For pure interaction, CarPlay as a generic solution is very hard to beat infotainment systems that are deeply integrated with the vehicle itself. Its advantages are mainly these:
- Consistency. You get into a new car, all you need to figure out is how to open CarPlay, no need to learning a completely different and often complicated infotainment system.
- "It's on your phone". You can decide what playlist to play or where to navigate before you even get into the car.
- Stays up to date over the long term. Just look at cars from five years ago. Most built-in infotainment systems are still stuck in that era, no matter how smart they once looked. CarPlay uses your phone as the main computing platform, and the car's infotainment system only needs to act as a thin client for I/O, it keeps updating with iOS.
The big thing for me is that the lifetime of a car is a lot longer than the technology development lifecycle.
I just bought a 10 year old Toyota estate (station wagon). It's got a reasonable screen and Bluetooth implementation etc. But I'm never going to want to use the built in navigation because it's just not as good as what my phone will do. And the audio integration isn't as sophisticated as it might be - I have to choose the app on my phone.
Whereas CarPlay/AndroidAuto is generic from the car point of view, and as phone features and software improve your car capability evolves too.
I added a new head unit to my 13 year old Santa Fe, it is like a new car now, wireless Android Auto. Connects quick, bigger nicer screen. Should allow me to keep the car for another 10 years assuming I don't blow up another engine, only the first one is free.
They want everyone to, but they also know that the cost of cars, it's not realistic for that to happen. The only way even people on the upper middle class can afford to be buying or leasing cars every three years is because at the end of those three years the car still has a lot of value left to sell on to someone who is more middle class. And that middle class person will likely sell it again to someone who is a little bit lower down and at about 10 to 12 years it finally reaches someone who is poor.
The only way someone could buy a car more often is if they became a lot cheaper. That would mean doing away with a lot of the luxury parts of the car that are where the profit is.
They’re working on it. I follow a mechanic on YouTube who has shared dozens of examples of manufacturers seemingly intentionally shipping deeply flawed components for seemingly no reason other than to push the average lifespan of a vehicle back downwards from the high levels we’d reached by about 2012. Cars are being junked with less than 100k miles because the original parts fail, replacement parts are hard to get, and now manufacturers are making it so you need an expensive piece of software which they completely control to program a new part to the car, without which, it’s a brick. So essentially they can drop support for a car from that software, and make it near-impossible to replace those parts even if someone reverse-engineers aftermarket parts.
I’m sure they would, but they also know their new car prices would be unsustainable if you couldn’t sell your old car… and that means everyone in the second hand car market is running stale infotainment stacks
Source? They’re cheaper, but I’ve seen zero proof they are less long-lasting than our cars. If anything, those who have tried them say they’re better cars, including the Ford CEO, who imported one and can’t say enough good things about it.
Another advantage of the "it's on your phone" aspect is that it follows you when you switch cars. If I use my friend's car, I still have MY system. If I rent a car for a trip, I still have MY system.
Another advantage of the "it's on your phone" aspect is Consistency. You get into a new car, all you need to figure out is how to open CarPlay, no need to learning a completely different and often complicated infotainment system.
My daughter's very ordinary 10+ year old Kia Soul has a very nice navigation and media UI. It's not the base model but it's a joy to use because it's incredibly responsive and very well integrated with the car's physical buttons. The SiriusXM radio even has a built-in DAR!
The Tesla UI is pretty good. It's the only built-in car software I consider good enough to use for navigation. In any other car I use my phone.
But Tesla also understands that good software engineers need to be paid Silicon Valley wages. The other car companies hire B- and C-level software engineers and then wonder why their customers prefer to navigate with their phones.
Pretty much every major manufacturer has a bay area satellite office these days. Toyota has a research center in San Ramon and a woven office near the broadcom campus in Palo Alto. GM has an office in SOMA and in mountain view. Ford has an office literally a block away from Tesla HQ. Mercedes used to be near Cariad at moffet field, but now they're down by SJC. Nissan is in Santa Clara.
Need I continue? And Tesla is generally understood to pay on the lower end among those companies.
Leaving aside any quibbles about the quality of Tesla's offering, look up the story of CARIAD [0]. The scale and cultural inertia of OEMs is hard to overstate. That change can't happen quickly.
Toyota had the better idea, keep the software folks an independent business unit with internal competency/ownership, and only allow them to fix future platforms. Woven is apparently having great success inside Toyota. The side effect is that those changes still aren't apparent even years later.
The Rivian R2 makes Tesla’s look old and Android like. It’s very slick. The only thing I miss vs CarPlay is the voice Apple Maps uses, which is more natural.
I think more often, traditional car companies don’t have in-house talent to work on their infotainment… that’s contracted out to the lowest bidder, to predictable result.
I'm still astounded my Ford's infotainment system takes 5-10 seconds after opening the radio "app" to present me with the station selection UI. Most of that seems to be some sort of startup delay. The mind boggles.
I'm frankly amazed at the speed at which the Ford and Chevy native UIs will take over from CarPlay for functions like reverse camera, lane camera etc. You'd expect some delay/lag but it's pretty responsive which obviously is essential for safety.
It’s federal regulations. If the reverse camera screen doesn’t appear quickly enough, the car gets recalled and fixed. This has happened to many manufacturers.
Ford, Toyota, Lexus, etc. This notice from Tesla actually specifies the regulation:
> On affected vehicles, upon vehicle power up, a certain software configuration may prevent camera streams from being sent to the MCU for up to 11 seconds, causing a loss of rearview image for up to 11 seconds for drivers who shift into reverse during this time, which does not comply with FMVSS 111, S5.5.3.
AFAICT, they always run in the background anyway. CarPlay is mostly just a pass through canvas rendered on the phone. The system can decide at anytime to overlay something on the CarPlay canvas.
Also speed and connectivity. My car needs a screen and some low power chips. It’s ten years old and the maps and everything are snappy (low quality touch screen aside, but that’s not too bad) because it’s all running on my nice fast device I already own that’s much newer than the car.
Agreed, my car is a tool for going places, consistency is a big attraction and I’ve zero interest in some new UI with every vehicle or vehicle software update.
Sure I would like the vehicle to have some style but trying to navigate with maps or something I want it to work / look consistently.
Honest question, what are the advantages of an integrated system? These three things are kind of the whole game for me, but I also don't have a very sophisticated taste when it comes to cars.
You missed the biggest one: continuity. Start listening to music at home, take it to the car. Start a podcast in the car, finish it in the gym.
CarPlay is user-centric, which is why users like it. All these attempts to force people into a device-centric experience make no sense. I spent an hour or two a day, at most, in my car. My phone is within Bluetooth distance every waking moment. Why in the world would I want my car to be a disjointed experience?
To continue your point, one use case where I’m always glad I have CarPlay is when I searched for the hours of some business on my phone via Maps, then seeing they’re still open, get in my car, and the same business’s address is pre-loaded on the CarPlay maps screen ready for me to tap “go”. Ditto any Calendar event that’s coming up where I have the location field already filled in. Just tap Go.
My car’s integrated nav is… fine. But having to re-enter addresses drops the convenience considerably.
You picked a bad example. You get any music/podcast/any-other-audio continuity with just Bluetooth. Likewise, you even get controls for music and audio metadata displayed.
What you don't (usually) get from car's regular infotainment:
- Maps that don't suck
- Maps that get updated often
- Navigation that is aware of more than just what HD Radio tells about highways
- Helpful notification when you get into the car that starts navigating to whatever is next on your calendar
- A choice between what navigation software to use
- Ability to switch between audio sources (i.e. go from audiobook to spotify)
IMO Android Auto and CarPlay generally implemented pretty poorly in pretty much anything, but Mazda.
I think this is in the same vein as continuity and user centric and what you were describing but it’s a different part - more than one person drives my car. I want my things and my wife wants hers. Having accounts or something extra on a new shared device is annoying.
My Audi has user profiles and they can’t even get that idea right - for example, a key cant be assigned to a user permanently, it just defaults to the most recent user. So if she hands you her keys to borrow her car because you forgot yours, then her key is now your key until she switches it back. This would be minor except it takes like 30 seconds to “load” settings whenever you switch users… it is like they are being read from a freaking floppy disk or something.
Agreed, if you’re a single-app user then something like Spotify works just as well, as long as they do a great job of maintaining to-the-second sync across devices. Audible does a good of that as well.
That just puts you in the space of needing all apps to be available on all devices.
Does the car support different Spotify accounts on each driver profile? If not then you can say goodbye to personal playlists and favorites and podcast progress…
That way also makes it mandatory that you pay for the redundant car data plan that most people wouldn’t need but which they so badly want you to buy for another $30-40 a month.
I appreciate my 2011 vehicle that only has a car radio with FM tuner and CDs, and yes, I know that I could easily swap it but I didn't on purpose, let me explain why:
- all the controls that I need, that are basically volume, radio station or CD track, are easily accessible trough physical buttons and knobs, that I can use without taking my eyes off the street
- I get in the car, insert the key and the radio turns on instantly and start playing music, no things that have to boot, no things that have to connect, etc. I usually listen to the radio and I stay up to date with news, listen to programs, listen to music without the need to create a playlist, or not and always listen to the same songs, or worse paying a subscription to just listen to music
- if I want to listen something different I can just put in a CD, and considering it supports mp3 CDs a CD can contain up to 100 songs without a noticeable loss in quality
- the UI of the radio in general is well designed, no useless functions, everything is easy to reach, no distractions. The radio is well integrated into the car dashboard, the design has something to say, not like a boring 10' tablet
- no distractions, notifications from my phone stay on my phone, calls don't pop up, simply when I arrive at destination I recall saying I was driving, or respond to the message
- finally, the sound quality is good, much better than most of integrated infotainment in modern cars that have 2000 useless functions, a shitty touchscreen, and a very poor sound quality. If I turn the volume all way up it shakes the car, the quality of analog FM radio is much better than modern digital radio that have the quality of a low bitrate MP3, and we are talking about the stock radio of a VW Golf 6, a normal car (when I bought it in 2011), not something fancy.
> And, I personally find the quality of YouTube Music Premium (256kbps AAC) superior to FM radio.
When it comes to playing music from phones in cars, connection type seems to matter more than the source, and iOS has some weird built-in sound normalization only for CarPlay that drives me crazy.
In my Audi A3 (2018), if I connect my iPhone 12 Mini via AUX or Bluetooth, sounds works perfectly fine. Same when playing via CD or USB stick inserted into the car, no problem. FM radio also works well, regardless of volume.
However, if I play music via CarPlay (Spotify [lossless], YouTube, on phone .flac files, etc) some built-in sound normalization seems to kick in and suddenly it ruins the music when playing even slightly louder.
I've tried for years to figure out what the hell is going on, tried every setting under the sun, but cannot get it to work so only thing left is some built-in sound ruinification ("normalization") that Apple does, only when played via CarPlay, not when playing via AUX or Bluetooth.
Seems to happen with every car I try it with, but I never tried a different phone. So right now I'm choosing between being able to have GPS or listen to music properly, as I cannot do both at the same time...
Hmmm. What other cars have you tried? I wonder if it’s the DSP path used for CarPlay. Or could it be the Audi system is clipping this source? I’d find it really surprising if Apple is doing something here.
Maybe it’s trying to split the output into more than two audio channels when in CarPlay mode? If it were only Apple Music doing this I’d be sure this was triggering its Atmos output, not sure how it’d be affecting other players, but maybe.
Tried every conceivable player, Spotify, YouTube Music, YouTube, Apple Music (local files), Soundcloud and more, all of them leading to the same thing, via USB+CarPlay the sound get normalized somehow but if using AUX/Bluetooth, works normally.
> Maybe it’s trying to split the output into more than two audio channels when in CarPlay mode?
I hope so, most of what I play is stereo, and works fine via AUX/Bluetooth.
On the other hand, you are limited by having CD's which compared to streaming stuff from Spotify is much much less convenient, take up space and you need to create/buy them, your playlist don't synch up with your other devices. CD experience is much less streamlined than a smartphone. Perhaps nostalgia makes them seem cooler for you, but I am not sold.
Whats even less convenient is opening up Spotify on a road trip to listen to some Sum 41, and finding out most of their catalog has been removed.
I agree that CDs have too much friction though. Theres no easy pathway from “I like this album” to listening in the car/stereo. Especially for someone who is constantly discovering music and keeping up with new releases from artists.
First of all, not all releases are even available on CD. Even if they were, I would be spending thousands of dollars per month for the amount of music I listen to. Not to mention the lead time from ordering CDs which could take a couple weeks or more to arrive. And then I can’t even listen in my new car anyway cause there’s no CD drive.
I like hi-res lossless audio files. I can load them up on a USB and plug it into the car. I don’t have to mess around with Bluetooth at all. It’s easier to get the music too. And it sounds better. And it can’t be taken away. And is cross platform. And its free!
Btw I like supporting artists, especially the less popular ones. If I like your stuff, Ill buy some merch. But thats after I have the music.
Not GP. But a decade ago, my brother’s car didn’t have bluetooth. We burned down a few mixes on CD and that was ok for long trek during town. He replaced that unit but we still used those CD from time to time. It was simpler than deciding which phone to connect.
Even today, while I use spotify on my work computer, it’s basically the same albums every day (around a dozen). Playing CDs would be probably better than switching to the UX disaster that is Spotify
> Even today, while I use spotify on my work computer, it’s basically the same albums every day (around a dozen). Playing CDs would be probably better than switching to the UX disaster that is Spotify
Why don't you switch to CDs then? Something is telling me this isn't quite the full story.
I'm sure lots of people who don't really need to use Spotify use Spotify all the time, if you really do listen to just a few albums, why not buy those off Bandcamp/Beatport/Whatever then listen to those and stop paying Spotify? I'd easily switch away from Spotify if I no longer saw/agreed with the convenience, but hard to beat it for discovery right now.
The full story is that CDs have a physicality to them that can be somewhat inconvenient.
But the concept holds. I have a directory in a copyparty share that I stream music from constantly. It's probably 20 albums worth of music, and it's just in a mix that I put on almost every day, whether I'm driving or I'm working.
I tend to tune into livestreams on YouTube for the discovery aspect.
You can still buy dedicated music players with many gigabytes of storage. Leave that in the car plugged into the stereo. They are comparatively dirt cheap from what was available before streaming took over.
I’m in a similar situation, my car does have Bluetooth, but I mostly use cd’s and radio, the one thing I wish I had was a map in a convenient spot, I have to have my phone set up in some awkward holder to view it, I’m dependent on using the maps app on my phone
> the radio turns on instantly and start playing music, no things that have to boot
Currently my bane with the smart TV I have. Takes so long to boot and to wake from sleep that I’d press the power button, go to make my coffee and then get back to it. Otherwise I’d be halfway through my breakfast when all I wanted to do is watch a few videos on Youtube.
Seconding this. Who knew that the time an old CRT took to warm up would seem like an instant compared to the boot time of a 75” flatscreen introduced 35 years later? :[
Your comment got downvoted for being flippant but I agree. It's an interesting discussion but it really comes off as grandstanding. Doesn't address the main thrust of the article nor the comment to which it replies.
Consistency would be nice. YT music on Android Auto moved the buttons around again recently. You can still see where the thumbs up button used to be from my fingerprints. It's not smaller and on the other side.
“Stays up to date over the long term” is in the “cons” list in my book - I’d prefer to have as few changes and rely on muscle memory as much as possible; and I find updates risky in this context.
I don’t mind a built in infotainment system stuck in a previous era, as long as it works.
Just wanting to point out that yours is a valid preference, but as Casey points out: Go right ahead and don’t use CarPlay. No one has ever been forced to use it on any car because it’s optional. If you want to plug an iPhone in for music or charging, you can tap “No” to CarPlay once and never be asked again.
- My phone's screen is nowhere near big enough for me to "glance" at it while driving (to see if my turn is coming up, etc)
- I'm not carrying around a tablet with me - my phone fits in my pocket
- Mounting is _not_ a solved problem. It just... isn't. This is a whole topic on it's own, but mounting a phone in a good position, where it will stay without moving/falling/bugging (especially in 100+ degree heat) and not be in the way of _other_ car things is a pain
- I already have physical buttons (that interact with car play, where needed) for all those things in my car
- Interacting with the screen of my phone while driving is 100% not something I'm proficient with; nor would I want to be. It's not designed for interacting with it while not paying attention to it. CarPlay is
Fully agree on screen size. In my car the dash screen over twice the physical size of my iPhone 16 Pro Max and is much easier to read maps from at a glance.
CarPlay enables a car-friendly interface with big buttons, shortcuts to navigation/music/communication, and minimal distractions. I don’t know of any way to get that on the phone’s own display.
Can't speak for Carplay, but Android Auto does try to distract me with attempts of engagement like "Is the construction site still there?" and other shit. The car's (an Audi) system does not, but it fails on many other levels. Both make me angry, albeit for different reasons.
