CarPlay mostly works, and although it has issues it's definitely user-focused.
CarPlay doesn't prevent car makers from tracking vehicle activity.
In the end, consumers don't give a shit about the in-vehicle infotainment. It sucks, or it's AA/CarPlay. The first generation of iDrive showed that rich people people will buy cars in spite of the in-car stuff. In fact, most car infotainment sucks, yet people still buy cars.
Let's turn the question around: why would car makers want to spend millions of dollars a year rolling their own infotainment system? So they can make incremental revenue selling ads and user data? So they have control? Control over what, exactly?
> Let's turn the question around: why would car makers want to spend millions of dollars a year rolling their own infotainment system? So they can make incremental revenue selling ads and user data? So they have control? Control over what, exactly?
There's an interesting (and apparently often misunderstood) article called "IT Doesn't Matter" [0]. In it, Carr is largely arguing that IT, as a business differentiator, was over for many of the things people thought were differentiators. That is, things that helped a company (say American Airlines) get a lead on their competitors in the 1960s had become commoditized. Now every airline was offering flight search and booking online (directly and through aggregators). The IT edge had become table stakes, you didn't do it to beat out a competitor but just to stay in the game. And, even more importantly, many of the things that used to be IT differentiators became commoditized.
Car infotainment was once a differentiator for car manufacturers or for classes of vehicles within the same manufacturer. Today, it's table stakes. Not all the manufacturers have figured that out (have any?).
It's a bit aggravating that a slice of money I pay when buying a car goes to paying for development of the infotainment, which can be shoddy. It's like paying the Windows tax when buying a laptop with it pre-installed.
Imagine if car manufacturers started offering cars with no infotainment OS, and as users having a choice of open source OS distros to install on them..
I wonder how much of those frustrations has to do with Japanese market share of car industry; I think the touchscreen infotainment is not there because car manufacturers value it as integral and central part of car experience but simply because otherwise their product loses against one of Japanese brands.
Japanese road network is a disorganized weighted node graph and absolutely not a grid, and a bulletproof navigation unit has been a must for a car in Japan since its inception around 1990. It is also preferred that they are 2DIN compatible so it can be later upgraded. AFAIK, those are not high priority checkbox items elsewhere, but all cars nevertheless follow the Japanese manufacturer layout because of manufacturers' collective dominance. Cars before 2DIN navigation units seem to have had 1DIN AM/FM radio units with radio buttons[1], by the way.
That dominance leaves a 4:3 8" diagonal hole in immediate view of driver for all cars globally that must be filled with something of value. That doesn't have to be a touchscreen but usually are, and it ends up being a navigation-audio combo unit, and it's outsourced to the lowest bidder. It is not the primary interaction point for cars by overwhelming global demands or principles of automotive product design. That leads to jarring subpar experience that appear to be but are perhaps not intended to be part of core UX of the whole car. I think.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by saying that the Japanese road network is not a grid. In terms of actual layout, it's quite grid-like. I would even say it's usually much closer to a nicely laid-out grid than the mess any European city is.
What Japan lacks are addresses that can be found easily without using a map. Apart from Kyoto, roads in Japanese cities don't have names (or number), so addresses within cities are not "{number} {name of street}". Cities are cut in areas smaller and smaller all the way down to a block. The last number will be the house on that block. So addresses within cities are "{name of area} {sub-area number} {block number} {house number}", with some variations from city to city.
An address might be "Nantokacho 11-16-8", which means the 8th house around the 16th block of the 11th sub-area of the Nantoka area. Good luck figuring that out without a map!
There needs to be a screen: I'm not sure what the incremental cost is of it being touch-sensitive. And I think a lot of designers (or cost cutters) may have figured that since they have to have software anyway, it may easier/cheaper to deal with software buttons than with moving parts like physical buttons and dials.
Don't Japanese people have smartphones or tablets with navigation on them that they can use? I'd rather cars just have a place I can mount my own device, rather than include any kind of screen whatsoever with crappy un-updated, un-maintained software.
I don't own my own car here, but whenever I ride taxis or rent cars in Japan I noticed that they almost all appear to have aftermarket infotainment units. This makes sense now!
Honestly I would prefer to have a 2DIN hole where I can put whatever infotainment I want, instead of being stuck with whatever the car maker included, and that I can change without changing my car.
> why would car makers want to spend millions of dollars a year rolling their own infotainment system?
This is addressed in the article:
> There used to be a big difference in driving characteristics and technology between premium and budget brands. Compared to a Volkswagen, a BMW used to have a more powerful engine, better handling, and comfort features like seat-heating and cruise control. However, a Volkswagen Golf now has similar tech as a BMW and with the transition to EVs, drivetrains and handling won't be the same differentiator as before.
> Now, the focus has moved to the interior. Infotainment systems have become a central part of that, so carmakers are coming up with unusual concepts to set them apart, both in hardware and software. CarPlay 2 is going exactly in the opposite direction, more towards standardizing the in-car software.
But I think a great differentiator for upmarket brands would be to offer as few screens as possible and as many buttons as possible. Electronics are a plague. Some features are very useful: mainly, route planning and the ability to play music in the car. But the rest is a nightmare.
I don't want to talk to my car; certainly not when passengers are sleeping during a trip, and even not when I'm alone. There's a subtle humiliation associated with talking to a machine. More importantly, I don't want to randomly target zones on screens to set up things, and I don't want to look at the screens because I don't want to take my eyes off the road. Give me buttons that have a fixed location, and that I can feel without looking.
I’m happy with the way Mazda has integrated CarPlay. No touch while moving, the navigation wheel moves a highlight around the screen to select buttons/links. I find it much less distracting.
Don’t you think it’s possible that car makers are moving in this direction in anticipation of a day when you no longer have to be paying attention to that extent while driving? Or do people still think that day is very very far off because based on my experience with FSD we’re not as far as everyone thinks.
GM's plan is to sell a subscription service that covers all the things you already pay for on your phone (maps, music streaming, etc). It's why they're killing CarPlay, because they know that even if their service is good, nobody will pay $20/mo for shit they already get for free on their phones.
Basically, their goal in life is to be a worthless middleman who takes peoples money while providing no real value to society.
How is GM a middleman when they are producing the product I am buying which is a car? If GM bundled OnStar with a top tier infotainment / navigation / ChatGpt / I’m hungry where do I eat app, I’ll pay for that as long as it’s reasonable and lets me know I’ll be taken care of if I crash and need assistance.
Planned obsolesence. Without proper CarPlay/AA integration, car manufacturers get to decide when those whiz-bang infotainment features stop working. You'd have to replace the whole car to get those features back instead of just buying a new phone.
Heck simple bluetooth audio playback has degraded year over year in my car. After an android update a few years back I don't get to see the track name any more, pause/play sort of works, and thankfully audio still comes through and I can go to the previous/next track.
Without constant updates, software that is part a a larger ecosystem will eventually breakdown.
