I Stopped Using My Phone Mount. Here Is What I Did Instead.

I picked up my 2025 Tesla Model 3 last year, and I would not trade it for anything. But there is one thing I never stopped being annoyed by: my phone and my car never really worked together.

I am an iPhone person. Google Maps, Spotify, WhatsApp, my calendar, all of it lives on the phone. The Tesla has a great screen, but the navigation is not what I am used to, and for music or podcasts I ended up streaming over Bluetooth and fighting with the menus. So I did what most owners do. I bought a phone mount.

I went through three of them in the first months with the car. The first one blocked a corner of the windshield view. The second one slid down every summer afternoon. The third one left a ring on the dashboard that still has not completely come off. Every single drive started the same way: cable in, phone on the mount, wait a second, open Maps. And every single drive I caught myself looking down at a small screen when a huge one was right in front of me.

What finally made me search for another way was nothing dramatic. I was at a red light, a message came in, I glanced down at the phone, and the guy behind me honked because the light had changed. Nothing happened. I just did not like how easy it was to do.

I typed something like "CarPlay in Tesla" into Google. The first results were long forum threads, some of them a few years old, and a few gadgets that looked like they came out of a drawer. I read Reddit for a couple of evenings. Eventually I found the Space Box from Teslahubs, read through the reviews, and checked that my car was compatible (it depends on the model and the computer inside, so do not skip that step). What tipped it for me was the 30-day return window. If it did not work, I could send it back.

It showed up in 2 days. The box is smaller than I expected. The install took me about 10 to 15 minutes at my kitchen table and in the car, with no tools. I will be honest: I skimmed the instructions and got one step wrong the first time, and had to redo it. The second time it worked.

When CarPlay appeared on the big screen for the first time, I just sat in the driveway for a minute and tapped through it. Maps in a layout I already knew. Spotify with my playlists. Messages read out loud. It felt like something the car should have shipped with.

Here is what is different now, about six months after I put it in. The mount is in a drawer. I do not plug anything in. I get in, and the phone connects by itself. My eyes go to one screen instead of two. It sounds small, and it is small, but it is a thing that I used to deal with every single day, and now I do not.

It is not perfect. After I get in, it takes a few seconds before CarPlay shows up on the screen, so I usually wait a moment before I start the navigation. That is the only thing that bothers me, and I got used to it quickly.

If you are a Tesla owner with an iPhone and you are tired of the mount, this fixed it for me. I wish I had done it the week I got the car.

David Lemon, Tesla Model 3 (2025), Space Box owner since early 2026