> Android Auto does try to distract me with attempts of engagement like "Is the construction site still there?" and other shit.
That's not Android Auto, it's Waze doing that (and it would do it on Apple too). And it's not "an attempt at engagement", it's a cost for keeping the real-time map and traffic data that Waze is chosen for up-to-date. Use Google Maps if you don't like the interruptions.
Tbf, Google Maps also has these prompts. One probably sees them less due to Google having achieved critical mass, but in quiet rural areas I see them quite often
Interesting, I hadn't noticed... Though related to the critical mass, keep in mind that Waze has been acquired by Google many years ago now (13, specifically).
I do that on the bike but the car screen integration is nice for navigation. Usually your phone goes in a worse position than the gauge cluster. Even on the bike, the couple cm farther down are the difference between looking down and it being in peripheral vision. The passenger can also fuck around with the music without changing connected phone or giving them the phone itself. And playing around with the phone directly is illegal while the tablet is fine (for me very minor, never been caught).
I think that last one is a negative. I remember where the controls are in any given car, and would rather all of the controls in that care stay in the same place, even if that car is a decade old. Learning a different radio interface in each car isn't a big deal, because there's many more much more dramatic differences from car to car, so I have to learn that car anyway.
No. No you can't. The specific example of preparing a playlist sure, but Carplay goes way beyond that. You can preload the navigation route, tweak it a bit, then when you sit down and plug your phone into the car its on the navigation screen. You can make phone calls using the microphones in the car. In a sufficiently integrated car you can have turn by turn directions pop up on the dashboard or a heads up display rather than having to look down into the center console while trying to work out which lane you should be in.
Surprised no one's mentioned it so far, but CarPlay / Android Auto aren't just features, they're consistency. Across makes, models, years. I know what I'm getting when I connect my phone - and if anyone uses my car with their own device, they get their own dashboard, as well. One interesting use case I saw was a couple where one used a left-to-right interface and the other a right-to-left UI. CarPlay makes this easy, because the interface is linked to your own personal device.
This is huge for me - I'm in rental cars every other week or so 'cause I fly a lot for work and getting to factories in the boonies isn't really doable on public transport. I used to spend 20 minutes in the europcar car park every single time and then have to log out of everything when I dropped the car off. Now I just hook up Android Auto and I'm back into the same podcast I had on the flight, my itinerary is planned in already and I can head straight to my hotel. Still have the old problem with smart TV's though. Can't usually be fucked to login for two nights so I just watch TV on my laptop.
> Can't usually be fucked to login for two nights so I just watch TV on my laptop
I recently had the idea of taking the FireStick 4K Max that I bought ~1year ago for the living room smart OLED TV which is getting a little older, I had gotten ready to take it on a few trips I'm doing this year, thought I was being clever, unfortunately it died a literal week after the warranty, boot looping constantly.
I won't buy another Firestick again, it was atrociously add-riddled and often showing things inappropriate for the kids in the middle of the day, but if generic Android TV stick like that was available with good performance and all the necessary DRM levels, I'd probably use that.
For now, I will just carry an HDMI cable and use my laptop.
My wife swears by using a FireStick. It was miserable due to hotel captive wifi portals often failing to work properly with the browser of the FS, and even when it does work, typing your name/room number is miserable on a TV.. Adding a travel router to the mix allows you to auth via phone/laptop, which makes things a whole lot nicer.
Unlike the sibling, I've never encountered a hotel with all ports blocked. But I have encountered hotels where there is no way to choose other ports. In that case, I've just unplugged their STB and plugged my FS in.
I haven't tried this on iPhone yet, but on android you can share Wi-Fi connection. Many times I've connected phone to hotel Wi-Fi and then chromecast to my phone.
Sadly, we're both on iPhone and you cannot share Wi-Fi like that on iPhone :(
This was a bummer just the other day where my iPhone somehow (and I still don't know how) auto-signed into an amazingly fast wifi AP managed by my cell provider, but I was stuck working on crappy guest wifi on my laptop and could not get the laptop onto the better wifi.
> Surprised no one's mentioned it so far, but CarPlay / Android Auto aren't just features, they're consistency.
No, they are not. When you press "Home" button on your car where does it go? In some cars it goes to CarPlay main screen, in others it goes to car's built-in system main screen. When you press back what happens? When you press Nav/Maps button where does it go? Again, some cars will launch built-in navigation while others will go in whatever last nav app you used in car play. Mazda disables touch screen when car play is enabled (which is good and I like it)
> One interesting use case I saw was a couple where one used a left-to-right interface and the other a right-to-left UI.
That depends on if car was originally made for left-hand or right-hand traffic, some cars allow you to change that (in my BMW it required messing with obd port)
Exactly! I can't stop wondering: are these executives just not thinking, or are they blindly repeating what they were told to? If I get into a rental car, do they seriously think I want to spend the next 30 minutes logging into Spotify, mapping apps, Overcast and anything else that I want to use but that needs to know me? And then worry about logging out of all that stuff once I return the rental?
The power here is on the rental car companies. They buy the most cars by far. And so when they say that customers won't accept a rental car without a CarPlay, the car makers will listen.
Car makers make money selling cars. Which buyers happily pay five figure suns for. An executive can add to the bottom line by raising sales prices/volumes with a more competitive product, or lowering component costs.
This isn’t some weird social media business with non-paying users and a reliance on ad money.
The wheel in an Enyaq before the facelift is the same haptic one-button shitshow. They have some buttons that act like shortcuts below the infotainment. But it the screen is still essentialistisk for managing crucial functions.
My 2025 Audi A3 is pretty good with buttons and knobs. The only time I need to touch the screen (other than for CarPlay) is to tell it, "no, you still cannot steal my data" every time I turn the car on.
That's in fact one of the pros of carplay/android auto as opposed to just putting your phone in one of those windscreen attached holders; you get to use the volume buttons on the steering wheel. Annoyingly my car doesn't have play/pause buttons on there, but if it had, they would work.
Lots of modern cars cater for this. It’s actually a marketing point with manufacturers like the VW group publicising how they’re bringing back tactile interfaces. And some ranges of cars never took that away (for example Jaguar).
They did away with a lot of physical buttons in the past. Now they are in the process of bringing them back. There are some models still sold with the old design while all new models have physical again.
Also some of their brands had physical buttons all along. I think Skoda never removed them in the Elroq or Enyak.
Even physical controls can be a downgrade if poorly implemented.
R.I.P. Anton Yelchin, who brought us joy with his portrayal of Chekov in the Star Trek films, before losing his life at only 27, from a switch poorly masquerading as a brake lever.
At this point, I feel like automakers should be criminally liable for redesigning the automatic shifter UX. It's probably the 3rd/4th most dangerous control in the vehicle; why do we want people to have to relearn it every time they're in an unfamiliar car?
(I stick with a manual for my vehicles, so fortunately I'm mostly immunized against the madness.)
In my Hyundai pressing the mute button while on Bluetooth/Android Auto pauses playback and mutes. Pressing again resumes playback and volume to previous level.
Well, either I'm very dumb and didn't think to press play on the car I own to solve the problem I've had for years, or you're missing the fact that there is no play button on BYD cars.
I use CarPlay all the time and I almost never use the touchscreen - as you shouldn't while driving. The car has buttons and knobs, on the dash and on the wheel, to call up all sorts of options in the UI. The only time I need to touch the screen is if I want a full screen map (instead of the three-panel usual view).
I'm unconvinced. Navigating the UI via knobs seems much more distracting to me. I have to reach farther in my vehicle, but more importantly, I have to watch the screen anyway to make sure the knob ends up on the right control.
It really depends on what you are doing, but yes - if you need to look at the screen to do anything, you still fail safety. A knob is nicer than a touchscreen because you don't have to adjust to a moving vehicle to hit the right spot of the screen (for this same reason recent airplanes have buttons in addition to touchscreens).
Still, if you are very used to the UI, you can say the music app is one item down from the map, and the phone is two, so you can count presses. I was able to SMS people with a Nokia phone with a hand on the steering wheel and one on the phone (back when it was not forbidden).
Same with Toyota (fun fact—I discovered earlier this year, over three years that I bought my Prius, that there were whole displays in the dashboard I didn’t know existed while trying to adjust the volume from the steering wheel while I was backing out of my garage, but because the wheel was rotated 180°, I hit the wrong button. Turns out the navigation between different info displays is 2-dimensional and the ↑/↓ gives additional views into some of the information that I had no idea existed, as well as revealing some functionality I didn’t know was there for the HVAC).
All the effort put in to stopping drivers distracting themselves with phones while driving, then we get big distracting touchscreens with apps front+centre in many new cars, and apparently that's OK.
I think it's just typical that this is allowed because it maximises profits; let's be real, a big fat touch screen and nothing else, is significantly cheaper than all of those expensive buttons, knobs, dials and switches that have been engineered and tested to perfection.
Did cars get cheaper when they took all of those out? I certainly didn't notice.
Some still have knobs. My mom's caddy has knobs in front of the armrest that control everything, so the touchscreen is optional but works just as well for those that want it.
It will also depreciate by 50% or more in 5 years, so there’s that. Honda and Toyota mostly use knobs and buttons for important controls and retain their value much better than Stellantis trash.
Apple engineering manager Emily Schubert said 98% of new cars in the U.S. come
with CarPlay installed. She delivered a shocking stat: 79% of U.S. buyers would
only buy a car if it supported CarPlay.
“It’s a must-have feature when shopping for a new vehicle,” Schubert said
during a presentation of the new features.
Not only does it irritate me not having it in a practical sense, it’s also an arrogance on behalf of the manufacturer. “We can do it better than iOS/Android”, or “We have a better reason to do it”. No, and No.
I’ve had ~15 cars over the past 25 years, different make and models, some really cheap, some fairly expensive. One thing they all have in common: their terrible infotainment UI.
I’m sure they are trying and it has gotten slightly better lately - but it’s still not great imho. If they really want to do it better than Apple etc., they seriously need to up their game - and I really wish they would, but I don’t see that happening, the cost is too high.
I don't think they can. The infotainment is outsourced to who knows where and those people develop based on specs sent by the manufacturer: as cheap as possible and as fast as possible. Unless you actually spend time understanding what people want, how they want it, if they like it or not, you cannot have a superior product.
I have a newish car (2023 make) with an Android based infotainment system: the built-in maps move so slow, no online updates (I have to use a stick to update them once a year) and so on. Basically they put it there I think out of habit, not that the majority of their customer demand in-car navigation as a must to buy it.
Even if they can do better, will it be better than Carplay in 10 years? Or 20? Will I get free GPS map updates for that long?
Some brands don't even do OTA updates, so you'd have to get your car in for a service if there's a new feature or bug fix in an update you care about. I'd never want to do that for a map fix when I could just use Carplay where Google Maps (or whatever else) has already fixed it.
And even if they do OTA updates, they won't be updating those maps in 10 years, much less 20.
It pains me when I see people using the built-in TV apps. I've bought and/or gifted older Apple TVs and the like (Fire/Chrome stick/box) to show there is a better way. The lag and general slowness of those interfaces drive me nuts.
Winner goes through to the semifinal against an in flight seatback entertainment system, but will go down in the final to a WiFi router configuration web interface with default password ‘admin’.
I worked at a car company. It's not arrogance, it's greed. They do want their own proprietary infotainment to be good, but it's more that they don't want to abdicate control, both out of a possessive feeling over what you're looking at, and over the potential for selling you access to their own stuff on that screen.
Ironically, it’s the same greed that has made Apple rich: the carmaker wants to own a platform where the only way onto that screen is by cutting them in on the profits. Of course, on a “much less accessible to small businesses” scale. I assume Spotify or Audible have to pay large annual lump sums just to be there on the GM platform, rather than “just” the 30% shakedown Apple charges. So it excludes any developer who isn’t part of a Fortune 500 company.
Every time I have to cycle through the SirusXM hardcoded ad in the AM->FM->Bluetooth->SirusXM cycle of my car stereo's mode picker, I get angry at Toyota.
Even if they could "do it better" it is still locked into a single device/vehicle and can't match the eco-system that Apple and Google have developed across a family of devices and services. In order to really compete, they would need to enter markets already dominated by big tech companies.
They can do it better than your phone but only if you are a professional driver in your car for at least four hours a day. The typical person spending half an hour going to work or going to get groceries has everything on their phone and the hassle of setting up their card just how they want it isn't worth it. The typical person also is more likely to be thinking the address I need to go is in my calendar system and that's going to be more hassle getting into the car then the open in maps function from the phone.
They already collect and track you, even with car play. I strongly recommend this CCC talk, where they hacked a Volkswagen database that contained unfiltered, high-accuracy, timestamped locations of a large majority of electric cars from VW group.
Based on that they were, for example, able to identify cars owned by members of Germany's security apparatus: where they work, where they live, where they drop off their children each morning. Who visited brothels.
Just curious, are car manufacturers required to obtain explicit consent from owners for collecting such data according to GDPR? Or German car lobby's pocket politicians were able to carve out some exception for them?
Irrelevant - it’s still a great type of kompromat when you want to gain leverage on someone. They probably don’t want their wives to know, for instance. Same if they’re a prominent backer of religious moral values.
They all think they can do better, and it is sheer arrogance, because even the best of them is utter garbage compared to software that is actually built with fast iteration, UX research, and real user testing. No car manufacturers do a good job of this, and they all bake their atrocious UX into a $50k piece of hardware you keep for decades and which *never* gets a significant software update. The fact that they don’t see how impossible it is for them to win at this game is why they will never win. Sorry Rivian. Your vehicle is great but you’re handicapping yourself with software hubris.
I hear so many complaints here on HN about "car UX". I am not a Tesla fanboy, but lots of people who review Teslas say they have great "car UX". Can you share some specifics about what you don't like?
I used to be a person who thought I would never buy a car without Carplay, and Tesla won me over.
I don’t pay for any Tesla subscription services, but I do not miss Carplay. Would it be nice to have? Sure. But there was/is no equivalent car at that price with Carplay.
From a non-(voluntary-)user perspective, that kind of arrogance and frankly abuse is what got Apple diehard fans, so it wouldn't surprise me if Rivian is also aiming for that.
I mean they can’t have no option and rely completely on CarPlay and if they do that they can’t half ass their own system. There’s no excuse for not supporting CarPlay though.
Since then GM has dropped CarPlay. Rivian has appeared following Tesla and refusing to support it. And I thought there were some other existing manufacturer who was either getting rid of it or thinking about it.
Basically despite the popularity the market seems to be moving against it slowly. And the more those cars succeed the more other auto makers will be willing to follow.
It's not that the market is moving away, but more like car companies realized if they want to sell monthly subscriptions in the future, they need to own the software.
The car companies need to stay in their lanes on this one. You’re risking selling a >$40k piece of hardware that requires professional service every six months in order to sell me $240/yr in software subscriptions.
I turned down buying a Rivian for exactly this reason, but it seems plenty of consumers don’t care.
Curious if anyone has been able to calculate the sales and profits surrendered by the likes of GM and Rivian due to this switch. (My guess is it’s low.)
This is part of a broader trend I see in all consumer markets: especially in markets with just a few large important players: the companies start making very unpopular moves in the hopes that their competitors will realize the massive profit potential and follow them out of greed rather than try to steal customers by being the good guys.
Examples: self-ordering kiosks at restaurants, every change made at every airline in the last 15 years, bandwidth caps at ISPs, “resort fees” at every hotel, tipping for car services, etc.
They know that since there aren’t many options, it doesn’t matter if customers all hate it, as long as they have no choice. The automakers (at least in their fantasies) smell blood in the water for the idea of CarPlay/Android Auto, and want to kill it if they can.
Aviation is an incredibly low-margin business - airlines are less trying to earn "massive profits" and more just trying to continue to operate year over year
This is crazy to me because the primary value proposition of Rivian's Connect+, as I see it, is enabling the hotspot while you're in the car and being able to monitor Gear Guard while you're away from the car. These are entirely separate from supporting CarPlay/Android Auto.
If Rivian et al. truly want to sell a premium product, their software needs to be premium. And frankly it's just not there. The other day I was trying to listen to an upcoming album that has a few singles released. On my phone I can do that no problem. On the Rivian Spotify app, the album just didn't show up. It wasn't possible to play those songs in order without searching for the songs one by one. There are a ton of things that I love about my R1T, but as more time passes, the gap between what they offer and what other manufacturers offer becomes more and more apparent
I'm in this camp: I will not buy a car without CarPlay. And I put so few miles on my car that while I'd like a new one, if the vendors make this impossible then no one gets my money.
Same here. I have a Chevy that supports wireless CarPlay and I refuse to buy a car that doesn't have it. We're looking at replacing it soon, and we're going to go with a Subaru in no small part because it supports CarPlay.