Do people do that? I just use my phone beside the old useless infotainment. Honestly, I wouldn't buy a new car that used an in-house infotainment specifically because they go obsolete quickly (<5-10 years) and cannot be economically (or at all) to the latest tech. Carplay seems to be long lived.
Auto makers want what everyone else wants: recurring revenue. They want to find a way to sell subscriptions to something. The infotainment system is a potential angle for that. CarPlay makes that irrelevant.
> "So they have control? Control over what, exactly?"
I think a key thing to consider is that there are in fact three separate questions at play here:
1 - Does infotainment/software UI differentiation matter in the car market? Is there a significant enough market advantage for having better UI that anyone should care?
2 - If there is an advantage for better UI, is it enough of an edge that would compel you to build your own? Or is it the case where it simply has to be good enough?
3 - If there is enough differentiation to be worth building your own, is your company good enough at software to pull it off?
Personally I think the answer to #1 is YES. I think cars with better UIs - while not sufficient in and of itself - have a market advantage.
Where car makers start veering off from each other is the answer to #2. If you believe that you just need a "good enough" experience to not be actively awful, then you buy off-the-shelf. You see this with Volvo/Polestar and Google Automotive. The "skin" around the stock experience is minimal at best, with only minor customizations.
If you believe that being excellent at it confers some advantage, you'd try to roll your own. This would include folks like BMW and Mercedes-Benz.
Now, where the latter strategy really goes off the rails is question #3. That said, if you believe the answer to the first two questions compels you to roll your own - would you easily surrender to a third-party? Or would you at least try to level up your software orgs to make a serious play?
For what it’s worth I agree on #1. I really like RR/Jaguar’s current UI. When I’m in a rental or someone else’s car and I’m forced to use CarPlay I hate it. Feels like I’ve been pushed to kindergarten and given crayons… any car manufacturer that just expects me to use CarPlay is probably not on my potential buy list.
I might be unusual in my preference but I really expect people to have preferences as strong.
Android Automotive is already way beyond what manufacturers are releasing as "their own".
So unless it costs a lot of money to integrate, not picking AA isn't about building your own that's better, but it has to be about control. Or at least independance from a big tech, which I can understand.
I thought about that as well. At the moment, CarPlay can't take over every function so carmakers still have to make their own. But in the long term, there is an opportunity for Apple to make the whole thing and monetize it as a cost-saver to carmakers
When (if?) auto-driven cars become a thing I'd expect some people will want a giant monitor in their car if nothing else, so they can watch movies, play video games, tele-conference, etc....
Disney's "The Magic Highway" might be dystopian to some but the relaxing vehicle seems pretty cool to me
The auto industry is really at a crucial point with how it integrates tech. As cars get more autonomous, infotainment is becoming a key part of our driving experience. I'm wondering, are carmakers at risk of falling behind if they don’t embrace platforms like CarPlay? Or do they have solid reasons to keep developing their systems in-house to keep control over their tech narrative?
Yeah it's CarPlay or whatever Android uses, or I want nothing to do with it.
Every time I rent a car it's a HELLSCAPE of figuring out whatever crappy UI this brand of car created for that year ... until I get my phone hooked up. Man I just want to get to my hotel not futz with some garbage UI in the garage forever.
> Let's turn the question around: why would car makers want to...
The tech giants are not component suppliers you can symbiotically partner with to add value to your product. They are predatory and parasitic goliaths. They are wolves more powerful than governments with designs on your hen-house. It is frankly insane to let them own the primary interface to your customer and auto will likely regret letting them get this far.
Google/Apple infotainment ventures cannot even be called trojan horses given how open they are in their investments and desires to seize the auto industry the moment tech/profit makes it feasible. Unattractive low-margin manufacturing keeps them at bay but they are gambling on "software eats the world" long-term. For now, they will drain every available high margin service for themselves.
>In the end, consumers don't give a shit about the in-vehicle infotainment. It sucks, or it's AA/CarPlay.
My ideal "infotainment" is a button that lets me pair bluetooth and volume/skip controls on my steering wheel. I have a phone mount, like almost everyone does. I don't need a display on my dashboard.
AA/CarPlay (and everything else) are genuinely just distracting annoyances that take up space. Especially in newer cars where the screens are for some reason, no longer matte and often angled upwards so that they just blast reflected sun into your eyes.
Likewise. I vastly prefer the physical buttons, as I can hit them without taking my eyes off the road. The only two things I use infotainment for is mapping and music control.
If find the Bluetooth interface too limited because it requires interacting with the touchscreen on the phone. I want to use the large screen on the car with an interface that is optimized to work while in the car not small controls on a small phone.
Top of my head, most car makers aren't rolling their own. It's either off the shelf with some white labeling or they buy it from another care manufacturer. i.e. Mazda default infotainment can be found in some Toyotas
Not sure if there's any more to it than this, but the Toyota Yaris is a rebadged Mazda 2. I suspect you won't find Mazda infotainment in other Toyota models, though.
I mean, theoretically they could make money by selling additional services. Tesla sells "Premium Connectivity" for ~$10/mo, though it might be against the license agreements traditional manufacturers have with dealers to sell enhancements directly to the consumer.
IMO it's more about control over the user experience. You don't want your customers' UX to be dependent on the whims of Apple or Google, because now you're implicitly building a long-term dependency with a third party that may not be acting in your interests in the future. You're moving closer toward a future where the vehicle becomes commoditized, and now you have more trouble differentiating from competitors. And keep in mind: it's only very recently that the "Apple car" project was cancelled.
That said, traditional automakers are also famous (or infamous?) for sourcing tons of components (including infotainment systems) from the same parts manufacturers. But I guess at least that retains the ability to pivot and use it as a point of differentiation in the future.
If it was user-focused, they wouldn't make unnecessary changes to the UI every release. If it was user-focused, they would put more effort into refinement and fixing bugs.
Regarding "it sucks", if we're talking mapping/directions I disagree. Google maps is really a pretty piss poor application. It hasn't changed in 15 years and it's obvious its maintainers haven't ever driven anywhere using the application, even around the Google campus in MT View, or downtown SF. It's deeply bad. In my experience some car manufacturer mapping applications are quite a bit better. Since they obviously suck at software, who knows how good it could get with the combination of (not Google) AND (competent team)?
I use Apple rather than Google as I try to avoid Google as much as possible but it’s the same principle. I want long term stability in software, not new changes put in to earn a PM a promotion.
>> In the end, consumers don't give a shit about the in-vehicle infotainment.
Drivers don't car, but I think car buyers actually do. Remember that many people are not buying cars for themselves but for other people, usually family. They fall into the trap of thinking that those other people might want such features, if not now then in the future. Look at automatic transmissions. I know many people who much prefer manuals, but they always end up buying an automatic because they believe that other people will want the automatic. And a few years later, all the cars are automatics. The same is happening with in-car entertainment systems. We buy them not because we ant them but because we think other people do.
