunk product launches that you get every so often. Wired CarPlay or Android Auto is a darn sight better than nothing, but almost everyone who uses it likely wishes it were wireless every so often.

In one fell swoop, that problem might be solved now, and we'll look forward to testing it out to see whether it lives up to that billing. The AirFly Drive can be ordered directly from TwelveSouth now, but it says that the gadget will also hit Amazon in around a week's time.