Are there vehicles that support it in a way that isn't buggy? I have a few friends with it and I don't think I've been on a single ride with them without a glitch. Freezing interface, spontaneously jumping to regular Bluetooth, music playing but no actual volume, plugging into usb power causing some kind of mode-shift that makes the screen hang or briefly cease to work, all kinds of nonsense. Also kind of weirdly bad interface I feel (very subjective opinion there, obviously that's not a "fact").
I've only had Android Auto in my own vehicles, and while it hasn't been as buggy, it feels slow. I never use it anymore.
I own a Ford and a BMW, both with CarPlay. The BMW is flawless. The Ford just refuses to connect about 10% of the time and requires the infotainment system to be rebooted. It also occasionally connects but leaves audio coming out of the phone speaker. So yes, implementations vary.
I have a Ford that after 13 years is reaching the point where I'm considering replacing it.
Their homemade infotainment system prior to CarPlay was awful, and has an overflow error which hits me about once every 6 months which requires pulling the fuse to hard reset it. As far as I can tell they keep adding new songs to a stack, and never flush it so at some point you'll reach the end of a song and it won't play any more. Once you reached that you can only use the phone function, attempts to use music result in you getting your Bluetooth connection terminated.
Regarding Android Auto being slow, it could just be due to your phone. It has to stream the whole interface as video to the car's infotainment system over USB (or Wi-Fi on newer models), then handle taps and stuff that it receives back, if you're using an old or budget android phone then that can be pretty laggy.
I have the Nothing Phone 3a now, before that, I had all flagship pixels. 0 were not slow. I always figured it had to do with the infotainment centers implementation of the protocols or simply their hardware.
It was always stable for me, just sluggish.
If I had to pick I'd take sluggish over constantly buggy of course. So props there.
The infotainment setup on my Tesla though is golden with only the occasional quirk. After using that, Carplay and Android Auto feel very regressive. A guy I work with has an R2 so I got to tinker with it and I figured it would be comparable but it actually kinda sucked.
It's funny you mention Toyota, my Dad's 2022 Civic Hybrid is the one I get to witness being buggy garbage pretty much non-stop with CarPlay. Lord don't plug it into the USB port that does data if you're already on wireless Carplay. You might be done until you pull over. I also love the way using speech to reply to a text often resumes the wrong song (seemingly just starts a random song midway through, and multiple times the Joe Rogan Podcast which dad doesn't listen to and is not subscribed to - when this happens it always starts at the same point in the intro).
I don't actually know if the Toyota infotainment setup is to blame though. Since I've never encountered a reasonably stable, glitch free Carplay experience in the last 5 years, I've always just figured "that must be how CarPlay is". I have never owned an iPhone so I only get the cliffnotes version of the experience. But since it's got a 0% track record in that limited viewing, I'm either unlucky, emit magical anti-apple em waves, or am possessed by the soul of Steve Jobs favourite black shirt.
I don't know if the sensitivity to Siri can be turned down, again not an iPhone guy myself, but it bugs me how often we will be talking and suddenly the audio stops and Siri says "I don't know how to help you with that" or something similar. Sometimes we just don't talk so that we don't constantly have Siri interrupting Hardcore History.
> ”Rivian … following Tesla and refusing to support it.”
Actually, Tesla is apparently planning to add CarPlay support via a software update.
It hasn’t happened yet, as apparently it’s been waiting on a new feature from Apple which will allow navigation data to be shared/synced between CarPlay and the car’s self-driving system.
Same here. CarPlay is in the top 10 features for my next Car. Even for my older 911 which I bought second hand, the first investment was a Pioneer head unit with CarPlay.
In my opinion, anything older than a 996 shouldn’t have an infotainment screen. Looks very out of place. Just use a phone mount for navigation or use audio navigation through a period correct radio.
I agree. I find it tacky when people buy old BMWs and Mercedeses just to throw the original (often mint condition) radio unit out and put in a cheap carplay display.
Like you have this 30 year old car with a pristine wooden trim where all components align nicely in design and you decide to ruin it for the convenience of having notifications in your face while driving? A phone holder looks much less invasive.
It's a 997. it had the original OEM double din stereo with the Nav. Porsche offered the PCCM CarPlay upgrade, but decided the Pioneer unit was much better.
Tesla and I think Rivian goes deep into the computer as a control surface. They save $10 not having a handle for the glovebox or whatever.
GM just wants to extract a pound of flesh. All are companies making dumb decisions by ignoring what customers want.
It will cost them customers. My company buys like 10k cars a year and we make CarPlay a requirement. We see it as a safety and productivity issue. We want employees using maps to navigate and avoid hazards, but don’t want them operating our vehicles unsafely.
Personally, it would be a long shot for me to buy any GM product due to high depreciation. The CarPlay/Android Auto thing disqualifies them.
I have a vehicle that's basically a BMW, which has excellent navigation integration with a HUD. Recently, they announced that my vehicle would receive map and software updates, for basically as long as the included modem was functional.
My vehicle doesn't support the carplay to hud stuff, but that's okay. The thing is... when my car stops getting map and traffic updates, I will still be able to switch to carplay for at least the command screen presenting information. I intend on keeping this vehicle for a long time, so that's important to me.
On top of that, carplay offers better bitrate than bluetooth.
For people that wish to keep a vehicle for a long time, carplay/android auto isn't just a convenience anymore. With the increased integration of headunits, aftermarket becomes a tougher sell.
Excluding whatever's going on in China right now, there's just not that many small brands left. You only have to have a passing interest in cars to be aware of pretty much every global car brand - excluding high end supercars, kit car weirdness and whatever mayhem is happening in China.
A household might have three or four mobile phones, but only one or two cars. Many cars also can and do support both Android Auto and Carplay. If my wife and I used Android and my teenage son used Apple, I'd definitely want our car to support both.
I would love to buy a Rivian R2 but I will absolutely not drop that kind of money until they support CarPlay. To me - a refusal to support CarPlay is an extremely user-hostile decision.
Sounds like the Apple monopoly has made yet another industry its bitch.
These companies are giving up sovereignty of their primary product to a company that can steer away customer loyalty and disrupt any hope these companies have of increasing their already scant margins.
Any car should be able to interface with a phone without Apple or Google's legally binding terms and NDAs. The direction of control should be on the side of the customer first, and the automotive company second.
Where the hell are the regulators? This is not okay.
That doesn’t make any sense… The comment you’re replying to is about people’s desire for a particular feature, but pretty much any car that supports CarPlay also supports the Android equivalent, as well as still having media playback and often some kind of navigation without either!
Your comment would only make sense in a hypothetical situation where the car infotainment only worked if you had an iPhone or if there was some kind of exclusivity agreements to preclude it working with Android, but that isn’t the case in any circumstance I’m aware of.
It makes perfect sense. Android Auto is not libre. You need an attested Google device to use Android Auto and an attested Apple device to use CarPlay, so both options are anti-user at their core, forcing you into being non-anonymous and tracked in a myriad of ways that you can only bypass if you run a custom ROM.
Seems like, if anything, the right action for regulators would be to enforce car manufacturers to not refuse to support existing consumer connectivity protocols... or at least not unless they can come up with something at least as good. And definitely something that isn't "pay us a data subscription so we can track you too while you use a crappier re-implementation of what your phone can already do."
Or "we're gonna cut off our older models to force people towards new cars instead of older ones." That's a bad pattern to let people selling $30,000+ devices get access to.
What regulators and the industry should have done was to devise a touch-over-HDMI protocol, so that CarPlay can be deprecated and its successor sectioned off as they like. That was IMO the root cause of this problem.
This wouldn't be a solution to the argument in the article: Rivian and Tesla don't want to support phones projecting to infotainment
As it is, CarPlay is implemented as a h264 video stream which receives touch, microphone, and metadata from the vehicle, the protocol is fine albeit proprietary
As a owner of a GM without android auto, never again. Everything is on my phone but I can't safely access it while driving. Also can't legally because my state makes using the phone while driving illegal (for good reason. I suspect most states don't allow it)
I feel the same way about Android auto. I refuse to be locked into some terrible, never updated or expensive subscription vendor nav unit. I have a phone. I want to be able to use it.
Not just that, but car makers have proven they can’t be trusted with our data. My phone has all my appointments and addresses in it. I’d much rather use the nav on the phone where the data already is, then sync it with my car so they can do god knows what with it.
The customers want to be able to control the infotainment system, by functionally replacing it with something completely different, since the defaults are garbage across the industry. Both Apple and Google have outdone every single carmaker in what is supposedly their own game (or at least their own arena). Can't blame them for that.
These are the companies that undersigned the Orwellian "protect the kids" act.
These trillion dollar companies are the problem. They're moving into other healthy industries and crushing them. They're sucking the oxygen out of every market.
Stop cheerleading this. They need vibrant competition. We need a de-ossifying forest fire. We need lots of nimble smaller companies.
Instead the giants place a ceiling on the growth of every other industry, then when they need more growth, they start to creep in and dump on healthy markets unrelated to their original enterprise.
Look at Amazon giving away Lord of the Rings, running a $200M ad campaign for free on its Rivian trucks, printed boxes, website, app, etc., buying up MGM... How do actual companies in these spaces compete with the dumping?
How do businesses keep Apple and Google from strong-arming them? Rivian doesn't want to be Apple's bitch. You guys are cheerleading it and telling Rivian to bend over.
Google and Apple are the companies that want to track you and turn the internet into a land of device attestation and mandatory ID sign in. They're both actively building "age assurance" into their platforms, and it won't be long before they start gating internet use via these tendrils.
Google and Apple are not good companies.
You're all building this Orwellian hellscape. STOP.
You know the reason why companies like GM don't like CarPlay is because they think they should be the ones who get to track you, sell you various subscriptions, and sell the resulting data to third parties. Right?
You'll note that it wasn't Apple who sold out their own customers, it was GM. [1] False-equivalence arguments are both pointless and, in this case, unnecessary. There is a lesser and greater evil here, and the lesser one in this case happens to be Apple.
The 1977 Oldsmobile Toronado is generally considered to be the first car to have microprocessor control.
But Ford's EEC was built around Toshiba's TLCS-12, the world's first 12-bit microprocessor, developed specifically for engine control, and might have been in cars produced prior to 77, but documentation is spotty.
So do you only drive cars built prior to the late 70s? Because sacrificing the enormous safety improvements just for a bizarre feeling of moral superiority is a really awful hill to die on. And literal death is a real possibility
Or do you not drive and never planned to buy any kind of car and thus your claim is meaningless?
You can get up to 1983 without computers if that's what you're looking for. 1984, they all had computers. Then if it had a carburetor, there was still a computer somehow controlling that carburetor.
TPMS (tire pressure monitoring system) is a coin battery powered computer inside each tyre of your car. They’ve been around for a couple of decades now. Even the lowest end cars have TPMS in each wheel. If you change wheels you need to go to a wheel shop and have them re pair (as in re pair wifi) the wheel with your car. I had to do this recently with my 2014 ford focus.
Anyway those are just four of hundreds of computers in your car these days.
Not exactly a great example as it's unnecessary and expensive to replace. Lots of other microprocessors actually make your car easier and safer to drive.
TPMS has been mandatory in the U.S. since 2007. It turns out riding on under-inflated tires is dangerous, and people don’t regularly check their tire pressure.
My car will not exceed a certain speed if TPMS is malfunctioning.
Did I just read an argument that it’s easier or safer to manually check your tire pressures rather than having the car do it automatically every time the car drives fast enough to “wake up” the TPMS units?
That battery lasts longer than the tire. People sometimes try to say but I don't drive my car much and that doesn't change the math because tires are destroyed not just from the way of driving but also the sun and ozone in the air destroy tires it still needs to be replaced every seven years., it still needs to be replaced every seven years.
That's a software issue rather than an inherent limitation. I've driven cars with abs-sensor based TPMS that will tell you which tire is under or over-inflated
I don't think this is a useful stance to take for more or less any reason (any reason you can point to will have a different underlying issue). Cars functionally have to have microprocessors, if nothing else but to control emissions, and that's a good thing. I don't want society to smell of exhaust, so that's an obvious and gigantic benefit. There are many other good reasons to have them, like rear cameras, tire pressure sensors, infotainment, the lot.
There are downsides, but many boil down to 'manufacturers are knobheads' (data collection, pushing subscriptions) and lessened control (tuning computers can be easier than tuning mechanics, you just aren't given control, so this to is arguably a case of 'manufacturers are knobheads', or sometimes liability issues).
I am clearly in the minority here but I have driven cars with and without CarPlay and honestly do not care whether a car has it. I use my phone for navigation and mount it such that when I look at it I am not taking my eyes off the road. I find this to be far better than having to look down at the center of my dashboard but CarPlay navigation UI via Google Maps or Waze also works fine so it’s not a huge difference.
Realistically the only navigation UI have seen that was better was a 2012 or 2013 BMW 5 series which had a HUD that projected my location, speed, heading and turn by turn navigation (with lane info!) onto the windshield. That system rocked because of how the projected UI had your eyes focus farther out so you had a very easy time perceiving the road ahead while getting the next direction info.
I assume my next car will have it and I might even upgrade the radio in my current car to have it but it is to me entirely optional.
> having to look down at the center of my dashboard
that's why more recent models move the screen higher up. it sometimes looks a bit silly (like they glued an ipad on top of the dashboard), but it's a lot more usable
> HUD that projected my location, speed, heading and turn by turn navigation (with lane info!) onto the windshield
the latest carplay implementations are compatible with the inbuilt navigation aids, so turn signals from waze/maps/whatever will feed into the HUD
My Kia Soul has a version of this, but it doesn't integrate with Carplay, and the maps that came with the car are already outdated enough to bother me.
It's a non-fix if I have to do that every year (or every however-often-I-notice-an-error, the first error I noticed was within a year). Google Maps is constantly updated. Not to mention that Kia aren't going to be supplying updates in 10 years, while Google probably are (and if they aren't, I can still use Carplay and a different set of maps).
Carplay's a better fix for the map issue, since then I don't have to update them whenever I find an error. With Carplay, errors instead don't happen.
The directions being shown in the gauge cluster via carplay is still not a thing on later Kias from what I can tell, so that problem is unfixed no matter what.
> that's why more recent models move the screen higher up.
That's far from optimal, that would be where I have my phone, at eye level just to the left of my head, right in front of the pillar. It's perfect in every way, especially since I'm longsighted.
Slate has the right idea, car makers should get out of the user software/interface business and prioritize choice. The instrument cluster is fine, as are basic controls, but they just tend to screw things up and add complexity.
> I am clearly in the minority here but I have driven cars with and without CarPlay and honestly do not care whether a car has it.
I'm in the same boat, though with Android Auto or whatever. I'm honestly surprised how many people seem to need CarPlay; a comment or two down there's a stat claiming 79% of buyers wouldn't buy a car without it. Is it that different from the Android implementation? Is there something special about it?
I don't get it. It's a nice to have for sure, but honestly not that special, and gets annoying at times (when Android Auto connects on my phone, it tends to stop me from using the maps app on the phone, plus a few other minor grievances). And it's not much easier than just plugging in an aux cord.
In some states you no longer can interact with a phone at all unless mounted. Phone mounts kind of suck or you’ll be in a rental without your nice mount. A 15” screen is easier to read than a small phone bouncing on a mount.
If I’m spending $10K on something, I want the Android/iOS experience to be first-class instead of some shitty UI designed be people who I presume don’t drive cars.
Cars are otherwise fungible between brands. If one has CarPlay/Android Auto there is little reason to pick a brand that lacks support.
I recently upgraded to a car with CarPlay, and it's actually a worse user experience than just having my phone on a really solid Brodit phone holder.
For example - when using Google Maps on my phone I can pan around the map to look at nearby places really quickly - maybe while I'm stopped at traffic lights, and then reset back to the navigation. Spotify in CarPlay is really hard to use - much harder than the normal app. Whether it plays the song you want seems to be a game of chance.
I use Android and having Android Auto is absolutely a must have for me.
AUX cord? It's been a few years since I've seen a phone with a headphone jack, or a car with an AUX input. I also don't miss the time where my phone had to be connected on one side to USB for charging, on the other side to the sounds system, and my navigation was done using a a 6" screen that kept falling between the chairs. Android Auto/CarPlay let's you connect one thing (or not at all), have your phone charged, your navigation clear, and your music playing smoothly and controlled with the physical car knobs.
> Is it that different from the Android implementation? Is there something special about it?
It just works and it is, like others before me said, consistent. I can connect my iPhone to any car I drive that has CatPlay and the dashboard looks like I like it. And Spotify starts right from where it left off in the other car.
CarPlay is better than android auto in that it works with my iPhone; as to why it is currently in _my_ requirements, it’s simple: I rent cars when I travel, I’m too lazy to memorise so many maps, and I don’t have a good mount I can bring with me.