There's an interesting gap when discussing carplay/aa.
Cars from the 90s up until about 2013 can be easily fitted with a $500 head unit upgrade, and support carplay quite well. With the right tools, it can be done in about two hours right in your driveway.
Cars from 2018 and up pretty universally support carplay, and it's generally quite well integrated into the car's infotainment system.
But, between 2013 and 2017, things were a complete mess. In-car systems were too integrated to be replaceable with a third party 2-DIN unit, but too primitive to run carplay/AA. People who have cars from this era either sell them (for less than they're worth, since only 21% of people will buy a car without carplay!) or put up with it for another 8 years or so until the car's wound out.
For example, my rustbucket '06 Toyota has a great sounding stereo with carplay but my sibling's 2017 Nissan is stuck with flaky and poorly integrated bluetooth.
Or, if you do want to upgrade your 2013-2017 car, you end up replacing half of the in-dash components with ones from a couple model years up, tapping into the car's CAN bus to recognize the new controller, and then running some sketchy scripts to patch the firmware to remove component protection since the VIN's don't match up anymore. Not for the faint of heart.
> But, between 2013 and 2017, things were a complete mess. In-car systems were too integrated to be replaceable with a third party 2-DIN unit, but too primitive to run carplay/AA
Mazda sells a retrofit kit for their 2014 (Mazda 3) / 2016 (other models) and newer cars that didn't come with native CP/AA. It's about $200 and DIY if you're the least bit handy:
I have installed that unit but I wouldn't characterize it as for the "least bit handy". It involves removing all the panels from the screen, center console, and shifter, and fishing some wiring behind the climate controls. Definitely do-able, but not for the faint of heart. The wiring is easy to connect, to be sure, Japanese are outstanding at that. Totally worth the money. I just wish I could put in one of the factory backup cameras, neither the dealer nor my trusted local stereo shop will do that for me.
For other brands, there are third party retrofits that replace the integrated stereo with a DIN mount, or with a carplay compatible head unit. The software on those is usually clunky, but it's not like OEM car head units are known for their UX.
Porsche has a reasonably priced upgrade path for their head units even in quite old cars which add Carplay. The value is obvious to them - it maintains a high resale value on older vehicles which maintains their higher current sale value.
Something I found interesting when I was hacking my VW to add Carplay (without paying £300) was that a ton of manufacturers in the ~2016 era use the exact same head unit and OS but with a different front fascia, different button layout and a relatively advanced UI skinning system. If you can be bothered you can add e.g. Audi track G-sensors to your VW or use a different skin.
I think you’re finding “different” car manufacturers using that system because they’re all VW owned brands. You’ll find the rest of the parts on the car are mostly the same also. If you want to annoy an Audi owner, point out which VW model is 95 percent identical… in some cases like the Q7 vs VW Touareg, the VW model is even higher end and nicer.
People like to complain about touch screens and lack of buttons, but the loss of the double DIN slot is a much worse loss. It more or less forces you to buy a new car to get satellite navigation updates or properly functioning Bluetooth.
Agreed. These days you can get a double DIN carplay/aa deck with a slot load DVD player for under $80 USD. That is absolutely shocking. I mean, we couldn't even get a 5" slot load CD drive for our computers for that kind of money and these things have a 5" screen on them too!
We had a 2014 that suffered from this. It some touchscreen that was basically useless besides showing the backup cam and a few random, infrequently changed settings. However, replacing it was essentially impossible it also served as a critical system for a few things.
By contrast, my 98 Jeep and '08 sedan were both easy upgrades to modern head units with standard DINs.
Not having CarPlay/AA was actually a massive reason I wanted to get rid of that car.
I have a 2014 Mazda CX-5 and a 2017 Subaru Outback. I have replaced the head units in both with 3rd party units which support CarPlay/AA. Both installations were easy and took about 2-3 hours. Both support changing the car settings through the 3rd party headhunt, integrate with the steering wheel controls, factory backup camera and the factory installed amplifiers (Bose and Harmon Kardon). The key to these integrations were iDatalink Maestro units. I ordered mine through Crutchfield but most decent car audio websites will generate an installation package including the appropriate wire harnesses, iDatalink unit, 2-DIN adapter and trim pieces once you select a head unit to purchase.
> Both support changing the car settings through the 3rd party headhunt, integrate with the steering wheel controls, factory backup camera and the factory installed amplifiers (Bose and Harmon Kardon)
Wow, I'm impressed. I wouldn't have thought manufacturers nowadays would be forthcoming enough to allow that.
Do you know if it is something specific to (some?) Japanese manufacturers, or is it a form of info-display standard that would also make it possible with other brands?
> Cars from 2018 and up pretty universally support Carplay, and it's generally quite well integrated into the car's infotainment system.
I don't know what cars you drive, but they are not budget or Chinese. I recently rented a bottom-of-the-line Nissan '24 and just getting audio from my iPhone was a struggle - and there was absolutely no Carplay in sight. Most Chinese cars I've rented (all 23 or 24 models) have advertised Carplay, but what they really have is a half-baked phone mirroring, which maybe worked on ios11 or something, but definetely doesn't today.
I've got a cheap 2021 Nissan Versa, and it has CarPlay plus a bunch of useful electronics features (front/back proximity detection, auto-dipping headlights, etc).
I'm interested in where this data is sourced: "only 21% of people will buy a car without carplay". I find that really hard to believe even if the survey was isolated to SF.
I am in that 21%. Heck, I would MUCH prefer to buy a car with no touch screens at all. All I want is a decent car ala 2004ish but with modern crash safety and headlights that don’t suck. I do not care about Bluetooth even!
I realize I will not be able to buy a car with no screens due to the backup camera rules. But there is actual safety value in that for me so I’m ok with it.
I wonder if that assertion is based on new car sales.
For example, I wouldn't buy a new car without android auto, because cars with it are readily available and hardly cost anything extra.
But if I had say $6k to spend on a used car instead of $20k+ on a new car? Your options are much more limited and the tradeoffs unpalatable. I know I can still put a phone holder in any vehicle and I'm off to the races.
> People buying used cars will take Bluetooth as a nice perk, but to think they make major decisions based on carplay in a 2015 Chevy Volt is funny.
That was my position until we bought our last car. We got it second hand, so we did not really have a definite set of required features and CarPlay was just nice to have. After having used it over the last 4 years, it completely changed though, and I can guarantee I won’t consider a car without it for my next one. It helps that around here all non-garbage car have had it for quite a few years now.
Nowadays there are low cost Chinese kits that directly add AA/Carplay to most of those early integrated systems without even replacing the unit. They’ve reverse engineered the lcd and touch screen interfaces so they can hijack the screen.
>(for less than they're worth, since only 21% of people will buy a car without carplay!)
...is there a handy list of which models these are? I'm in the market for a used car, and I'm perfectly happy to pay less for something without CarPlay.
