Readit News> A lot of the concerns around branding focus on the instrument cluster as it's one of the most recognizable parts of an interior. If you look at the CarPlay concept for Porsche and remove the steering wheel, there is no way you can tell it's a Porsche. I'm sure many brands took notice of this... With many traditional differentiators being democratized, design is a good way to stand out.
This is a really good case study in how difficult it is to find a balance between co-branding and maintaining a consistently high-quality design system across co-branding partners. There's a massive amount of work across UI/UX design and implementation done at Apple that assumes that widgets are not only using a serif font, but a specific serif font with specific kerning; that color-primary-60 and color-primary-50 and color-for-text-on-top-of-primary-60 are distinguished in a very specific way.
(Light/dark mode and localization efforts force a degree of flexibility here, but there are still a finite set of QA targets if you focus on primary language markets.)
But what happens if multiple partners want their own primary color and font? This suddenly has far-reaching, costly ramifications across multiple organizations. Even having planned your APIs from day one around color and style customizability doesn't guarantee that this can be done successfully. Taken to an extreme, frontend engineers (not just their embedded designers) are practically required to hold the context of all future potential customization needs in mind when implementing a component - a nigh impossible ask.
Which is to say that there are few companies that could pull off what the OP posits that car manufacturers are requesting, having a world-class interface that is customized to their brand. That's a tall order even for Apple's depth of talent.
That is a great point and you are absolutely right! It really shows how tricky the UI part of this is and how quickly you run into scaling issues
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?
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
What would make the map more fun to explore, and what other data would you like to see?