That being said I think there are a few things that make my carplay experience _worse_ than my friends’ android auto experience: for example today I am annoyed by google maps spam me with notifications trying to get me to use googles maps instead of waze which is so fucking stupid since it’s also google and it just makes me more annoyed with google instead of being the sort of thing that would convince me to switch to android. But I have to admit the google maps and waze integration on android is better.
When I plan to use a rental car I usually pack a phone holder that fits on air vents. You never know if you’ll be able to connect your phone to the car so that’s a small backup.
Be sure to let them know at the rental corner if you are dissatisfied because it doesn't work with your phone. Run car companies buy a lot of cars and in turn actually have input to how a car is made and they also have reason to care about your satisfaction. rental cars is one of the best places to get things to change because the rental car companies can get a change that you alone otherwise couldn't get made.
It's no big issue for me one way or another to have a car with the technology from factory, and I do like having the wireless connectivity - music from the phone etc is really nice - but visual maps and visual UI add no value to me personally.
The setup I have for my project car is ideal for me - a small bluetooth receiving amplifier that feeds the speakers directly. It's all hidden behind the dash, has no visible UI, but I get in the car and the phone takes over, it's in a cradle and becomes the head unit.
I never need to see a map on screen (Maybe because I grew up doing orienteering, or can just listen to the verbal directions, I'm not sure) so that doesn't bother me. And siri can handle hands-off interaction with the device when needed.
I did upgrade the head unit in my family/daily car to support carplay etc, but the primary motivator there was finding a unit that could support a reversing camera. It certainly made the interior feel more modern, but again I don't think it adds much value to me personally.
Having my phone mounted is fine but it’s been hard for me to find a good mount that works with random rental car I get. Any suggestions?
I don’t hate carplay but some things annoy me like I can’t Shazam what I’m listening to in the car because CarPlay pauses the cars audio. I would be willing to try to make it optional until CarPlay works better.
>that works with random rental car I get. Any suggestions?
Clip based ones, worst case you can mount them on the aircon vents. They are not great in general but they are cheap and you can fit them pretty much anywhere
I used to refuse to buy cars without carplay. For many of the reasons I expect others do.
I have a rivian, and my wife has a car with carplay. I've had rivians for years now. I don't miss carplay when i drive my Rivian.
In truth, I used carplay for 3 main things - navigation that didn't suck, listening to music on the apps i wanted to, and reading text messages out loud.
Rivian has made those things not suck. So i don't miss carplay.
On my wife's car, those things suck, badly, without carplay.
I'm sure there are people out there who heavily depend on carplay for other things, and thus, it really does matter if they have carplay or not.
and maybe a day will come when the features carplay could provide me are as shitty on the Rivian as they are on my wife's car, and i'll start demanding it again.
But at least right now, that's not true, and so I think Rivian's choice is fine.
My Polestar didn't have Android Auto when I bought it.
Navigation was still Google Maps, and text integration was there.
But no Pandora for music. And that's the problem, in my opinion. Even Android Automotive is way behind Android Auto in app support. That reduces the owner's choices for which software they want to use for their use cases.
I’m in a similar spot. I miss CarPlay much less than I expected because the Rivian software is really good.
The big thing I really miss from CarPlay is having text messages announced.
Google Maps on the phone is a bit better too but I got over that quickly (TTS, features like showing road hazards, and general rendering)
I own a Tesla not a Rivian, but I agree with you here. As a software engineer, I find CarPlay to be a tack-on solution. For that, it works well, but only because the base infotainment systems on almost every OEM are utter trash.
Something that I don't believe is discussed enough, especially here, is how bad 90% of software is in general. Software from non-software companies, almost without exception, is just junk. It has stuff tacked garbage from a partner deals, confusing organization that seemed like a product or marketing guy that never used the software. I could go on.
The exceptions, of course, are Rivian and Tesla, who actually make first-class software. On them, I don't miss it, And actually, I would be slightly annoyed if they had it, simply because it breaks up the consistency with infotainment.
Luckily the pendulum is about to swing back the other way for most brands, as they have to reintroduce physical controls to comply with the updated EU safety regulations
I've been hearing that for years, and I'm still waiting. Incidentally, my 2020 Ford Escape has buttons, which was a strong selector. I hear it's because it was designed for the European market (as the Ford Kuga)
> CarPlay is a fantastic system because it keeps you off your phone.
Tinfoil hat time: CarPlay was created as a 4D regulatory chess move, because it enables users to continue interacting with their phones in a legislative environment where said action is otherwise illegal.
It would be hard to argue that it’s illegal to use the phone in a way that’s nearly identical to the way you interact with your vehicle controls.
I admire the restraint the CarPlay designers have in adding features. E.g. in music apps, you can't click-through to an artist page from a song page. Annoying on the surface, but it actually naturally restricts your mucking about in menus. I bet any money that that one choice has saved lives.
Your thesis is right but in this example this is instead one of the “Alan Dye” hidden UI instances where the functionality is intentionally hidden (I presume in the name of aesthetic minimalism rather than safety, because this is what Apple design does outside CarPlay too). At least in Apple Music, I think you tap on the artist name in the now playing screen, and I think you get a menu to go to album or artist from there. If I’m wrong, somebody correct me and I’ll delete, I’m away from my car today and can’t verify.
You can verify from my comment history that I love talking shit about Mr Dye as much as the next guy, but no. Car Play limitations are certainly not an Alan Dye decision. Everything in CarPlay is stripped down cause it's not safe to be navigating menus and doing deep interactions while driving.
The passenger can use the phone if you want to be able to scroll through an artist's catalog, rearrange playlists, etc. CarPlay's UI is a quick way to access your current library.
So this goes back to the loss of the DIN in vehicles. Vehicle manufacturers shot themselves in the tire decades ago when they stopped caring about DIN space and started forcing themselves to develop and then abandon the lead position on vehicle infotainment. Carplay isn't very special when you consider any 90s and early 2000s vehicle with a DIN slot or two can have all the exact same functionality as Carplay with unlimited upgrades for around $200 in hardware. The OEMs failed to innovate and outright hubris meant they would not roll-back to what worked well for everyone. Apple deserves to eat their lunch.
My aim is device independence. In the old days, to print I had to hook up my printer to a computer. To print from a computer on the network, I needed a print server. I had to administer that. Now the printer itself hooks to the network, which is far superior.
I have an older thermostat which allows me to program vacations directly on the unit. This is superior to the newer thermostat, with which I must use my phone for this.
My dishwasher requires me to use my phone to do a delayed start. This is inferior to what it replaced, which was a model that allowed me to do delayed start from the panel on the dishwasher.
Devices should work on their own. So it’s a failure if the first thing I need to do in the car is tether it to a phone. The car needs nav, it needs radio, etc. It would be better if it has those things built in.
I understand the complaint in this thread, which is that the carmakers are bad at this. I don’t own a Tesla or Rivian, but some folks are saying their interfaces are good. Those carmakers have the right idea. I begrudgingly accept CarPlay. I don’t like it. In this era when computing is as cheap as it is and where even a TV can hook directly to network to play back content, it makes no sense that the solution on a $40,000 car is to plug it in to a phone.
But it does make sense. You probably looked up where you're going before entering the car on your phone. You probably want to hear the same music or podcasts as on you phone. Do you really want the car to have separate internet connection, and login for every app?
Also you need to connect the phone anyway if you want hands free calling.
I agree that devices should work independently. But I believe the fundamental baseline should be open interoperability. Yes, the dishwasher should allow a delayed start from the machine itself. But it should also have secure yet open interoperability so other authorised systems that care about the dishwasher can interact with it. I think there's ultimately a user experience benefit. I'm familiar with my phone, its UI paradigms etc. If I (or my gran) can use the dishwasher through an interface or voice assistant we're already familiar with then that's a win. Especially if the form factor of the device itself makes it challenging to deliver a great and intuitive interface in-situ.
In this regard CarPlay is evidence of success - a sufficiently interoperable car that allows users to bring their own context and ecosystems.
CarPlay is only evidence of failure if your expectation is that the car should provide a comparable ecosystem to Android or iOS - one that must also somehow follow you in your pocket when you leave the car.
This is a good point, but CarPlay is not open interoperability. Open is DisplayPort. Open is 3.5mm jack. Open is Bluetooth.
The car has two proprietary tie-ins to two dominant mobile operating systems. That’s another reason this feels like failure to me. If the car had some standard way to hook a device to it to use touch screen and output sound, I might like that.
Instead my car (2016 Honda Accord) eliminated the standard 3.5mm jack and added a janky CarPlay implementation that sometimes freezes up entirely, and there’s no way to update it. This is not progress.
You're absolutely right, but I don’t think we'll ever get to a point in which what a car ships is better than what Apple ships. This only gets worse over time when you have a new iPhone and a 10-year-old infotainment system, it's just not possible.
Car automakers are not going to support your infotainment system (for free) even just 5 years down the line.
Even just thinking about the integrations gives me a headache (will my music app work on my car? how do I transfer my trip from Google Maps on my phone to my car?)
So the solution for today and tomorrow is to just stream your entire phone to the car.
I kinda disagree. I want the top of the line map system that goes with me everywhere to follow me into the car. I want to carry my computer around with me and don’t want a different computer in each location.
> that’s not the way we see ourselves interacting with our users
You lost me right there Rivian. Start picturing yourselves worrying more about how your users picture themselves interacting with THEIR car... and stop worrying about controlling interactions between you and your users. Switch your frame of thinking around.
This is the problem with so many modern companies. Instead of focusing on building great products that their customers will enjoy using, they're trying to build relationships with users.
Maybe I'm overthinking things, but to me "user" implies a different more subordinate role where you take what you get, there's no "the customer is always right" when it comes to "users".
Rivian has a monthly premium subscription for their infotainment
If they introduced CarPlay they will essentially be taping their wallet shut themselves from their point of view when they need the money
But their current infotainment has a lot to be desired and a bunch of dumb bugs. CarPlay would allow me as a customer to have a better experience of their vehicles to sidestep their shit navigation
I hear the r2 software will help. But CarPlay would be better experience that includes apps I want to use, like overcast. Rj just wants that subscription money and power instead of what a large percent of their users want.
I’m fully bought into the Apple ecosystem, and I’ve had Teslas for 8 years and we currently also have car that supports CarPlay. The CarPlay interface is overall far inferior, especially with navigation. First of all, searching for destinations is terrible on CarPlay compared to Tesla! Even worse, Apple didn’t even add multi-touch support to CarPlay until iOS 26, and the vast majority of cars (including ours) don’t support it, so you have to hunt for and tap the zoom controls, which is pretty barbaric compared to the fluid pinch and zoom gestures that work on Tesla and our other devices. Also on our CarPlay car, it never seems to know the direction the car is facing until it starts moving, which becomes incredibly frustrating navigating out of a parking lot. The final major downside is having to switch apps out of navigation to control music then switch back, whereas on Tesla (and Rivian) you can choose and control music while keeping navigation on your screen.
I have a boring Mercedes mid-size SUV. Carplay works. I can skip/repeat tracks using the standard control on the steering wheel; the instrument cluster shows the current track the same way it's done with connected phones forever. On the center console screen, we use the Carplay view with 3 splits - one for Spotify, two for navigation (map & next direction). Google Maps and Apple Maps are both reliable where I drive (Miami).
Tesla is a great car below the from the headlights down, I love driving my dad's Y performance to the grocery store when I'm visiting home. But no way I'm going to get a car where I can't point the vent at my armpit without using a touch screen. No way I'm going to get a car where I can't talk to whatever agent I want while stuck in traffic. I much rather have a boring car that doesn't tick me off.
If Tesla (or Rivian) add Carplay, they'll really move up the my list (still want physical vent control tho). Would you stop driving your Tesla if an update added Carplay tomorrow?
Personally I find the feeling of air blowing on me, no matter how pleasant initially, to quickly become grating. In most cars I adjust the air to blow where I am not, and compensate with a notch higher fan speed.
Having the ability for the air stream continually moving is more valuable to me than constantly moving it by hand.
Being able to pre-cool the car before entering it is more valuable to me than sitting in a hot car and pointing the MAX A/C directly on my face.
> The final major downside is having to switch apps out of navigation to control music then switch back,
But... you don't. Tapping on the home button once more or swiping to the right on the app page reveals the home screen which has navigation and music together:
Our CarPlay car has a small screen, so I prefer to keep navigation full screen most of the time. In split mode, it’s way too tiny for me, but I occasionally leave it there if I know my way around anyways. It’s definitely not a well designed experience.
It sounds like the issue is mostly your CarPlay cars small screen compared to Tesla's large one. This didn't seen to be a CarPlay problem beyond maybr Apple trying their best with the screens most of their customers are given.
I have a Polestar 2, 2022 model even so it's not fresh off the lot.
CarPlay navigation shows on the instrument cluster. The speed, state of charge, etc all move to the side so the map is right in the middle for quick viewing. Then the infotainment screen can show music or the tiled music/navigation view that CarPlay supports.
Basic music controls are on the steering wheel of course, readily accessible.
The lack of multitouch is slightly annoying, but it's not something I ever use. If I ever can't see what I need on the navigation I simply look outside for the road signs, which still exist.
I find Tesla’s interface to be inferior as soon as you want to use an app they haven’t built. Like my podcasts app. Or receiving / replying to a WhatsApp message. Even the built-in text message support can’t handle replying to a group text.
Personally I’d stick with Tesla’s nav and use CarPlay for media and messaging, and that’s the optionality and user choice I think this post is trying to get at.
Curiously, being herded onto tesla's software is the number one reason I won't buy one. I don't like the navigation or media software and the rest would feel better as a physical control or just seems useless in a car.
I find the media stuff all works just fine - gotta say I control it all almost exclusively by voice, and it Just Works - but the navigation… sucks donkey ass. I hate that it only treats superchargers as possible charging stops - where I live they are few and far between, yet other high speed chargers are common. The routing is often abysmal. It’ll be like “heavy traffic ahead. Taking you into it.” The traffic camera database is incomplete. The behaviour between the mobile and in car app is wildly inconsistent.
You know, I don’t care so much about having CarPlay as I care about having Waze or ABRP or just any routing app other than Tesla’s.
Can’t you do split screen navigation via the home screen (Dashboard View)? At least on cars I’ve rented I could have navigation on one side and music on the other in CarPlay.
> I’m fully bought into the Apple ecosystem, and I’ve had Teslas for 8 years and we currently also have car that supports CarPlay. The CarPlay interface is overall far inferior, especially with navigation. First of all, searching for destinations is terrible on CarPlay compared to Tesla
Tesla and surprisingly Hyundai are outliers, the vast majority of cars have terrible infotainment systems, and them deciding to suddenly focus on it does not assure me at all.
Most OEM infotainment sucks, and it's taken a while for things to improve. I'd be willing to say your older car has a resistive touchscreen and physically couldn't support multitouch
CarPlay is definitely an improvement if you're comparing it to something like Ford Sync for example
I think this is the difference for me - I’ve decided where I’m going before I get in the car. Either I’ve planned a route (on my phone) or got a destination through a message from a friend on LINE. Either way I already have a plan.. on my phone. So having to somehow get that into the car navigation is always going to be worse than just using my phone
When I first started using CarPlay, the screen that has the music and map showing simultaneously was not obvious and it wasn’t until well into my third long trip with CarPlay that I finally discovered it. I had thought the only display options were app full screen and app list. I think there was a change sometime in the last 3 years that made that the default starting display (or maybe I’m just a little less dumb now).
Quite the contrary, I’ve long thought Tesla should add support for CarPlay to alleviate the concerns of many buyers over it not being supported. I think it would have been starkly worse than Tesla’s interface before they supported multi-touch this past year, but nonetheless they should have supported it by now. Better late than never that they’re finally adding support for it, it’ll especially make Rivian look kinda silly for continuing to be so stubborn about it. I think only a small fraction will actually use CarPlay on their Teslas, but it’s still pretty dumb to let that missing feature hurt their sales.
"The final major downside is having to switch apps out of navigation to control music then switch back". That's no longer true for CarPlay. It now has a mode where you see Maps and Music at the same time.
One of them lets me send iMessages to groups as well as non-phone recipients like my kids. The other is my Tesla.
I’m glad for you, but if Tesla supported CarPlay I could get what I wanted and you would not be affected at all. I’m baffled why people like you even bother to share your opinion. Nobody is suggesting that you be forced to use CarPlay. See also the entire topic of this discussion.
I’m baffled you think sharing a well-sourced opinion on a discussion thread is a bad thing, or that you think I believe Tesla adding support for CarPlay would somehow force me to use it. As I said in other replies, I’ve long thought Tesla should add support for it, but that few people would actually use it much.