Article is really about the unofficially called "Carplay 2", a deeper integration that Apple announced in 2022 but hasn't been heard about since.
As the article itself says, CarPlay Original Flavor is a massive success, I'm in the "79% of drivers only consider a car if it has CarPlay" (bye-bye GM!)
Apparently this isn't true. If you have a car where the 2nd screen behind the steering wheel also shows CarPlay-related stuff, you have CarPlay 2 (or so I've been told). It's just not as invasive and all-or-nothing as it was billed to be.
No. There are three things, which makes it confusing.
1: “original” CarPlay. Shows up on your head unit
2: enhanced “original” CarPlay. Some cars can show the map or turn by turn instructions behind the steering wheel on a screen there
3: “new” CarPlay. This is where CarPlay fully takes over every screen. Nothing has been released, I think only one very expensive model has even said they’re going it.
Today e dry one has #1 or #2. The article is about a mix of #3 and maybe a version of #3 run on the car not the phone, like Android Automotive.
The lack of distinct names for things on both the Apple side and Google side (auto vs automotive) just makes this all very hard to discuss at times.
To be fair, at this point only the Ultium EV-based models won't have CarPlay, and they are struggling to build them anyway. Even if they do figure out the production issues and achieve the targets of their wildest dreams, they will still only account for around 6% of all the vehicles GM produces. They're not exactly betting the farm on it.
>Continuing with the above example, let's imagine I just downloaded a new podcast app on my phone (one that is also available in the automotive Play Store). The next day I have to go on a long drive and I want to listen to a podcast episode I downloaded on my phone. When I enter my car, I have to go to the Play Store, find the app, download it, log in, and then download the episode. When I use CarPlay, I only have to connect my phone.
Does the author have no experience with Android Auto? The same happens there, if the app is on my phone and it supports Android Auto then it will automatically be available in the car, along with all media on my phone. This isn't a CarPlay only functionalitiy, it's just how phone mirroring works on both platforms. Author seems to think there is an extra step involved on Android. Perhaps by "Play Store" they mean the car manufacturer's own app store?
Source: I use Android Auto constantly in my own vehicle and in the 15+ rental cars I have every year.
Alright, but then comparing CarPlay 1 to Android Automotive is comparing apples and oranges. The author should be comparing CarPlay 1 to Android Auto and CarPlay 2 to Android Automotive.
> Android Automotive which is different than Android Auto
I know this isn't the highest value comment in the world, but god Google's product naming/differentiation is terrible. I can't imagine a more guaranteed-to-confuse (or worse, more guaranteed to lead to misleading second-party marketing) nomenclature.
>> Continuing with the above example, let's imagine I just downloaded a new podcast app on my phone (one that is also available in the [Android A]utomotive Play Store).
They lost a capitalization which makes it a bit ambiguous but their scenario is this:
There are two app stores being discussed: iOS (for CarPlay), and Android Automotive (the infotainment system's play store).
If you have Android Automotive on an infotainment system and an iPhone and can't connect your iPhone to the infotainment system, you have to download the app twice: iOS App Store and Android Automotive Play Store.
I don't know the numbers, but Android Automotive infotainment systems don't universally support CarPlay. Some only got it via updates over the last couple years (that's also a selling point of them, though, that they could do it via software updates and not a whole hardware refresh).
There's a difference between Android Auto (Google's CarPlay equivalent for phone projection to any infotainment system) and Android Automotive (Google's Infotainment OS).
It's pretty funny to me to see an Apple user complaining about lack of interop with other ecosystems. You've chosen your walled garden; now it's time to realize you're stuck in it.
The author seems to blame everyone but Apple for this, though. Apparently it's Google's fault that his preferred podcast app isn't available on Android. What about the app developer, who has decided not to support Android? And it's the auto manufacturer's fault for deciding to go with Android Automotive as the infotainment OS. What about Apple, for refusing to license any of their OS offerings to third parties? (Let alone not having an automotive-suitable version of any of their OSes anyway.)
Instead, Apple wants auto manufacturers to implement a complex, proprietary Apple protocol to give iPhones the ability to control most aspects of the car's infotainment functions. Why would auto manufacturers want to do this? Not only would the auto manufacturer have to develop their own infotainment system (perhaps even using Android Automotive, but perhaps something else), but then they have to do all this extra work to essentially allow drivers to not use their own system. (And while I agree that most auto manufacturer software is weak or outright garbage, that point of fact isn't really relevant here.)
I don't agree with the author that some car makers are not excited about CarPlay 2 primarily because they want to own the automotive experience. It's because of all the extra work they need to do to support CarPlay 2 (probably an order of magnitude what it takes to support CarPlay 1 or Android Auto), and doing so isn't really in their interests, outside of Apple users who might refuse to consider their cars without CarPlay 2 support. But this is a chicken-and-egg problem: CP2 doesn't exist yet in any car, so customers don't know what they're potentially missing.
> It's pretty funny to me to see an Apple user complaining about lack of interop with other ecosystems. You've chosen your walled garden; now it's time to realize you're stuck in it.
I am still amazed that some people see it as a brain-free non-decision to buy into a status symbol.
I have an iPhone. It has things that I like and things that I hate. I have a brain that can process nuance, and it’s entirely possible to say nice things about some features and rant against others.
I bought my current phone knowing what I can do and cannot do with it. It is an informed decision and a compromise by necessity. I bought it expecting it to integrate with my car via CarPlay, and I would definitely complain if it either stopped working or if car manufacturers dropped it.
> and doing so isn't really in their interests, outside of Apple users who might refuse to consider their cars without CarPlay 2 support.
I would be interested in CarPlay 2 if I were buying a new car when it’s out. Infotainment is still a huge weakness in many cars, and is definitely a plus to many users. Carmakers are free to ignore it of course, but unless they are maybe Tesla, they have no good reputation to rely on in selling their own custom infotainment experiences.
> You've chosen your walled garden; now it's time to realize you're stuck in it.
Yes and no. Android Automotive supports android apps, but GM's implementation (for example) still locks out android phones from using Android Auto. Yes, you can install the same apps, but the nice thing about hooking up your phone is that you're maintaining all of your apps, data, and state in one place instead of two and it's inherently different for as many different drivers as there are phones.
> And it's the auto manufacturer's fault for deciding to go with Android Automotive as the infotainment OS.
Yes, as far as I know, any automaker can choose to make the screen in the dash compatible with Carplay, at least the non fancy Carplay that will be able to show all the apps on the phone.
Zero reason, in my opinion, to not offer a Carplay compatible screen, other than to inconvenience car users. Not the CarPlay 2 thing, but just original Carplay.
CarPlay 2 needs a deeper integration to the car, as part of the vehicle's SDV stack. From what I understand, Apple will license software that runs on the vehicles SDV stack (RTOS, etc) with support for various Auto specific SoCs (Nvidia, Qualcomm, Renesas, NXP, etc).
