Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Apple has a vision of upending an industry it has limited influence over. The company admittedly has a better track record than most of doing this, between its successes in the music and telecom businesses, but the automotive one has proven a tough nut to crack in multiple ways. You could argue that CarPlay transformed infotainment, but that revolution also inspired legacy carmakers to take software much more seriously. That’s a problem, because Apple’s idea for next-generation CarPlay is to fully usurp their interfaces for its own. It was announced in 2022 with “first models arriving in 2024” from Porsche and Aston Martin, but today is the last day of 2024, and no such vehicles exist. What happened?
Off the bat, I’ll tell you that we don’t know the answer yet. What we do know is that as recently as November, Porsche told MacRumors that it had no “near term” plans to launch the new CarPlay, which can take over all of a vehicle’s displays including the digital gauge cluster and HVAC interface, unlike existing CarPlay which is mostly confined to the central infotainment stack. That’s a big loss for Apple; while Porsche isn’t exactly a volume automaker, it sells plenty more cars a year than the uber-luxe Aston Martin. By the way, Aston also hasn’t supplied a firm date for new CarPlay’s arrival in the DB12, while Apple had nothing to offer when Wired asked the company about the situation this past September.
Standard CarPlay can be found in pretty much everything that isn’t a General Motors EV these days, so you might be asking “What about everyone else?” Apple named 14 brands committed to adopting the new CarPlay upon its unveiling more than two years ago. The list included not just Porsche, but also Ford, Honda, Nissan, the JLR family, Volvo, and Mercedes-Benz.
Most have remained silent on the matter since, but Merc, for its part, seems to have cooled off. Back in April, Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius told The Verge that while the company won’t adopt a GM-like hardline stance against CarPlay in all of its forms, the next-gen version and its every-screen takeover is simply a bridge too far:
“We’re not fundamentalists to say, for some reason, we’re not going to allow a customer to use Apple CarPlay if that’s what they choose to do,” Kallenius told The Verge. “We have Apple CarPlay. We have Android Auto. If, for some of the functions, you feel more comfortable with that and will switch back and forth, be my guest. You can get that, too. But to give up the whole cockpit head unit—in our case, a passenger screen and everything to somebody else—the answer is no. You’re stepping into your Mercedes cocoon, your Mercedes rolling living room, and the furniture and the digital stuff are from Mercedes. Welcome to Mercedes. That’s it.”
The unofficial, common-sense explanation for next-gen CarPlay’s continued absence is that carmakers just don’t want to cede all that control. If you’ve been following the industry reluctantly allowing Apple and Google to take over dashboard real estate since the beginning, then you know this is nothing new; the auto industry knew it was gearing up for a fight from the very start.
Perhaps Apple’s finally gone too far with this latest move, but context is key here, too. In the 10 years since CarPlay’s first release, manufacturers recognized their deficiencies in the software arena, invested in addressing them, and shipped multiple generations of products. We could argue over whether they’ve finally eliminated a need for phone projection, or matched Apple and Google’s expertise in UI design—in my opinion, most haven’t—but OEM infotainment has, by and large, gotten a hell of a lot better since the early days of Ford SYNC.
Perhaps recognizing the mountain of resources automakers have spent in this sector, next-gen CarPlay does include provisions to allow aspects of the experience to defer to whatever menu the OEM’s already built. The Verge, again, explains this “punch-through” approach well, the idea being that tapping an on-screen button for “seat massage” won’t lead to a CarPlay front end, but instead “punch through” to the car’s onboard graphics.
At this point, though, we’re getting into mixing and matching two unique and equally complicated operating systems, and that solution won’t make either party or the consumer happy. As it is, I can leave my Toyota Corolla with its “dumb” CarPlay on the infotainment screen for the entirety of a journey, and I do. If I want to adjust the climate control, I have buttons for that—thank god.
Once upon a time, carmakers were desperate to find ways to keep their logos in front of drivers and passengers, knowing that the vast majority of them would just open CarPlay and “set it and forget it,” in a sense. But now, the state of play has kind of flipped; it’s Apple that must figure out how to ingratiate itself into existing systems, or at least carve out enough spaces where the manufacturer has the spotlight, to keep its partners content.
Google got around this problem by getting into bed with carmakers earlier in the game, leaning on ubiquitous services like Maps, Gmail, and Calendar to bake its influence into Android Automotive-based systems, no matter how GM, Ford, Honda, or Stellantis skin the final look and feel. That hasn’t been Apple’s strategy, and unless the New Year brings about a sudden change of heart from the industry, the CarPlay of the future might look pretty much the same as it does in your vehicle right now.
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