You misunderstand. I am baffled why you would share your opinion in this discussion given that the entire premise is that CarPlay is additive, not a replacement. You made an entire point that was contrasting CarPlay with the built-in infotainment as if it were an either/or proposition
Give me CarPlay on my Tesla, I will use it AND the built-in apps too. Then I get more than I would have with either one by itself.
The author of the original piece is asking for a choice.
Your opinion is not an argument for that. It’s also not an argument against that.
So I’m not terribly sure what it adds to the discussion. I’m not surprised there are people who like Tesla’s UI. I’ve seen plenty of them online over the years.
I have rented one though, so I know enough about the software experience to know that there's (currently) only one reason why I might wish for CarPlay over the integrated software experience, and that's Waze. Maybe.
I own two (petrol) cars. One has CarPlay, the other has a rigid phone mount between the steering wheel and centre console. While I appreciate the former for its nice large widescreen map, I still prefer the latter. Waze in CarPlay mode (due to the restrictions on what can be shown on the phone screen) is simply more annoying to operate. So if was in the market for a Tesla, and I had the choice between CarPlay support or a nice phone mount between the centre console and steering wheel, I'd probably choose the latter.
(I would still campaign for Tesla to support CarPlay, because why not.)
I honestly cannot believe how bad CarPlay is — I can't believe how many rave reviews it gets, I think it's absolutely awful compared to Rivian or Tesla software.
All of this nonsense critique is massively outweighed by 1. having a HUD (your tesla will never get one because Elon is an idiot) and 2. having carplay/android auto sync your turn-by-turn directions into that HUD.
I agree with the author: CarPlay is table stakes for me. Whenever an automaker says a car won't support CarPlay, I mentally cross it off my list. Which is fine, because there are plenty of other viable options.
I think what’s become more interesting/impactful for me is why they elect not to support it.
Most firms moving away from it (or who never implemented it) seem determined to either sell additional subscription services to their user base (connectivity) or sell their user base to a third-party (either as data, or eyeballs). And for a product at this price point I find myself very annoyed at the attempted payment extraction.
Either way, I’m with you. Lots of vehicle manufacturers out there that will support it.
We bought a Honda Prologue last year and didn’t even test drive the built-on-the-same-platform GM cars (e.g. the almost-identical Chevy Blazer EV) because they didn’t have CarPlay.
People like us have got to be affecting GM’s sales by some measurable amount, right?
Tesla is more of a technology company than a car company, that's why they managed to make a good UX.
Classic car makers are not able to make decent UIs. Plus, each car would be different. So I prefer Android Auto: it's always my Android Auto, regardless of which car I'm driving.
I owned a Model Y for several years, but, at least in my city, I always felt Tesla’s navigation had pretty poor route selection during busy times of the day - like dorecting me to streets that were notoriously stop and go during rush our when the highway alternative was known to be much quicker.
As an R1S owner I feel like the elephant in the room is that the Rivian developed infotainment software is just not very good. For example, the Spotify app has weird scrolling issues and the interface for offline downloads is clunky and unreliable. The maps/route planning is fine but not really any better than Apple/Google Maps (or ABRP). So I find it hard to give much credit to their argument against CarPlay when they’re not providing a better experience via their native apps.
One of those silly little issues with inbuilt software that drives me insane is the number of times I’ve had to log back into Apple Music or Spotify (or one of the video services to occupy the kiddo while parked for extended duration).
That’s another one that phones have just solved with the integrated password manager. The friction of providing credentials on my other devices has been reduced, but all of a sudden I need to go hunting through that pwd manager, and hunting and pecking on the infotainment keyboard, to enter a 20+ char unique pwd that modern “best practices” has established. It got bad enough for a bit (swver changes resulting in needing to re-log in) that I stopped using all of these apps for 2-3yr on our Model Y because I got tired of having to do it.
Tried clicking the links to the Rivian web page. What a horrible experience.
I have been trying to get some useful info about the cars (e.g. range), and the only option I had was to play a completely useless video which only made me dizzy.
Then, desperate, I tried asking their AI chat what’s the expected range. It told me (great success!) but then it directed me back to the useless page.
I’m with Casey on this: I will not buy a car without CarPlay. Of course, I haven’t bought a car since 2013. That one is a Tesla Model S and I think its UI is pretty decent for maps and playing audio, but I have rented enough cars since then to know that I would much prefer CarPlay support. If I had to replace my car today, I’d probably buy a Volvo EX90, which is the electric version of the XC90 Casey talks about.
Rentals it is more important. Your own car doing the one time setup every few years is no problem but when it is a rental you don't want to take that time.
I rent quite a lot of cars. I’d rather CarPlay was taken from my car and left in all the rental cars than the other way around.
The car manufacturers are awful with their interface design, and being able to get into a new car at 9pm in the dark, and have a familiar interface while navigating some unknown city is invaluable. Consistency is safety and comfort in this situation.
Like the author, CarPlay is table stakes for any vehicle purchase. I literally installed a Sony screen receiver in my 2016 F150, that was given to my by my father after he lost his license due to his age. That was a fun weekend with the dash apart reliving my younger days when I did car audio installations. The truck lasted 1 week before I had the dash apart to get CarPlay back. The native Ford infotainment system was so crap.
They want to hold you captive to subscription plans. If they allow CarPlay, it gives consumers more options for cellular connectivity, music, navigation, and other apps.
Nothing prevents them from removing CarPlay in an update, though? Unless you make sure to never connect the car to the internet. Some garages will update FW for you unasked I hear.
This would not fly in Europe. You would be able to return the car for having lost crucial functionality, at least within 2 years of the sale (in some jurisdictions, 5 years). They could do it after that, but functionally forcing a subscription to get back a worse version of the functionality one already had for free sounds like a bad way to encourage sales of said subscription.
I’m not sure it would be legal for them to remove something they actually advertise as a feature to sell the car.
Also I’m sure they’d be hit with a class-action lawsuit immediately if they tried it. Manufacturers sell a lot of cars which would lead to a lot of pissed off owners.
I've had CarPlay on my last two cars, a 2018 VW Golf and a 2024 Ford Maverick. It's fine. Sometimes you plug your phone into the USB port (unlocked) and it refuses to connect for several minutes very frustrating when you want to start navigation and media playback before leaving the driveway. My favourite headunit experience was my aftermarket single DIN Kenwood (https://www.kenwood.com/ca/car/caraudio/receivers/kdc-bt282u...) in my MK4 Golf it was an easy swap. You could plug in any iPod or iPhone and it would play and control the audio directly from the headunit and show title information on the display. Plus, it would take any USB storage device and play music. It was such a simple and efficient experience.
Maybe it’s cause I’ve never actually used it, but I really only care about a stable / well supported Bluetooth connection.
I have a holder for my phone for when I use GPS and basically never interact with it directly after it’s set. Only real interactions are media controls via the steering wheel.
The only use cases I can see car play helping with are those who take a lot of calls/texts in their car while driving and those who listen to music and want to listen to specific songs.
For me it’s about the waste. Engineers have taken the time to build a screen into the car with a good viewing angle, that works well with glare, doesn’t obstruct the drivers view.
Then the software side just makes the whole thing useless with a terrible UX that will never be updated.
CarPlay is a great solution because the non safety critical stuff (music, navigation) gets offloaded to a competent software company.
So, I fully recognize this is dumb, but humans (like me!) are dumb and lazy.
The ability to just get in your car and have the phone-powered interface right there without having to take your phone out of your pocket and mount it in the holder is something I didn’t ‘niceness’ of before experiencing it.
I was super bought into carplay and android auto until I actually owned a car that had it. Oh great, it requires USB. Well my phone is 4 years old and the port is toast, so that doesn't work for me. Okay, wireless then. Car doesn't support that. Lovely. Bluetooth implementation is half-assed and the pairing process is Byzantine. Terrific stuff.
That car ended up sucking in other ways too. I quickly sold it and went back to buying old Lexuses. Wireless charging phone holder, and off you go. The siren call of infotainment is powerful, but actually living with it is just more fiddly bullshit I don't need in my life.
I drive a 2025 Kia Ceed and the all the infotainment does is get in my way. Id pay to have it removed.
Carplay & Siri helps me stay focused on driving in a safe way.
I considered buying a new 2-DIN CarpPlay stereo for my 2003 Suzuki Grand Vitara but went with a simple 12V LENCENT Bluetooth V5.4 FM Transmitter instead that plugs into the cigarette lighter socket.
The reason was that the original stereo has a custom shape that fits the dashboard, it's rounded and the fascia is apparently easy to crack when removing.
I attach my phone with a CD-mount that goes into the CD-player (I hate those vent-mounts) and then I just connect the radio to whatever frequency the FM transmitter is set to.
It works surprisingly well, I was skeptical at first reading some negative reviews but I'm super satisfied.
The signal never cracks but YMMV, I have it set to 87.5 in rural Sweden and it sounds perfectly clear in the domain of 128 kbit MP3.
I'm a sound guy but I think with the poor sound isolation of the car and the OK speakers it sounds perfectly adequate and even a bit nostalgic— it's how I remember car trips in the 90s and early 2000s.
It costs €30-40 and I also get a USB-C PD and a second USB-QC 3.0 on the device.
When I bought a Rivian I missed CarPlay. There were a few things that really stood out.
1. Proper Voice Texting
2. Google maps for routing with (good) traffic data.
The Voice Texting just a release or two ago - its okay so far but not as good as CarPlay. Google traffic landed a while back (in Rivian's map which I prefer over Google Maps)
I'll take the voice texting for what is otherwise a very elegant and well designed UI - that keeps getting better.
Full disclosure. Even when I have a rental with CarPlay I just use Spotify and google maps. Both of which are integrated into the Rivian UI. So YMMV
CarPlay is also a contract between mobile devs and automakers. It allows for things like displaying "current playing" on the dash, media buttons on the steering wheel that control apps, and turn by turn directions show on dash and HUD. A screen cast may be able to do this but not in a consistent dependable way.
Also no one is mentioning that maybe we should not encourage users to use 1000s of apps in their car? It would be irresponsible to easily allow users to watch youtube while driving. Keeping the set of apps usable through the car is a responsibility in automobiles that are already becoming too distracting as is.
As someone who only had 20+ year old cars and motorcycles, I don't see what's CarPlay supposed to solve? All I need is a Bluetooth-capable radio and a phone holder to display the navigation, so I can listen to my music and focus on driving. Phone doesn't need to be touched unless changing destinations. Do people seriously need to be constantly entertained while driving?
I have a beater subie (2018). It has CarPlay (fairly basic variant). It also has very few touchscreens, which I like.
I could easily afford better, but have little interest in doing so. It’s low miles, paid for, handles well in the snow, and is in decent shape. A car gets me from Point A to Point B, and I want it to do so reliably and safely. I couldn’t care any less, what people think of me. Life’s too short.
I also write iOS apps; ones that make a lot of use of navigation stuff.
I like being able to use my app to determine a destination, plug it into CarPlay, and immediately get a map to where I want. Point A, meet Point B.
I’m sure that some of the systems fancier cars use, may be fine for this kind of thing, but CarPlay does it very smoothly.
I’m with the author. No CarPlay, no sale.
I really don’t think any manufacturer is concerned about what I think, though. There’s a lot of fish in the sea.
That’s the great thing about CarPlay it makes the usually junk infotainment system in cars (especially older ones) irrelevant, so they still seem modern.
For a budget car, I’d be perfectly happy if they had a screen for CarPlay/Android Auto that didn’t do anything else if a phone wasn’t connected. I think this makes a lot of sense as a cost cutting measure. Maybe it would just be used for the mandated backup camera.
I also love it for rental cars. I can get in any rental, and instead of having to learn my way around or figure out a Garmin add-on, CarPlay can make the navigation and music instantly familiar with all the data I need.
I’m not a big fan of the dumbed down interface. Using the Music app on CarPlay is frustrating. I prefer operating the music app on my phone with a phone mount. Same goes for navigation apps. Finding a restaurant with pictures and reviews is so much faster on my phone.
> Same goes for navigation apps. Finding a restaurant with pictures and reviews is so much faster on my phone.
You shouldn't be doing this while driving. If you're doing this while not driving, you still can. Carplay doesn't make your phone inert while connected. You can still use Google Maps on your phone to punch in a location or look around the area, while still connected to Carplay.
> The map and the interface is vastly superior on my phone. Google Maps on iOS is barely usable while connected to CarPlay.
When browsing? I guess. When driving? I have a hard time agreeing with that.
> You shouldn’t operate anything while driving. Do that before you leave.
Exactly, so you not being able to do anything with Google Maps on the Carplay screen doesn't matter, since you don't need to do anything through there to begin with. Set your destination on your phone before you set of (whose functionality isn't reduced by being connected to Carplay), then the screen is naught more than a display after that.
When the wireless CarPlay connects I can’t use Google Maps on my phone screen anymore. It’s one of the reasons I dumped it for other navigation apps. I also disliked the Google Maps spam I got on CarPlay while using other navigation apps. Very intrusive.
When I look up a place on Google
Maps but don’t use it for navigation. I then use another app for navigation. After 15 minutes Google Maps starts showing notifications on CarPlay asking me if I want to use Google Maps to navigate to my destination. I classify that as spam and distracting while driving.
This was about a year ago, I completely stopped using Google Maps since.
I've disabled notifications for Google Maps, so that'd explain why I don't have that problem. It's either open and I'm actively using it, or I'm not and it shouldn't talk to me, so I don't see why it should notify my about anything.
The bigger screen is nice. The integration is also nice. I can push a button on my steering wheel to activate Siri to tell it where to go. Music controls on the wheel also pass through to CarPaly. I have a low res auxiliary screen to display added data (oil temp, weather, etc) and the music option will display music track data from CarPlay as well.
So instead of trying to look at a tiny screen that’s clipped onto an air vent, I can use the screens and integrated controls, keeping my hands on the wheel and my eyes more in the road.
Also, the biggest battery drain is having the screen on. CarPlay allows me to have the screen on the phone off while still accessing all the data. With a wireless adapter, I can also leave the phone in my pocket, so I don’t need to set it up every time I get in the car or remember to grab it when getting out. So it feels more like the native experience of using the car.
With the exception of the screen size I can do all of that with my phone in a mount as well. But you shouldn’t be operating your phone while driving, not even with CarPlay. It’s illegal in many countries.
Your phone in a mount provides integration with your car's steering wheel buttons to allow for control without taking your hands off the wheel? Your mount allows you to leave the screen on your phone off while also using navigation with a screen?
Exactly. You shouldn't be touching screens with your hands while you drive. That's illegal where I live. But my dash mounted phone has Siri and Bluetooth so I can be hands-free for commands and I can use the steering wheel controls for media.
I have a 15 year old Mercedes. I got the old integrated CD player and radio pulled out and Alpine makes a nice dash surround and canbus support module for the steering wheel controls.
It has a 7" display where the old stuff was and wireless Android Auto.
It's pretty much like any new car as far as entertainment and maps. Plus, it's got physical buttons for everything else. I think recent cars may well be coming back to what I have on my old car.
ps. not mentioned, Anrdoid auto and Carplay are H264, later H265, video players with touch control and buttons in a return channel. The phones render the display internally and project it as video to the display. That's all. This is why much older generation displays with at least reasonable SOCs can run them near perfectly. They are not running Anrdoid themselves. In fact some of them are operating system-less SOCs that have nearly no firmware but a video player and the support for the touchscreen and buttons. Much like that crappy video player built into old TVs ten years ago.
I have them on my motorcycles too. It's way better than a phone, in that the user interface is designed to be less interactive and more focusses with larger buttons.
I use to think this until i got a car with carplay. Now I can’t live without it. In fact wireless carplay was a game changer. You have to experience the convenience to know what it’s like.
Personally I found CarPlay to be incredibly underwhelming. Very limited app support beyond navigation and music. In addition I frequently have issues switching which phone it's using thanks to terrible iOS BT and of course the ever annoying issue where someone is using the phone that is projecting, and your music suddenly cuts out to play obnoxious audio.
The only advantage over a traditional car media center/nav is the always updated and personalized map/nav.
Over 90% of new vehicles sold in the U.S. already support Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
So it is kinda expected to be there: if it is not there then a car needs to be something special. So I think buyers don’t even ask for it because they assume it will be there (and absence becomes much more noticeable than its presence).
I prefer my WV Up! infotainment system. It's just a dumb radio/media with a factory phone mount. The actual radio has physical buttons to navigate the config and modes and for everything else you use the phone's touch screen. With 6.8" phone screen it's really good.
A good middle ground would be to have physical buttons to interact with the manufacturer interface and the touch screen to interact exclusively with CarPlay
I hesitate to propose ulterior motives, but given there have been several seemingly obtuse objections to projection from Rivian, perhaps the CEO is concerned that, if Rivian supports projection, it will harm the perception of the value of their software stack? Related, I think they licensed their stack to VW.