There is an existing vibrant ecosystem of Tier 1 partners who can do the CarPlay (or AA) integration, lessening the burden on the Auto OEMs for such specialised integration work (Luxoft, etc).
CP2 is an eventual pathway (pure conjecture here) for Apple to offer other upgrades in the future, like an L2+ ADAS package, via a subscription model, with a potential profit split between Apple and the OEM.
Somewhat like what MobilEye currently offers and their current business model. Apple gets valuable realtime traffic info from such an L2+ offering, which can feed into making Apple Maps better with up to the minute traffic updates. And the OEM gets to leverage a valuable "sticky" offering that is bound to attract the Apple crowed (usually well heeled folks with deeper pockets). And they both get to monetize CP2 via a paid subscription model.
I also think the author misses the mark on this statement
> Apple’s long-term goal is likely to find ways to directly monetize CarPlay. It could license CarPlay to carmakers at some point. But with the entire global car market amounting to only around 70 million cars per year and the car industry’s slim profit margins (ranging from 5% to 15%), it must reach a high market share to get significant revenue from it. However, carmakers may be hesitant to invest in what they see as a competing product.
I don’t think Apple sees this as a promising revenue stream. It’s just another way to encourage people to stay within the walled garden. That seems many times more valuable than any possible licensing fees they would get from manufacturers
> I don’t think Apple sees this as a promising revenue stream.
Isn't the value of CarPlay/AndroidAuto indirect? As in that the value is coming from the data being generated to enable better mapping? Because the truth is that some of these mapping services' main utilities depend on a large network of users (e.g. information about congestion, road notices, etc[0]). In that way it seems beneficial to get your app onto as many vehicles as possible and even gives motivation for making CarPlay cross-platform (even if the main benefits only go to Apple users).
[0] Also, wtf AndroidAuto. You pull data from Waze users for things like speed traps, road hazzards, etc, but you don't let me contribute when using Auto? Why is there no button (or voice command) "report road hazard"? Hell, this'll even help you classify events for your ML models.
> I don’t think Apple sees this as a promising revenue stream. It’s just another way to encourage people to stay within the walled garden. That seems many times more valuable than any possible licensing fees they would get from manufacturers
I agree this is the optimal way of seeing it. Apple did not do the same with App Store though. The initial vision was to just apply enough fees for hosting and vetting the apps. Now with the way they hold on to the 15/17/30% fee, they are treating it like a revenue stream instead of a "courtesy service".
Pretty much all new car reviews are complaining about the built in infotainment, and it only gotten worse after manufacturers decided to jump on the all out touch screen bandwagon (to save a few bucks) but without Tesla’s generally alright UI and responsiveness.
In that respect a UI made by Apple will certainly appeal to an audience already demanding current CarPlay. On the other hand, it could be that the current level of CarPlay integration is already enough.
> give iPhones the ability to control most aspects of the car's infotainment functions
Because the solutions the auto makers came up with _sucked_ and as it’s not core to the operation of the car, I’d prefer it be done by someone that even approximately knows what they’re doing with software?
I am not buying the car for their infotainment features, I’m buying it for the car. I’d like it the entertainment bits were just delegated to the setup I already have…
That's why I'm happy with CarPlay/AA for infotainment... ONLY. Maps, music, podcasts, that's all I need.
I don't need my whole car UI to be taken over by my phone. My car maker solution to display and control speed, HVAC, gas tank/battery status is perfectly fine.
personally, i am hoping for (and working slowly toward) modernized AACS so that eg. a raspberry pi can be used to control most modern car head units unmodified: https://github.com/tomasz-grobelny/AACS
The only reason I use CarPlay is because I have an iPhone. The experience with Android auto is way ahead. Did you ever try to call a business that’s not in your contacts? Did you ever try to ask a simple question? Siri integration is horrible
I feel like we should separate Voice Assistants from infotainment in general here.
Yes, Siri is terrible, but the EUs new DMA law requires that I be able to select a different voice assistant on iOS too, and that should theoretically, once implemented, also apply to CarPlay.
In my opinion, and while I haven't used "Android Auto" I have used "Android Automotive" (the OS version, without a phone driving the integration), CarPlay the infotainment integration (besides Siri) offers a better user experience.
Siri, in general, is horrible. Just ask Siri: "set an alarm for 12:00 UTC" or "set an alarm for 12:00 Eastern Standard Time" and she will create an alarm named UTC or Eastern Standard Time ... but it's actually in your current timezone.
Super annoying when you want to set an alarm in a timezone you are going to be traveling to.
I much rather have car manufacturers creating ‘exclusive to their brand’ themes and skins for the CarPlay 2 dials than not having car play (2) at all.
Car manufacturers have had decades to develop their software but almost all are difficult to work with, slow, give bad user feedback (full screen pop-up with entire paragraphs while navigating) and are cumbersome to get accustomed to when switching cars.
I’m one of the 79% that demands CarPlay, if it’s not part of the car I don’t want it.
Having had to do with car executives, especially in Europe, let me tell you... they're a peculiar lot.
The older ones confuse their old school pride for business acumen more often than not, because of survival bias from an era when the two things actually coincided.
The younger ones are frustrated by the fact that older upper management is extremely conservative and they're often put down or given toy projects to tinker with.
On the other hand, incumbent carmakers might have also seen how Apple was able to turn the carriers' business around by convincing Cingular/AT&T about giving up their control and they don't like the idea of ending up like the carriers, with overarching licensing fees for keeping on using the tech...
A bit of a tangent, but those "distinctive" interior mockups made me instantly cringe. I'm fine with designers having a bit fun with every part of the car other than the top of the dashboard, which should be flat, dull, and dark (ideally covered in something like Vantablack), because any bit of visual clutter there gets superimposed over the road in front of you thanks to the reflection of the windshield in sunny weather.
Readit News
CarPlay doesn't prevent car makers from tracking vehicle activity.
In the end, consumers don't give a shit about the in-vehicle infotainment. It sucks, or it's AA/CarPlay. The first generation of iDrive showed that rich people people will buy cars in spite of the in-car stuff. In fact, most car infotainment sucks, yet people still buy cars.
Let's turn the question around: why would car makers want to spend millions of dollars a year rolling their own infotainment system? So they can make incremental revenue selling ads and user data? So they have control? Control over what, exactly?
There's an interesting (and apparently often misunderstood) article called "IT Doesn't Matter" [0]. In it, Carr is largely arguing that IT, as a business differentiator, was over for many of the things people thought were differentiators. That is, things that helped a company (say American Airlines) get a lead on their competitors in the 1960s had become commoditized. Now every airline was offering flight search and booking online (directly and through aggregators). The IT edge had become table stakes, you didn't do it to beat out a competitor but just to stay in the game. And, even more importantly, many of the things that used to be IT differentiators became commoditized.
Car infotainment was once a differentiator for car manufacturers or for classes of vehicles within the same manufacturer. Today, it's table stakes. Not all the manufacturers have figured that out (have any?).
[0] https://hbr.org/2003/05/it-doesnt-matter and https://www.nicholascarr.com/?page_id=99
Imagine if car manufacturers started offering cars with no infotainment OS, and as users having a choice of open source OS distros to install on them..
Japanese road network is a disorganized weighted node graph and absolutely not a grid, and a bulletproof navigation unit has been a must for a car in Japan since its inception around 1990. It is also preferred that they are 2DIN compatible so it can be later upgraded. AFAIK, those are not high priority checkbox items elsewhere, but all cars nevertheless follow the Japanese manufacturer layout because of manufacturers' collective dominance. Cars before 2DIN navigation units seem to have had 1DIN AM/FM radio units with radio buttons[1], by the way.
That dominance leaves a 4:3 8" diagonal hole in immediate view of driver for all cars globally that must be filled with something of value. That doesn't have to be a touchscreen but usually are, and it ends up being a navigation-audio combo unit, and it's outsourced to the lowest bidder. It is not the primary interaction point for cars by overwhelming global demands or principles of automotive product design. That leads to jarring subpar experience that appear to be but are perhaps not intended to be part of core UX of the whole car. I think.
1: https://www.alamy.com/1956-mercedes-benz-190-sl-steering-whe...
What Japan lacks are addresses that can be found easily without using a map. Apart from Kyoto, roads in Japanese cities don't have names (or number), so addresses within cities are not "{number} {name of street}". Cities are cut in areas smaller and smaller all the way down to a block. The last number will be the house on that block. So addresses within cities are "{name of area} {sub-area number} {block number} {house number}", with some variations from city to city.
An address might be "Nantokacho 11-16-8", which means the 8th house around the 16th block of the 11th sub-area of the Nantoka area. Good luck figuring that out without a map!
With back up cameras being mandated in the US (and other jurisdictions?):
* https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/02/backup-cameras-now-required-...
There needs to be a screen: I'm not sure what the incremental cost is of it being touch-sensitive. And I think a lot of designers (or cost cutters) may have figured that since they have to have software anyway, it may easier/cheaper to deal with software buttons than with moving parts like physical buttons and dials.
This is addressed in the article:
> There used to be a big difference in driving characteristics and technology between premium and budget brands. Compared to a Volkswagen, a BMW used to have a more powerful engine, better handling, and comfort features like seat-heating and cruise control. However, a Volkswagen Golf now has similar tech as a BMW and with the transition to EVs, drivetrains and handling won't be the same differentiator as before.
> Now, the focus has moved to the interior. Infotainment systems have become a central part of that, so carmakers are coming up with unusual concepts to set them apart, both in hardware and software. CarPlay 2 is going exactly in the opposite direction, more towards standardizing the in-car software.
But I think a great differentiator for upmarket brands would be to offer as few screens as possible and as many buttons as possible. Electronics are a plague. Some features are very useful: mainly, route planning and the ability to play music in the car. But the rest is a nightmare.
I don't want to talk to my car; certainly not when passengers are sleeping during a trip, and even not when I'm alone. There's a subtle humiliation associated with talking to a machine. More importantly, I don't want to randomly target zones on screens to set up things, and I don't want to look at the screens because I don't want to take my eyes off the road. Give me buttons that have a fixed location, and that I can feel without looking.
Basically, their goal in life is to be a worthless middleman who takes peoples money while providing no real value to society.
Toyota should also plan to expand their manufacturing capacity to pickup GMs lost sales to anyone under the age of 60.
Lol
Planned obsolesence. Without proper CarPlay/AA integration, car manufacturers get to decide when those whiz-bang infotainment features stop working. You'd have to replace the whole car to get those features back instead of just buying a new phone.
Without constant updates, software that is part a a larger ecosystem will eventually breakdown.
This isn't "we're going to deprecate your car, buy a new one". People will buy them anyway.
It is "You're going to pay for AOL, even though we have the internet"
And when you sell your car, some other dumb schmuck will buy it used and sign up for AOL-of-cars.
I think a key thing to consider is that there are in fact three separate questions at play here:
1 - Does infotainment/software UI differentiation matter in the car market? Is there a significant enough market advantage for having better UI that anyone should care?
2 - If there is an advantage for better UI, is it enough of an edge that would compel you to build your own? Or is it the case where it simply has to be good enough?
3 - If there is enough differentiation to be worth building your own, is your company good enough at software to pull it off?
Personally I think the answer to #1 is YES. I think cars with better UIs - while not sufficient in and of itself - have a market advantage.
Where car makers start veering off from each other is the answer to #2. If you believe that you just need a "good enough" experience to not be actively awful, then you buy off-the-shelf. You see this with Volvo/Polestar and Google Automotive. The "skin" around the stock experience is minimal at best, with only minor customizations.
If you believe that being excellent at it confers some advantage, you'd try to roll your own. This would include folks like BMW and Mercedes-Benz.
Now, where the latter strategy really goes off the rails is question #3. That said, if you believe the answer to the first two questions compels you to roll your own - would you easily surrender to a third-party? Or would you at least try to level up your software orgs to make a serious play?
I might be unusual in my preference but I really expect people to have preferences as strong.
So unless it costs a lot of money to integrate, not picking AA isn't about building your own that's better, but it has to be about control. Or at least independance from a big tech, which I can understand.
Disney's "The Magic Highway" might be dystopian to some but the relaxing vehicle seems pretty cool to me
https://youtu.be/Vo4-rYNGEwE?t=199
Every time I rent a car it's a HELLSCAPE of figuring out whatever crappy UI this brand of car created for that year ... until I get my phone hooked up. Man I just want to get to my hotel not futz with some garbage UI in the garage forever.
obviously i rather have carplay if i could but i am worry about security implication, plugging to a car i don't know
The tech giants are not component suppliers you can symbiotically partner with to add value to your product. They are predatory and parasitic goliaths. They are wolves more powerful than governments with designs on your hen-house. It is frankly insane to let them own the primary interface to your customer and auto will likely regret letting them get this far.
Google/Apple infotainment ventures cannot even be called trojan horses given how open they are in their investments and desires to seize the auto industry the moment tech/profit makes it feasible. Unattractive low-margin manufacturing keeps them at bay but they are gambling on "software eats the world" long-term. For now, they will drain every available high margin service for themselves.
My ideal "infotainment" is a button that lets me pair bluetooth and volume/skip controls on my steering wheel. I have a phone mount, like almost everyone does. I don't need a display on my dashboard.
AA/CarPlay (and everything else) are genuinely just distracting annoyances that take up space. Especially in newer cars where the screens are for some reason, no longer matte and often angled upwards so that they just blast reflected sun into your eyes.
IMO it's more about control over the user experience. You don't want your customers' UX to be dependent on the whims of Apple or Google, because now you're implicitly building a long-term dependency with a third party that may not be acting in your interests in the future. You're moving closer toward a future where the vehicle becomes commoditized, and now you have more trouble differentiating from competitors. And keep in mind: it's only very recently that the "Apple car" project was cancelled.