I think Rivian is disguising a hidden factor: CarPlay prohibits vehicle manufacturers from collecting metrics and selling anonymized or identified user activity data, and this loss of telematics data / income stream is unacceptable to manufacturers (for example, GM*) who see the smart TV business making billions on that precise data.
The correct route for someone with interview access to Rivian to clarify whether this scenario applies would be to review their legal terms for owners and then point-blank ask in a recorded interview ‘whether Rivian’s vehicles are reporting to Rivian what music their buyers play in Rivian vehicles’. This is a nuanced sentence: whether is yes/no; information is too broad to weasel out of; ‘on what music’ focuses on a private aspect of car ownership and is a callback to the VHS rental rulings; ‘in their vehicles’ is not only restricted to what’s connected to the headunit by usb or Bluetooth or radio, but also covers the headunit-connected microphones in the vehicle as well. If they say yes, the questions become obvious. If they say no, the followup should be to ask if Rivian contractually guarantees that they will not someday issue a software update that begins doing so. Either it does not, or it does. Two questions max to either confirm or refute a suspicion.
GM cited ‘the ability to improve cars’ as why it’s refusing CarPlay, but as the OP article clearly shows, GM could simply continue to improve the cars and the screen surrounding the CarPlay dedicated window, while continuing to improve their own built-in functions using the data from those who do not use it for the benefit of those same users. GM’s justifications last year in this regard are just as obtuse as Rivian’s this year. Given that similarity, I suspect you’re right: Rivian does indeed seem to be trying not to appear desperately in need of cash by reselling user data for subscription revenue profit: ‘buy our three-ton six-figure vehicle so that we can make $1/year off of you to keep our business afloat’ is horrendous optics and would lead to open mockery of their business.
* The GM/FTC 2026 case only prevents GM from selling data associated with vehicle driving. Headunit usage cannot be readily assumed to be ‘driving’ data in the case context of vehicle insurers, and so continued sale of radio usage data to (for imaginary example) Nielsen would be unaffected by the specific, narrow, and temporary 2026 ruling.
> I think Rivian is disguising a hidden factor: CarPlay prohibits vehicle manufacturers from collecting metrics and selling anonymized or identified user activity data, and this loss of telematics data / income stream is unacceptable to manufacturers (for example, GM*) who see the smart TV business making billions on that precise data.
The car's own cellular connection can still report large amounts of telemetry, such as the car's location in real time, how many people are in it, etc. And if modern cars are anything like smart TVs, send "content recognition" screenshots home to infer what drivers use the onboard screen for.
I refuse to drive a car without first unplugging the cell modem; this is more or less easy depending on the make and model, so do your research.
This is all true, but has little to do with CarPlay in specific — except for the content recognition bit, which, yes, that’s exactly why the careful phrasing around the microphone. I endorse the fight against continuous telematics but I’m only addressing Rivian’s obtuse refusals of CarPlay and how to force one likely intention into the open (and thus discussion of whether Apple’s flat refusal to allow telemetry sharing for such purposes is appropriate!), rather than trying to boil the full ‘fuck telemetry’ ocean in a CarPlay post.
Every car I have purchased has satellite radio factory installed. And each time SiriusXM will not shut up about trying to get me to sign up. Over and over. It takes years before they give up.
I don’t want it. So why is it in the car? Because they pay Ford and Honda and everyone else to put it there.
Why did they both have Spotify? And iHeartRadio? Who even uses that? All sorts of other things. There’s a kickback for every one.
But unlike satellite none of them work without a cell connection. And they won’t use your phone. You have to pay the car maker for their overpriced connectivity. That’s what they want you to do.
Money money everywhere. But if I use CarPlay or android auto guess who doesn’t get a cut.
“People will think our software is bad.” It is, that’s why I want CarPlay.
They want my money. After the car payment I don't have money leftover for another subscription. Use my phone subscription, that is what I'm paying for for.
That’s one of the things that’s always seemed odd to me. I’m more likely to use some service on the car that you get a kick back for and can spy on if I can use my cell phone data plan.
If you try to put a gate in front of it of a $25/mo car data plan, forget it.
It’s 4G? Wow. My phone is only 5G. It’s a hotspot? So is my phone. And I’m the only one here anyway. I get updates to your maps? I don’t like your maps.
It’s like they’re trying to sell flavoring to make dirty water taste better, without ever stopping to think most people don’t like dirty water.
TBF for a lot of stuff they could probably just monitor the audio system to fingerprint things the way TVs do these days and sell that data even if you use android auto or CarPlay.
But they certainly get a lot more if you use their maps and entertainment apps.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"
-- Upton Sinclair
This is the CEO of Rivian's software arm -- his job is to create and sell software that runs in the car. Carplay and Android Auto effectively make him unnecessary.
If you listen to the interview, he has bold ideas about how the car should somehow be the center of one's computing ecosystem. It's ridiculous because the smartphone is already the center! And people like that! And it just makes sense! They're fighting this dumb battle because they have to. But ultimately every car manufacturer wants to get away from Carplay so they can own that tiny fraction of computing that happens on the drive to and from work.
The car industry got "mogged" as the kids say by Apple - cars went from status items (see any 60s/70s movie) to "an iPhone accessory" overnight and they've still not recovered.
>If Rivian’s native UI is so great, then their customers… won’t use CarPlay. It’s that simple.
I kind of disagree with this. Airpods are purely additive, customers can just choose to use different headphones with their iPhone if they want. But they don't want, because Apple lets Airpods interact with the iPhone in a way that other manufacturers can't.
So no, carplay wouldn't be mandatory but it's likely that Apple's leverage will kill their in house offering.
I've never seen a normal car infotainment system I liked (at least beyond 'put in a CD, then use next and previous track'), and Carplay is such a massive improvement over that. It's good, it's consistent, it's the same everywhere, it's up to date, it uses data from my phone. There's nothing to not like. The rest of the infotainment system could literally not exist[1] (beyond integrating buttons to actually control Carplay), and I wouldn't care. The car's infotainment system could just be a Carplay runtime and I'd be good.
[1] There are probably some features I'm forgetting that probably count as part of the infotainment, but which Carplay doesn't touch, like AC and battery info and management. The AC in my own car is completely separate from the infotainment system, but that probably doesn't apply to all cars. But even in those cases, it'd be better if integrated into Carplay, or just left out of what's happening on screen, and instead be given seperate manual controls.
This is familiar to me from an adjacent industry…smart TVs. The reason Samsung, LG, et al develop their own UIs is not because they are good at it. It’s because if they give up and let their device become a dumb host for apps, they lose their relationships with customers (i.e. ad revenue) and accelerate their race to the bottom as commodity hardware vendors.
Customers don’t want this stuff. They want to launch Netflix or Prime Video or Disney and watch. But the premium hardware brands need to fight to stay alive, and giving customers what they want is a death sentence.
Are there really no customers who want the TV to have Netflix built in? At a streaming company I worked at, we put quite a lot of effort into working around all the smart TV firmware quirks so that you didn't need to buy a separate box if you had a supported TV.
Even when CarPlay is full screen, it is possible to have a the manufacturer's UI available. My Ford Sync 3 will let me get back the the car UI via an icon that is the Ford logo - it loos like a regular app, but it's sole purpose is "go back to the car's infotainment." This is useful for controlling the radio and tweaking settings, but not a lot else.
CarPlay is a nightmare for many because its premise only considers 2 options: use CarPlay, don’t use CarPlay.
If you want to mix and match features across what your car offers and CarPlay offers (e.g. use Podcasts app but stick with native navigation), the UX starts to breakdown very quickly.
No, this scenario works fine. Car audio (and UI) can interleave with CarPlay. I can put podcasts on my center screen, my car manufacturer's navigation in the driver's screen, and the navigation prompts will duck the podcast and interrupt as appropriate. This isn't hypothetical or hard, my car does exactly this today.
Is the mechanism through which CarPlay/Android Auto works locked down? Could a third party make a competing app for iOS or android that would connect to cars and run on the screen? Or perhaps a special piece of hardware to hook in to older cars?
Casey is right, but the whole point for the Rivian position is they see themselves as the car software platform of the future. The idea we want primarily phone UIs in our cars is antithetical to their very existence, or why VW invested in them.
The idea customers should have control over the interfaces they use needs to be reinforced. If anything this is why the AI wave has gained so much hype as now people get to bypass so much nonsense masquerading as UX.
All CarPlay is is sending video and audio (like a Moonlight stream) over USB Ethernet. It should be a recognized standard at this point so that you can have a custom device plug in to your car, and have your own UI. But regulations (think watching YouTube while you drive) unfortunately prevent this
The strangest part is that this should be an easy win for car makers. If your native system is better, people will use it. If it isn't, forcing them to use it doesn't make it better, it just makes the car feel worse
Android Auto has upgraded Google Assistant to Gemini recently. Huge improvement. All the AI conversations are now available with a single button on your steering wheel. You can say "play that song about [something]" and it will get it most of the time.
Preference for Android Auto/Carplay is much more than (subjectively) better navigation/media. It's about all the other apps that Tesla/Rivian don't support like WhatsApp, Waze, etc.
I don't own a car, and I found the article mildly interesting, but I can't get over the sentence
> Our last three cars, the eldest of which was from the 2017 model year [...].
Is it common to buy three cars in let's say 10 years? That seems like a large amount of spend (afaik cars depreciate in value rather quick?) and -- barring accidents -- a really short time to have to replace something as sturdy as a car; If I get less than three years out of a phone it feels like a waste and it feels like the main barrier for phone longevity (besides batteries, which are replaceable) is security updates.
IDK, since I don't see any comments on it, it must not be that strange, it just struck me as odd.
The average car in the US is about 13 years old. Just like with phones, some people upgrade every few years even though it's a poor financial decision. Many frugal or less wealthy people only buy used cars and drive them until they die.
I happen to listen to ATP, a tech podcast of which Casey is a co-host.
I believe his family owns 2 cars, but had to replace one of them recently when a pebble caused a freak accident, essentially totaling the engine in one of the cars. Hence 3 cars purchased in 10 years.
I’ll buy an accessory display that supports CarPlay/Android Auto and attach it to the dashboard and still won’t use the navigation in the infotainment system.
carPlay is a horrible every time you sit down inside of the car, you need to care about connectivity, if your phone charged etc. It's a neurotic habit.
As a tesla owner, i feel carPlay is such a dumb idea. you buy a car that cost ~$50k+ to rely on every drive on your phone. It's a freedom to be phone free.
And yeah, it's still integrated. My profiles are in sync, if my wife sit down in the car, it adjust the seat height, wheel, temperature , music etc. If I'm listening Spotify using my headphones it switches to car the moment i open the door etc.
“Stop being so intransigent” / “I will NEVER buy a car that doesn’t support CarPlay” is pretty funny.
That said, I agree with the author. Autos are not software companies and they are only locking us in for their own benefit. Anybody not supporting other common standards is probably not telling the whole truth about the reasoning.
people have suffered through its clunky handshake for so long that they've started defending their captor.
My friend's $100k Audi makes him spend five minutes accepting terms of service just to enter a GPS destination. On contrary, he can hop into my Tesla and drive off instantly ...location already sent from my phone, key shared from the phone, but wow, no car play involved. One my friends owns android. No problem at all.
The interesting thing is that there is a lot of evidence that Tesla is about to embed Carplay. Rivian has taken over the privileged insanely expensive EV car market, as the Model Y is the closest thing to the old Honda/Toyota dominance, just in the EV space.
Personally, I avoid all cars that have CarPlay. This technology has nothing to do with a car. It's just a phone on a bigger screen, pure marketing by Apple that stifles innovation within the car manufacturing industry. I love Apple products, but CarPlay is boring af. And don't get me wrong i do understand why people love CarPlay. Problem is, majority of people don't know why CarPlay is so bad - many haven't used anything better, and they won't, because Apple stifles innovation in this space. It's a loop.
"You can read Wassym’s full answer at the episode link, but here’s the part that stuck out to me:
The challenge with screen mirroring solutions is that they take over every single pixel in the car, and that’s not the way we see ourselves interacting with our users."
I kept reading past this part thinking I didn't misread the title, because as he explained, a mirroring solution that takes up every pixel could potentially be addictive, and it made sense that he didn't want the UX to fundamentally change when people drive Rivian's cars. And for that, kudos.
But now I realize your case is that CarPlay is additive. Ok, great! I do wish I could use Android on my car, which is newer than your 2017 one but only features Bluetooth, music and Phone, pairing, rather than a full OS mirror.
Do I wish it had more? Yes. But am I less distracted on the road? Yes. So I would buy a Rivian.
I don't know about Rivian, but I'm generally less distracted on the road with CarPlay due to Siri & Voice Control. I wish I could extend it to my native car controls such as climate control etc.
Yeah, I actually use a cell phone mount for navigation since my car doesn't have one. It's far from ideal, and I think more cars should have an easier and more secure way to attach/clamp a phone/tablet rather than require the driver to use their infotainment system, Although that can sometimes be fine. Having a flimsy car mount can be worse/more dangerous than a limited or poorly updated in-car navigation system.
https://github.com/hatonthecat/Open-Source-Car/blob/main/ssr...
Rivian refusing to bend the knee to Apple should be met with more respect. You are free to force yourself to never buy a vehicle without Apple software, however you're just adding another shackle between your life and their massive walled garden. Should Rivian continue to innovate as Tesla did, your choice will become hard to maintain. Never is quite a long time.
I have a chapter in my book Kill the HiPPO titled “Cupholders vs CarPlay”.
The premise of the chapter is that some features in software are like CarPlay when looking for a new car - they become an important must-have for the buying decision - as opposed to “cupholder” features, those features which are a mere minor improvement for existing users.
I'm confused about the cupholder example though: I'd MUCH rather skip CarPlay (which I love) than cupholders in a car, but I wouldn't shop for a car based on whether it has cupholders because surely they all do, right? It seems like shopping based on whether the car has A/C or something.
The point is that you must make sure your product has the “CarPlay” type of features in order to get new customers for whom those features are must-haves.
Beware of spending your time only on adding new “cupholder” style features, which make existing customers slightly happier but don’t attract new customers.
Especially be aware that when you launched your product X years ago, some of today’s “CarPlay”-style features didn’t even exist. Your current customers are not asking for them, because they are mostly happy with your product as it is.
If you only listen to what existing customers are asking for, you might not even realise that these new “CarPlay” features are stopping you from getting certain new customers.
Isn't it dangerous and illegal to do stuff on your phone while driving? In this case it's on a bigger screen so it's okay somehow? (I haven't experienced one of these in person though, so I might be missing something.)
I don't know how CarPlay is, but Android Auto restricts the apps and app interactions you can do in the Android Auto user interface. On my phone the only apps that show up are google maps, spotify, and my podcast player and my phone interface I think.
You can control Carplay the most relevant parts with buttons. Next-previous track, volume, voice commands, probably more I can't think of.
Not to mention that yes, a bigger screen probably is better. Bigger target = easier to hit. The legality can become a lessened problem, depending on jurisdiction. Using your phone while driving is often specifically illegal, but using your car's infotainment system might not be automatically illegal (it might count as distracted driving or whatever, but the threshold of proof is higher).
I’m not even that old, but I’d really love to argue to simplify the entire auto infotainment stack. I don’t even need a screen. I just bring my own by magnetically attaching my phone that I’ll use to navigate and Bluetooth music or podcasts. If CarPlay becomes the standard that allows me to not pay for whatever crappy tablet UI automakers are pushing, fine. But that doesn’t make CarPlay a necessity, it just makes it the least bad option.
A rear camera is mandatory on new cars in the US these days, and it's honestly a good idea to have them either way. This makes a screen a necessity more or less no matter what (I can't see it being implemented with a bring-your-own tablet solution).
That doesn't mean they have to ship most of the infotainment system though. They could just leave that hole there for Carplay to fill. But that would be admiring defeat, and we can't have that.
The rear and mirror cameras being active is one reason I don't like it when my phone is connected to it because they overlay what Carplay/Android Auto is trying to show. It's sort of like downgrading from dual screen to one.
I've never found it to be inconvenient. When I'm reversing, I'm not using Carplay actively. I guess it could be annoying if you're a passenger trying to key in a destination or something, but I'd just use my phone in that case (or have the driver unlock their phone).
My car has side cameras that activate when the turn signals are active and that is usually precisely at the same time that I need to see directions for a major interchange or similar. I'm guessing it's been fixed but I find mixing the UI of my phone with my car's built in UI can create some unexpected behaviors.
There's so many comments on the lines of "I would never buy a car without android auto/car play support". I 100% used to be on this camp, "A car without android auto, what am I, a caveman!?".