That said, traditional automakers are also famous (or infamous?) for sourcing tons of components (including infotainment systems) from the same parts manufacturers. But I guess at least that retains the ability to pivot and use it as a point of differentiation in the future.
If it was user-focused, they wouldn't make unnecessary changes to the UI every release. If it was user-focused, they would put more effort into refinement and fixing bugs.
No, CarPlay is Apple-focused.
Good. It works.
I use Apple rather than Google as I try to avoid Google as much as possible but it’s the same principle. I want long term stability in software, not new changes put in to earn a PM a promotion.
Drivers don't car, but I think car buyers actually do. Remember that many people are not buying cars for themselves but for other people, usually family. They fall into the trap of thinking that those other people might want such features, if not now then in the future. Look at automatic transmissions. I know many people who much prefer manuals, but they always end up buying an automatic because they believe that other people will want the automatic. And a few years later, all the cars are automatics. The same is happening with in-car entertainment systems. We buy them not because we ant them but because we think other people do.
Can you explain this? I guess maybe the devil is in "many"?
Cars from the 90s up until about 2013 can be easily fitted with a $500 head unit upgrade, and support carplay quite well. With the right tools, it can be done in about two hours right in your driveway.
Cars from 2018 and up pretty universally support carplay, and it's generally quite well integrated into the car's infotainment system.
But, between 2013 and 2017, things were a complete mess. In-car systems were too integrated to be replaceable with a third party 2-DIN unit, but too primitive to run carplay/AA. People who have cars from this era either sell them (for less than they're worth, since only 21% of people will buy a car without carplay!) or put up with it for another 8 years or so until the car's wound out.
For example, my rustbucket '06 Toyota has a great sounding stereo with carplay but my sibling's 2017 Nissan is stuck with flaky and poorly integrated bluetooth.
Or, if you do want to upgrade your 2013-2017 car, you end up replacing half of the in-dash components with ones from a couple model years up, tapping into the car's CAN bus to recognize the new controller, and then running some sketchy scripts to patch the firmware to remove component protection since the VIN's don't match up anymore. Not for the faint of heart.
Mazda sells a retrofit kit for their 2014 (Mazda 3) / 2016 (other models) and newer cars that didn't come with native CP/AA. It's about $200 and DIY if you're the least bit handy:
https://mazdaparts.org/mazda-3-smartphone-mirroring-kit.html
Something I found interesting when I was hacking my VW to add Carplay (without paying £300) was that a ton of manufacturers in the ~2016 era use the exact same head unit and OS but with a different front fascia, different button layout and a relatively advanced UI skinning system. If you can be bothered you can add e.g. Audi track G-sensors to your VW or use a different skin.
https://www.amazon.com/Portable-Receivers-Display-Stereo-Blu...
By contrast, my 98 Jeep and '08 sedan were both easy upgrades to modern head units with standard DINs.
Not having CarPlay/AA was actually a massive reason I wanted to get rid of that car.
Wow, I'm impressed. I wouldn't have thought manufacturers nowadays would be forthcoming enough to allow that.
Do you know if it is something specific to (some?) Japanese manufacturers, or is it a form of info-display standard that would also make it possible with other brands?
I don't know what cars you drive, but they are not budget or Chinese. I recently rented a bottom-of-the-line Nissan '24 and just getting audio from my iPhone was a struggle - and there was absolutely no Carplay in sight. Most Chinese cars I've rented (all 23 or 24 models) have advertised Carplay, but what they really have is a half-baked phone mirroring, which maybe worked on ios11 or something, but definetely doesn't today.
Occasionally I’ve had something like a D or so, or a van, but even the last van I had had CarPlay.
I realize I will not be able to buy a car with no screens due to the backup camera rules. But there is actual safety value in that for me so I’m ok with it.
For example, I wouldn't buy a new car without android auto, because cars with it are readily available and hardly cost anything extra.
But if I had say $6k to spend on a used car instead of $20k+ on a new car? Your options are much more limited and the tradeoffs unpalatable. I know I can still put a phone holder in any vehicle and I'm off to the races.
I sold cars up til a few years ago. Countless cars got sold where Bluetooth itself barely works, and people are basically fine with it.
People buying used cars will take Bluetooth as a nice perk, but to think they make major decisions based on carplay in a 2015 Chevy Volt is funny.
That was my position until we bought our last car. We got it second hand, so we did not really have a definite set of required features and CarPlay was just nice to have. After having used it over the last 4 years, it completely changed though, and I can guarantee I won’t consider a car without it for my next one. It helps that around here all non-garbage car have had it for quite a few years now.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
That statistic is complete bullshit.
Anyway it's pretty much moot because besides Tesla, all new cars support both Carplay and AA.
https://9to5mac.com/2023/12/05/carplay-popularity-iphone-tes...
A non statistically relevant random poll of Apple fanboys
...is there a handy list of which models these are? I'm in the market for a used car, and I'm perfectly happy to pay less for something without CarPlay.
Once you're in used territory, all bets are off and you'd have to poke around.
As the article itself says, CarPlay Original Flavor is a massive success, I'm in the "79% of drivers only consider a car if it has CarPlay" (bye-bye GM!)
1: “original” CarPlay. Shows up on your head unit
2: enhanced “original” CarPlay. Some cars can show the map or turn by turn instructions behind the steering wheel on a screen there
3: “new” CarPlay. This is where CarPlay fully takes over every screen. Nothing has been released, I think only one very expensive model has even said they’re going it.
Today e dry one has #1 or #2. The article is about a mix of #3 and maybe a version of #3 run on the car not the phone, like Android Automotive.
The lack of distinct names for things on both the Apple side and Google side (auto vs automotive) just makes this all very hard to discuss at times.
Dual screen CarPlay was released in 2019 https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/20/20875604/apple-carplay-io...
To be fair, at this point only the Ultium EV-based models won't have CarPlay, and they are struggling to build them anyway. Even if they do figure out the production issues and achieve the targets of their wildest dreams, they will still only account for around 6% of all the vehicles GM produces. They're not exactly betting the farm on it.
Does the author have no experience with Android Auto? The same happens there, if the app is on my phone and it supports Android Auto then it will automatically be available in the car, along with all media on my phone. This isn't a CarPlay only functionalitiy, it's just how phone mirroring works on both platforms. Author seems to think there is an extra step involved on Android. Perhaps by "Play Store" they mean the car manufacturer's own app store?
Source: I use Android Auto constantly in my own vehicle and in the 15+ rental cars I have every year.
Auto is driven from your phone whereas Automotive is running on your car directly.
I know this isn't the highest value comment in the world, but god Google's product naming/differentiation is terrible. I can't imagine a more guaranteed-to-confuse (or worse, more guaranteed to lead to misleading second-party marketing) nomenclature.
They lost a capitalization which makes it a bit ambiguous but their scenario is this:
There are two app stores being discussed: iOS (for CarPlay), and Android Automotive (the infotainment system's play store).