Anyway, separately to anything car related, I got fed up of some of google's treatment of android and switched to Murena's /e/os which is a de-googled spin of android. It doesn't support android auto, and that held me back from switching for ages.
Long story short, I don't miss android auto at all. Bluetooth is absolutely fine for playing media from my phone etc.
(my car does already have functionality like google maps built in though, so I might feel differently if it didn't)
I imagine the Venn Diagram of Rivian buyers and Apple users is basically a circle (or one small circle inside a much larger one), this seems like a wildly obtuse position for them to take.
>The challenge with screen mirroring solutions is that they take over every single pixel in the car, and that’s not the way we see ourselves interacting with our users.
Wassym Bensaid sounds like an incompetent person to be a chief software officer working on cars if he does not understand this is not how carplay works. It's either this, or he's just weaseling out of saying "we want to capture all our users data, and we want to put in rent seeking subscriptions into our cars, which is going to be hard if we enable carplay".
but what do people actually use carplay for? Navigation, music and calls?
I suspect that 90% of the people that "need" carplay are actually just using it as a bluetooth speaker and would be fine with a good phoneholder and bluetooth/aux connection.
I always feel strange connecting to someone else their carlpay or to a rental car.
> just using it as a bluetooth speaker and would be fine with a good phoneholder and bluetooth/aux connection.
Is it unreasonable to have this functionality built in to the car? I can't see any good reasons not to have it from the consumer's point of view. Carplay doesn't even have a licence fee, so it's basically free to implement.
And it's not like there's a shortage of options. Removing the cars that don't have it of your shortlist is an easy way to filter off the options that don't even pretend to respect you as a user.
> I always feel strange connecting to someone else their carlpay or to a rental car.
Honest question, why? It is literally remote desktop + some pipes for audio and screen touches. It's no different than connecting an external touchscreen to a smartphone, lapdock-style.
It's a strange feeling reading these comments because not only have I never used carplay or android auto, I don't think I've ever noticed anyone else using it in a car someone's driven me in. Everyone I know just has their phone in a dash mount. I don't think it's that small a sample size either! I drive a 2014 Accord and it auto connects to my android with Bluetooth when I turn on the car. It's hard to really imagine the experience of maps or music being improved by seeing it on my dashboard screen compared to right next to it on the phone.
I imagine everyone who is fully involved with the carplay ecosystem feels equally as strongly in the other direction and has for a long time.
CarPlay and Android Auto only really started seeing adoption in post 2017 Model Year vehicles.
Anyone I know that has one, will immediately either plugin or connect whenever they go live.
There's other benefits like (in the aforementioned article), CarPlay Ultra being able to send data to multiple screens like the front dash. Where having my directions right next to me speed means I don't have to check two screens.
I only got a car with Carplay this year... before that, phone in a dash mount.
But just getting into you car and having it project your phone interface instantly from your pocket on a screen that is part of the car is really nice. I don't even have a super large screen (10.5 inches, widescreen) but it's significantly better than looking at my phone. It even integrates with the heads up display.
> It's hard to really imagine the experience of maps or music being improved by seeing it on my dashboard screen compared to right next to it on the phone.
It might be hard to imagine but it shouldn't be. I would find it very hard to go back to fiddling with my phone rather than have it nicely integrated into all the buttons and dials on my car. Never taking my phone out of my pocket and forgetting it in the car -- I did that a lot. The audio integration across the radio, phone apps, and navigation is perfect -- Bluetooth doesn't come close and was always a frustration. It's just better in every way, that's why people like it.
> I drive a 2014 Accord and it auto connects to my android with Bluetooth when I turn on the car. It's hard to really imagine the experience of maps or music being improved by seeing it on my dashboard screen compared to right next to it on the phone.
How about instead of your phone? You don't need your phone dash mount if you have Carplay.
I personally only need the map up sometimes so I find the whole thing kind of patronizing. The last time I tried it I didn't like that I couldn't switch between different music apps without exiting the entire system. Maybe it's different now but I'm pretty content not using it. Also the Carplay / Android port on my car is old and doesn't support fast charging.
> I personally only need the map up sometimes so I find the whole thing kind of patronizing.
You should be able to have it only show the music app or whatever if that's what bothers you. My cars default infotainment shows the map by default too, so this is more or less the same from my point of view (other than the fact that the car's maps are out of date).
> The last time I tried it I didn't like that I couldn't switch between different music apps without exiting the entire system.
As in you need to exit one app to open another? You can add whatever apps to the home(?) screen if you need to see them both at the same time, but if you want two apps to be fully open at the same time, that's not happening, as that's probably a hold-over from phone UI. Or am I misunderstanding you here?
My car's default system is running Android 4.x and has big "Audio", "Maps", "Climate" physical buttons on both the wheel and the center dash but rarely use the car's Maps screen. I usually have it set to Audio and it just shows what's playing via Bluetooth. I'm mostly driving around LA so my typical driving pattern is knowing 90% of the route and needing to sometimes lookup traffic and then looking at the directions for the last 10% if I'm going somewhere new. Otherwise I'm playing either Spotify, Soundcloud, or Beatport.
When I tried Android Auto it actually took over my car's infotainment system and made my phone slightly slower having to drive another screen? I dunno it's been years. I just don't see the value in it personally.
If you just use it for music and are happy with bluetooth, it's understandable why you don't see the benefit. Heck, do you even need a screen at that point (barring a backup camera)?
For maps, having up to date maps is an enormous relief compared to relying on the outdated maps that came with your car (at least in my experience).
> When I tried Android Auto it actually took over my car's infotainment system
Yes. I prefer it that way. The car's default infotainment system might as well not exist for all I care, since I prefer the Carplay experience.
> and made my phone slightly slower having to drive another screen?
I’m not a huge fan of it, but I do find it more convenient than BlueTooth alone.
For context, I drive a ‘91 GMC pickup, so neither cars nor car audio are super important to me. I still bought a CarPlay-enabled Android head unit because it’s less of a hassle to use.
I use Android Auto a lot when traveling in rental cars. The alternative is annoying. With Android Auto, I at least know how to navigate and play audio with minimal effort. Otherwise I just use my phone and in a rental I typically don't have a mount so it's annoying because my phone discovers new and unexpected places to hide. First world problems, I know.
Can anyone recommend a good aftermarket CarPlay unit manufacturer (or stand alone unit that I can mount on dash? Wary of cheating out and getting an overheating cpu or bad touch screen
I got a cheap generic one (aphqua brand) and it's fine. The touch screen is fine. The aux out is fine. It doesn't seem to get hot. It's not amazing, but for the price it's functionally perfect.
There should be a standard. (Yes I know the XKCD)
Apple and Android each having their own is ridiculous and actively prevents smaller competitors(one can dream)
For what it’s worth I’ve heard they’re basically identical. It’s just some two-way data and an h264 video stream. There’s a reason basically everyone supports both. Seems to be really easy.
I don’t know whether the auto makers actually forced them to be compatible or it was a choice in Google’s part to get into cars that already had CarPlay.
But it really doesn’t seem like it’s a big hassle. Most of it is probably just certification testing to be allowed to use the names/logos.
My car has wired carplay/android auto, but I have a nifty little USB dongle that receives carplay/android auto wirelessly and passes it to the car via USB. Sometimes called an AI box, I think.
These things contain a whole System-on-a-Chip board. I presume what it's acting like a middle box; pretending to be the headunit to the phone, and then sending the phone's output to the headunit, pretending to be a phone.
Since they need a quite beefy CPU to do that, I'm guessing they don't just pass along packets, but actually speak the protocol on both ends, and perhaps transcode the a/v stream.
Every time I've used CarPlay or Android Auto, I just remember how much better the experience was with a tablet velcro'd over the main display. Immediately obviously better in every single way, and dramatically cheaper and easier to replace if desired.
I get the goal, and I'm glad there's at least some semblance of a standard. But it's still bad.
Opinionated, but Tesla's interface seems better than any CarPlay?
The thing with CarPlay that I hate the most is that it is laggy. I have it on a Series 5 BMW and Spotify has a delay of at least 4s when you select a song and when it actually starts playing. Same thing when you rapidly skip tracks - the interface changes but the speakers (or any other non-CarPlay interface) can't really keep up. It really is a joke, especially on that kind of vehicle.
The car industry is currently in the "rodeo" phase that the telcos where in when it came to the internet. Loosing power- and very soon tamed, because the Chinese competition has no such qualms.
What the auto industry should have really woken up to is the idea of a singular carplay for both android and ios. I have a 2021 BMW that only supported carplay and was fine for many years. It is wireless even. I love it. But now i have a pixel.
Maybe someone already said this but my pet peeve is restrictions on wireless CarPlay. We have a top of the line Kia Telluride that only has wired CarPlay. Then we rented a crappy Kia sedan on vacation and it had wireless. Apparently the developer of Telluride’s fancy built in navigation system prohibits wireless CarPlay
As an Apple fanboy I have to say I’ve never been impressed with CarPlay. I’ve used it in rentals quite a bit but have found it generally infuriating.
Primary reason is the map. On the Tesla you have this beautiful map that you can pan around and pinch zoom in and out of.
On the versions of CarPlay that I’ve used, you can this minimal map that can’t be pinch zoomed. Seems like you have to tap the pan buttons by hand to get it to slide around.
It’s just generally unusable. Like I don’t even know why people like this. Oh and then the nanny aspect of your phone becoming a black screen of just enumerated turns with no way to actually see the map yourself (if the car screen is unwilling to work right, my first instinct was to go to my phone but alas no they brick it).
Before I owned a Tesla I remember thinking what a mistake it was that it didn’t have CarPlay because I assumed it was the best. Well it’s not. Not by a long shot.
Carplay is a convenient - FREE solution to car infotainment that car makers cannot control. They cannot sell you subscription based services for in-car stuff if you can get that from another app, and that's not in their interest.
The CEO here knows well what he's saying is BS. We are lucky if something like Carplay will survive in the car subscription based era.
They might charge you for the use of Carplay in the future, or free access to their infotainment that is complemented by subscritions.
Car makers sell cars with thin margins so they need to find ways to increase them.
I hope you made your dissatisfaction known. Otherwise I’m sure they see your purchase as a success, validating your decision. Make sure they know you’ll never by another GM car.
I'm still angry that I can't just run Android Auto directly anymore on my phone when I'm in a vehicle that doesn't have Android Auto support and my phone is just dash-mounted (or handlebar-mounted).
I don't particularly care about Android Auto (I generally prefer standard bluetooth for audio, and directly setting the phone up for navigation), but if a manufacturer supports CarPlay and not Android Auto, they can get lost. I hate how Apple stuff is an assumed default.
Effectively no one does that. I think there might be one or two ultra luxury cars that do, but in general no one does. Because they don’t wanna cut off any of their audience.
And at this point it seems like 80% of car manufacturers just ship android automotive anyway. You really think they’re gonna do that and turn off android auto support?
Am I the only person who hates plugging their iPhone into their car to charge and completely losing control of it?
When I plug it into the USB socket, my Peugeot 207 starts playing a random podcast track on my phone. No way of stopping it. If I stop it, it starts again. I can't select a different audio output, e.g. the phone speaker. There are plenty of people complaining about this on the forums.
Yes, it's a bug in either the iPhone or the car. Yes the bug shouldn't be there, but it is. I should be able to disable it.
I'm in the habit of bringing a spare battery with me so I can use phone sat-nav.
Your car is broken, and was apparently sold as such. I'd return the car for that, or just never buy it in the first place if I noticed it during research or a test drive.
> It's a quite old, third-hand car. But there are plenty of people reporting the same thing.
Presumably it's been a problem since day 1. Meaning it was broken on day 1.
> But why can't my iPhone let me set permissions for the thing I plug it into?
There's the 'trust this device?' popup that should prevent the problem if you don't want the car to do anything with your device. If you want finder control, then from Apple's point of view, it's probably that this would needlessly clutter the UI, given that it shouldn't be an issue in the first place. Then again, I don't think Android supports finer controls either way.
I’m with OP, here: CarPlay is additive to the experience, but also is something that provides me a degree of consistency across my automotive experiences - when vendors bother to implement it properly.
I have an old Honda Fit that I installed one of Pioneer’s “app radio” units into, which included replacing the dash facia. I use CarPlay on it almost exclusively, but if I want Pioneer’s incredibly mediocre UI/UX, it’s a single button-tap away - either on the left side of the radio via a capacitance button, or on the first page of CarPlay’s app icons.
When I rented a car to drive to visit family, it had CarPlay. The infotainment experience was familiar, so I could focus more on the road ahead instead of fussing with some newfangled vendor-specific infotainment shitshow.
When I rented Nissan in Canada, it too had CarPlay - but with a nasty bug where using voice commands or making a call would crash the whole unit. I figured out very quickly not to do that, and the rest of CarPlay worked a treat for the trip - a far cry better from Nissan’s UI/UX.
This is why I didn’t hop on board infotainment systems until CarPlay and Android Auto were mature options, opting to stick with my phone over USB for audio/iPod controls instead: none of the major manufacturers except maybe Panasonic actually give a shit about the UI/UX. They don’t build intuitive systems that can be operated without looking, and they scoop up far too much superfluous data to enable simple features. I refuse to buy the vehicle maker excuse of “superior experience” anymore when time after time, the reality is these car companies think the infotainment data is some sort of goldmine of revenue and letting Apple or Google have any say over the experience is tantamount to leaving money on the table.
If I cannot have CarPlay, and your EV or vehicle won’t let me swap the infotainment unit for an aftermarket one that does, then I am not buying your fucking spyware on wheels. I don’t think anyone else should tolerate that bullshit either, especially on what averages to be a $70k+ purchase nowadays.
CarPlay is subtractive for the car manufacturer who wants to track you and sell your data. That's all you need to know about this debate. Of course CarPlay is the far superior UX. It's entertaining to see car manufacturers bend over and come up with ridiculous justifications for why they "cannot" give you the option to just use CarPlay.
It's difficult for me to admit - because I really dislike Apple, Google, and the other predatory monopolies - but I wouldn't buy a car without CarPlay either.
Like I said, it's not because I'm a fan of Apple. Honestly, fuck Apple. Fuck their stupid walled garden and their $99/yr developer fee and their planned obsolesence and their lack of a headphone jack and everything else. But fuck Google too. And especially fuck all the car makers with their crappy infotainment software.
The truth is, I put up with an iPhone and with CarPlay simply because it is slightly less shitty than all the other shitty options.
As a disclaimer, the three iPhones I've ever purchased have all been used. I keep them for as long as possible. I don't use iCloud. I don't buy apps. In fact, I don't give Apple any money as far as I know.
I wish a Linux phone was a viable option but they are years away from being truly usable and decades away from any hope of mass integration with cars.
I love how people are pushing for Android Auto and CarPlay on the basis of consistency and ubiquity and control, yet fail to realize that their advocacy will reduce what is currently a thriving marketplace filled with unique options to a duopoly.
Once that happens we all know what comes next: enshittification.
> a thriving marketplace filled with unique options to a duopoly.
If the car infotainment market is what counts as 'thriving' with 'unique options', then I don't want a thriving market, because that's apparently a bad thing. Sure, there are plenty of unique options. Outside of Carplay, Android Auto and Tesla (and maybe a few other very recent models), they're all shit.
I don't want hundreds of bad options. I want one (at least, more is preferable) good option.
It boils down to "who owns the field". Facebook and Apple killed Flash because they wanted control. Rivian is trying to say "we will own the users eyes, their phones be damned".
Quite interesting, particularly with statistics shared in comments.
Personally I hate CarPlay because of it's limitations - oh you can't respond to messages, oh you can't watch videos and sorts. Much easier to have a tablet there free of these "safety" limitations.
Imagine if customers demanded MacBooks boot into Android when an android phone was connected .
The cars primary UI is the screen. Car Clay defers the cars experience to Apple .
Customers have been demanding CarPlay because most car UIs are poor. But if done properly, they can exceed CarPlay while being consistent and well integrated
Car manufacturers don't want this because it gives Apple/Google leverage over their products. The alternative is some kind of open standard, but that undercuts the ability of manufacturers to hard fuck you on trim options.
One of the more irritating parts of late stage capitalism is the complete inability of its scions (CEOs, etc.) to say any of this. The gaslighting is insufferable.
There are a bunch of CarPlay devices on Amazon, for example, with all kinds of screens, designed for Tesla and other cars that don't support it, that cost about $200 for a nice one. Why not just buy one of those and who cares if it's natively supported?
I get where the author is coming from, but it seems to me that the core issue here isn't CarPlay, it's that car manufacturers are absolute dogshit at software. Most Tesla owners don't seem that upset about the lack of CarPlay, I'm assuming because the native Tesla experience is really good. I'm not sure people would care as much if that were the case more often.