If you have Android Automotive on an infotainment system and an iPhone and can't connect your iPhone to the infotainment system, you have to download the app twice: iOS App Store and Android Automotive Play Store.
I don't know the numbers, but Android Automotive infotainment systems don't universally support CarPlay. Some only got it via updates over the last couple years (that's also a selling point of them, though, that they could do it via software updates and not a whole hardware refresh).
If it doesn’t, that’s a choice the automaker made. Either to disable it or to not write that part of the software.
I know Android Automotive already has all the code to support it. So for an android automotive car to not support CarPlay is 100% a decision.
The author seems to blame everyone but Apple for this, though. Apparently it's Google's fault that his preferred podcast app isn't available on Android. What about the app developer, who has decided not to support Android? And it's the auto manufacturer's fault for deciding to go with Android Automotive as the infotainment OS. What about Apple, for refusing to license any of their OS offerings to third parties? (Let alone not having an automotive-suitable version of any of their OSes anyway.)
Instead, Apple wants auto manufacturers to implement a complex, proprietary Apple protocol to give iPhones the ability to control most aspects of the car's infotainment functions. Why would auto manufacturers want to do this? Not only would the auto manufacturer have to develop their own infotainment system (perhaps even using Android Automotive, but perhaps something else), but then they have to do all this extra work to essentially allow drivers to not use their own system. (And while I agree that most auto manufacturer software is weak or outright garbage, that point of fact isn't really relevant here.)
I don't agree with the author that some car makers are not excited about CarPlay 2 primarily because they want to own the automotive experience. It's because of all the extra work they need to do to support CarPlay 2 (probably an order of magnitude what it takes to support CarPlay 1 or Android Auto), and doing so isn't really in their interests, outside of Apple users who might refuse to consider their cars without CarPlay 2 support. But this is a chicken-and-egg problem: CP2 doesn't exist yet in any car, so customers don't know what they're potentially missing.
I am still amazed that some people see it as a brain-free non-decision to buy into a status symbol.
I have an iPhone. It has things that I like and things that I hate. I have a brain that can process nuance, and it’s entirely possible to say nice things about some features and rant against others.
I bought my current phone knowing what I can do and cannot do with it. It is an informed decision and a compromise by necessity. I bought it expecting it to integrate with my car via CarPlay, and I would definitely complain if it either stopped working or if car manufacturers dropped it.
(I don’t care about CarPlay 2 at all)
I would be interested in CarPlay 2 if I were buying a new car when it’s out. Infotainment is still a huge weakness in many cars, and is definitely a plus to many users. Carmakers are free to ignore it of course, but unless they are maybe Tesla, they have no good reputation to rely on in selling their own custom infotainment experiences.
Yes and no. Android Automotive supports android apps, but GM's implementation (for example) still locks out android phones from using Android Auto. Yes, you can install the same apps, but the nice thing about hooking up your phone is that you're maintaining all of your apps, data, and state in one place instead of two and it's inherently different for as many different drivers as there are phones.
Yes, as far as I know, any automaker can choose to make the screen in the dash compatible with Carplay, at least the non fancy Carplay that will be able to show all the apps on the phone.
Zero reason, in my opinion, to not offer a Carplay compatible screen, other than to inconvenience car users. Not the CarPlay 2 thing, but just original Carplay.
There is an existing vibrant ecosystem of Tier 1 partners who can do the CarPlay (or AA) integration, lessening the burden on the Auto OEMs for such specialised integration work (Luxoft, etc).
CP2 is an eventual pathway (pure conjecture here) for Apple to offer other upgrades in the future, like an L2+ ADAS package, via a subscription model, with a potential profit split between Apple and the OEM.
Somewhat like what MobilEye currently offers and their current business model. Apple gets valuable realtime traffic info from such an L2+ offering, which can feed into making Apple Maps better with up to the minute traffic updates. And the OEM gets to leverage a valuable "sticky" offering that is bound to attract the Apple crowed (usually well heeled folks with deeper pockets). And they both get to monetize CP2 via a paid subscription model.
> Apple’s long-term goal is likely to find ways to directly monetize CarPlay. It could license CarPlay to carmakers at some point. But with the entire global car market amounting to only around 70 million cars per year and the car industry’s slim profit margins (ranging from 5% to 15%), it must reach a high market share to get significant revenue from it. However, carmakers may be hesitant to invest in what they see as a competing product.
I don’t think Apple sees this as a promising revenue stream. It’s just another way to encourage people to stay within the walled garden. That seems many times more valuable than any possible licensing fees they would get from manufacturers
Isn't the value of CarPlay/AndroidAuto indirect? As in that the value is coming from the data being generated to enable better mapping? Because the truth is that some of these mapping services' main utilities depend on a large network of users (e.g. information about congestion, road notices, etc[0]). In that way it seems beneficial to get your app onto as many vehicles as possible and even gives motivation for making CarPlay cross-platform (even if the main benefits only go to Apple users).
[0] Also, wtf AndroidAuto. You pull data from Waze users for things like speed traps, road hazzards, etc, but you don't let me contribute when using Auto? Why is there no button (or voice command) "report road hazard"? Hell, this'll even help you classify events for your ML models.
I agree this is the optimal way of seeing it. Apple did not do the same with App Store though. The initial vision was to just apply enough fees for hosting and vetting the apps. Now with the way they hold on to the 15/17/30% fee, they are treating it like a revenue stream instead of a "courtesy service".
In that respect a UI made by Apple will certainly appeal to an audience already demanding current CarPlay. On the other hand, it could be that the current level of CarPlay integration is already enough.
Because the solutions the auto makers came up with _sucked_ and as it’s not core to the operation of the car, I’d prefer it be done by someone that even approximately knows what they’re doing with software?
I am not buying the car for their infotainment features, I’m buying it for the car. I’d like it the entertainment bits were just delegated to the setup I already have…
I don't need my whole car UI to be taken over by my phone. My car maker solution to display and control speed, HVAC, gas tank/battery status is perfectly fine.
Bluetooth but for cars.
Such a missed opportunity.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Yes, Siri is terrible, but the EUs new DMA law requires that I be able to select a different voice assistant on iOS too, and that should theoretically, once implemented, also apply to CarPlay.
In my opinion, and while I haven't used "Android Auto" I have used "Android Automotive" (the OS version, without a phone driving the integration), CarPlay the infotainment integration (besides Siri) offers a better user experience.
Super annoying when you want to set an alarm in a timezone you are going to be traveling to.
I really hope Siri gets that LLM-based upgrade in iOS18 but I can cope with it for now.
Car manufacturers have had decades to develop their software but almost all are difficult to work with, slow, give bad user feedback (full screen pop-up with entire paragraphs while navigating) and are cumbersome to get accustomed to when switching cars.
I’m one of the 79% that demands CarPlay, if it’s not part of the car I don’t want it.