And cars are increasingly a software-bound experience that CarPlay can only get you out of so far. I have a Volvo XC40 EV, and even though it's a decent car and I've had multiple Volvos that I've loved, I probably won't buy another one because the software experience is so bad. And that's WITH CarPlay!
The author is in a podcast that I classify as Apple apologist. They feel because they have used Apple products for 8+ years the world should bend to their knee. And anytime new non-apple tech comes up on the podcast they do not give any opportunity to acclimate to new tech, because they drink the apple kool-aid. Which is fine, but just admit some products are not for you then if you want the Apple ecosphere, where they dont respect their customers, their developers or their partners.
My last car could accept a double DIN head unit but I never put one in because then I'd lose any way to control all the settings in the car. And that was a car from 2014! The integration is even tighter now.
I don't know or care if "it's a thing anymore", there's an inexhaustible supply of existing cars with double DIN. My Subaru from 2017 has double DIN and I don't see any reason to own a more modern car than that.
> Let me help you, [Rivian Chief Software Officer] Wassym
Casey Liss, let me help you:
Apple and Google are monopolies.
You are boot licking an invasive species trillion dollar company.
These two megacorps are trying to put their greedy tendrils into the automotive industry and extract even more money from an industry that is not healthy and very difficult to succeed at.
It's high time the governments of the world told Google and Apple to fuck off and leave both consumers and other industries alone. Told the both of them that it's time for their platforms to become an open standard.
That phones themselves must be an open standards. With open web installs without scare walls and deeply hidden settings.
The inversion of control needs to make Apple and Google the bitch here. Not the automotive industry that can't even dream of the insane margins the tech industry has.
Cars should be able to interface with any phone without having to subjugate themselves to Google and Apple. Because this is a perverted inversion of control.
> Cars should be able to interface with any phone without having to subjugate themselves to Google and Apple. Because this is a perverted inversion of control.
CarPlay is bad for the car manufacturer and is far worse than the modern car software. People who complain about loosing CarPlay are not using the new software but reacting in fear thinking the old car software will come back.
The author acts like manufacturers get CarPlay for free when it has a high cost, high constraints, and gives over most or all of the dash over to another company.
> gives over most or all of the dash over to another company.
This was covered in the article, that’s just CarPlay Ultra, which is still fairly new and hardly any companies have implemented it. That’s not what’s being asked for.
> fear thinking the old car software will come back.
Why would this not be a concern? Condition forces higher quality. If these car companies are competing against Apple and Google, they need to stop phoning it in. If they block them out, they can ship more junk and drivers are just stuck with it.
If they believe it what they ship, they shouldn’t be afraid to also build in CarPlay/Android Auto support. Have the sales people go over the built in system so people give it a chance. Impress the customers with it. Advertise how good it is. Eliminating the competition and claiming it’s for the best, does not inspire confidence.
> This was covered in the article, that’s just CarPlay Ultra
And Apple doesn’t just take it over. It requires a per-model design package the OEM makes with Apple’s help. So they can keep all their logos and design elements they care about.
They still don’t do it, as you pointed out. But it’s not like using an AppleTV to avoid the terrible built in smart TV interface. The OEM is still there.
> CarPlay is bad for the car manufacturer and is far worse than the modern car software.
I have a new car with actually pretty decent modern car software; far better than the decades of crap software I put up with my last car. Carplay is still better. And in another decade, Carplay will be even better and my decent car software will be the same.
(And the car software and Carplay actually play very nicely together -- it is not all or nothing)
I drive a 2026 Toyota, how do I enable this new good native infotainment system of which you speak?
The one in my car sucks, and to use the most basic features (navigation, music) that cost nothing on CarPlay (beyond my phone bill) cost $15-25/month from Toyota.
I've never seen CarPlay work properly. 2026 and they still can't make a car play music without jittering like a CD. Every car brand I've rented, every iPhone I've owned, gotta turn that junk off every time.
That’s very odd. I’ve used my phones with 3 different cars regularly using CarPlay every single time I drive for literally a decade without ever experiencing that.
So I own a new Honda and have either borrowed or rented GM, Chrysler, Toyota, Nissan. If you've only driven say Ford, BMW, Hyundai, Mercedes, VW, I didn't test those.
This isn't like Linux where the combo of motherboard, kernel version, and day of the week affects your Bluetooth audio, but ok cause n=1. Apple stuff is supposed to just work. Most of it does, but not this.
> There exists a flavor of CarPlay — CarPlay Ultra — that does take over every screen of the car.
I wish software leaning Internet people stop framing that center console tablet as "the car". It's worse than people pointing at display monitors and calling it computers. They're just cheap complimentary tablets attached to the car. If we were to fully embrace the line of thinking that frame the touchscreen being the car, the Slate Truck cannot exist, since it lacks the car of the car. In reality it does exist, because that thing is just a tiny add-on unit of a car.
The reason why there's been zero cars with CarPlay Ultra is because those cheap tablets remote controlling features of the actual car that hosts it, like speedometer, is weird, and way too complicated, and plain unworkable, on top of being too controlling.
I'm not defending car brands, I find conversations with misunderstandings like this less than ideally productive. The 5.25" DVD drive unit is not the computer.
The author clearly thinks that the dash and and the nav are connected to the same thing in the back, when in reality the nav is a self contained unit that runs on the power from the car. That only happens when people frame the nav as the car.
Casey is one of three hosts on an Apple focused podcast. They’ve discussed CarPlay Ultra numerous times. He’s discussed watching the WWDC session where how it works and gets themed was first explained.
CarPlay Ultra takes over the infotainment as well as the dash displays. The author is correct. In cars that support CarPlay Ultra, the dash screens are just additional infotainment screens that default to gauge display.
And I'm saying zero cars support CarPlay Ultra because that's not how cars work. The dash screens cannot be made into just additional infotainment screens because the infotainment is explicitly architected as an external device to the car.
What I've been saying is that the infotainment is external to the car, not significantly more connected and integrated than the spare tire, and that everyone needs to understand that.
The "infotainment" (the display on the middle of the car) controls a lot of things now. On my car I can change things like lane departure or collision warning, changing the car's behaviour, for example that it brakes itself if it thinks it's about to hit something. You can even set a speed limiter, changing the behaviour of the car when you put pedal to the metal. Instead of going faster and faster up to 220km/h, you can modify the car to go faster and faster, but only to e.g. 120 km/h. How's that "external to the car".
You are mistaken, sorry. Even the normal everyday infotainment on most modern cars has receive-only telemetry available to it from the car control computers. Some elements are passed through (like EV state of charge) to old style CarPlay as well. Think data diode (making no claims as to the actual physical implementation, but logically it works)
CarPlay Ultra is just an extension of that where the gauge cluster is now just another infotainment screen that displays the received telemetry data. It does not have access to the ECU, cannot interfere, can be rebooted with impunity, etc.
For pure interaction, CarPlay as a generic solution is very hard to beat infotainment systems that are deeply integrated with the vehicle itself. Its advantages are mainly these:
- Consistency. You get into a new car, all you need to figure out is how to open CarPlay, no need to learning a completely different and often complicated infotainment system.
- "It's on your phone". You can decide what playlist to play or where to navigate before you even get into the car.
- Stays up to date over the long term. Just look at cars from five years ago. Most built-in infotainment systems are still stuck in that era, no matter how smart they once looked. CarPlay uses your phone as the main computing platform, and the car's infotainment system only needs to act as a thin client for I/O, it keeps updating with iOS.
The big thing for me is that the lifetime of a car is a lot longer than the technology development lifecycle.
I just bought a 10 year old Toyota estate (station wagon). It's got a reasonable screen and Bluetooth implementation etc. But I'm never going to want to use the built in navigation because it's just not as good as what my phone will do. And the audio integration isn't as sophisticated as it might be - I have to choose the app on my phone.
Whereas CarPlay/AndroidAuto is generic from the car point of view, and as phone features and software improve your car capability evolves too.
I added a new head unit to my 13 year old Santa Fe, it is like a new car now, wireless Android Auto. Connects quick, bigger nicer screen. Should allow me to keep the car for another 10 years assuming I don't blow up another engine, only the first one is free.
I’m sure the car manufacturers would much prefer if you updated your car as often as you do your phone.
They want everyone to, but they also know that the cost of cars, it's not realistic for that to happen. The only way even people on the upper middle class can afford to be buying or leasing cars every three years is because at the end of those three years the car still has a lot of value left to sell on to someone who is more middle class. And that middle class person will likely sell it again to someone who is a little bit lower down and at about 10 to 12 years it finally reaches someone who is poor.
The only way someone could buy a car more often is if they became a lot cheaper. That would mean doing away with a lot of the luxury parts of the car that are where the profit is.
They’re working on it. I follow a mechanic on YouTube who has shared dozens of examples of manufacturers seemingly intentionally shipping deeply flawed components for seemingly no reason other than to push the average lifespan of a vehicle back downwards from the high levels we’d reached by about 2012. Cars are being junked with less than 100k miles because the original parts fail, replacement parts are hard to get, and now manufacturers are making it so you need an expensive piece of software which they completely control to program a new part to the car, without which, it’s a brick. So essentially they can drop support for a car from that software, and make it near-impossible to replace those parts even if someone reverse-engineers aftermarket parts.
Care to name the mechanic on YouTube?
This isn’t to whom parent is referring, but you can watch this video about wet timing belts for an idea https://youtu.be/0SASSFjIt5I
In short, it’s an awful idea because even if the belt doesn’t fail early, debris from the belt will clog oil pickups, galleries, and passages.
I’m sure they would, but they also know their new car prices would be unsustainable if you couldn’t sell your old car… and that means everyone in the second hand car market is running stale infotainment stacks
Current State of Chinese EV Manufacturers
Source? They’re cheaper, but I’ve seen zero proof they are less long-lasting than our cars. If anything, those who have tried them say they’re better cars, including the Ford CEO, who imported one and can’t say enough good things about it.
Some of which are also phone manufacturers.
Make them cheaper and I’m game.
Well, not every car brand suck at that. My 6 y.o tesla still delivers me updates, and new features.
To be honest, Tesla is a computer with a car as an add on. That’s why it works.
Traditional companies do it the other way around.
I’m not sure it “works”. I would still drastically prefer if Tesla had CarPlay.
Another advantage of the "it's on your phone" aspect is that it follows you when you switch cars. If I use my friend's car, I still have MY system. If I rent a car for a trip, I still have MY system.
Another advantage of the "it's on your phone" aspect is Consistency. You get into a new car, all you need to figure out is how to open CarPlay, no need to learning a completely different and often complicated infotainment system.
>For pure interaction, CarPlay as a generic solution is very hard to beat infotainment systems that are deeply integrated with the vehicle itself
I can't find one instance of a car UI being as good or easier to interact with than CarPlay.
My daughter's very ordinary 10+ year old Kia Soul has a very nice navigation and media UI. It's not the base model but it's a joy to use because it's incredibly responsive and very well integrated with the car's physical buttons. The SiriusXM radio even has a built-in DAR!
The Tesla UI is pretty good. It's the only built-in car software I consider good enough to use for navigation. In any other car I use my phone.
But Tesla also understands that good software engineers need to be paid Silicon Valley wages. The other car companies hire B- and C-level software engineers and then wonder why their customers prefer to navigate with their phones.
Pretty much every major manufacturer has a bay area satellite office these days. Toyota has a research center in San Ramon and a woven office near the broadcom campus in Palo Alto. GM has an office in SOMA and in mountain view. Ford has an office literally a block away from Tesla HQ. Mercedes used to be near Cariad at moffet field, but now they're down by SJC. Nissan is in Santa Clara.
Need I continue? And Tesla is generally understood to pay on the lower end among those companies.
then why is it that their software is a generation ahead?
Leaving aside any quibbles about the quality of Tesla's offering, look up the story of CARIAD [0]. The scale and cultural inertia of OEMs is hard to overstate. That change can't happen quickly.
Toyota had the better idea, keep the software folks an independent business unit with internal competency/ownership, and only allow them to fix future platforms. Woven is apparently having great success inside Toyota. The side effect is that those changes still aren't apparent even years later.
GM had the same idea, but killed it recently.
[0] https://www.germanautopreneur.com/p/cariad-volkswagen-softwa...
The Rivian R2 makes Tesla’s look old and Android like. It’s very slick. The only thing I miss vs CarPlay is the voice Apple Maps uses, which is more natural.
I think more often, traditional car companies don’t have in-house talent to work on their infotainment… that’s contracted out to the lowest bidder, to predictable result.
I'm still astounded my Ford's infotainment system takes 5-10 seconds after opening the radio "app" to present me with the station selection UI. Most of that seems to be some sort of startup delay. The mind boggles.
I'm frankly amazed at the speed at which the Ford and Chevy native UIs will take over from CarPlay for functions like reverse camera, lane camera etc. You'd expect some delay/lag but it's pretty responsive which obviously is essential for safety.
It’s federal regulations. If the reverse camera screen doesn’t appear quickly enough, the car gets recalled and fixed. This has happened to many manufacturers.
Ford, Toyota, Lexus, etc. This notice from Tesla actually specifies the regulation:
> On affected vehicles, upon vehicle power up, a certain software configuration may prevent camera streams from being sent to the MCU for up to 11 seconds, causing a loss of rearview image for up to 11 seconds for drivers who shift into reverse during this time, which does not comply with FMVSS 111, S5.5.3.
https://www.tesla.com/support/recall-loss-of-back-up-camera-...
AFAICT, they always run in the background anyway. CarPlay is mostly just a pass through canvas rendered on the phone. The system can decide at anytime to overlay something on the CarPlay canvas.
Also speed and connectivity. My car needs a screen and some low power chips. It’s ten years old and the maps and everything are snappy (low quality touch screen aside, but that’s not too bad) because it’s all running on my nice fast device I already own that’s much newer than the car.
That is what my 3 point covers: the in-vehicle system is just a thin client handling I/O :)
Agreed, my car is a tool for going places, consistency is a big attraction and I’ve zero interest in some new UI with every vehicle or vehicle software update.
Sure I would like the vehicle to have some style but trying to navigate with maps or something I want it to work / look consistently.
Honest question, what are the advantages of an integrated system? These three things are kind of the whole game for me, but I also don't have a very sophisticated taste when it comes to cars.
You missed the biggest one: continuity. Start listening to music at home, take it to the car. Start a podcast in the car, finish it in the gym.
CarPlay is user-centric, which is why users like it. All these attempts to force people into a device-centric experience make no sense. I spent an hour or two a day, at most, in my car. My phone is within Bluetooth distance every waking moment. Why in the world would I want my car to be a disjointed experience?
To continue your point, one use case where I’m always glad I have CarPlay is when I searched for the hours of some business on my phone via Maps, then seeing they’re still open, get in my car, and the same business’s address is pre-loaded on the CarPlay maps screen ready for me to tap “go”. Ditto any Calendar event that’s coming up where I have the location field already filled in. Just tap Go.
My car’s integrated nav is… fine. But having to re-enter addresses drops the convenience considerably.
Some manufacturers are attempting to address this via apps and account syncing, which I think is still much worse than carplay/AA.
You picked a bad example. You get any music/podcast/any-other-audio continuity with just Bluetooth. Likewise, you even get controls for music and audio metadata displayed.
What you don't (usually) get from car's regular infotainment:
- Maps that don't suck
- Maps that get updated often
- Navigation that is aware of more than just what HD Radio tells about highways
- Helpful notification when you get into the car that starts navigating to whatever is next on your calendar
- A choice between what navigation software to use
- Ability to switch between audio sources (i.e. go from audiobook to spotify)
IMO Android Auto and CarPlay generally implemented pretty poorly in pretty much anything, but Mazda.
I think this is in the same vein as continuity and user centric and what you were describing but it’s a different part - more than one person drives my car. I want my things and my wife wants hers. Having accounts or something extra on a new shared device is annoying.
My Audi has user profiles and they can’t even get that idea right - for example, a key cant be assigned to a user permanently, it just defaults to the most recent user. So if she hands you her keys to borrow her car because you forgot yours, then her key is now your key until she switches it back. This would be minor except it takes like 30 seconds to “load” settings whenever you switch users… it is like they are being read from a freaking floppy disk or something.
Locations as well. Carplay picks up locations from calendar appointments, messages etc, so very often you just plug it in and click "Go".
That can be achieved if you are app-centric as well (i.e. Spotify app in al lthe places), but your point still stand nonetheless.
Agreed, if you’re a single-app user then something like Spotify works just as well, as long as they do a great job of maintaining to-the-second sync across devices. Audible does a good of that as well.
That just puts you in the space of needing all apps to be available on all devices.
Does the car support different Spotify accounts on each driver profile? If not then you can say goodbye to personal playlists and favorites and podcast progress…
That way also makes it mandatory that you pay for the redundant car data plan that most people wouldn’t need but which they so badly want you to buy for another $30-40 a month.
> You missed the biggest one: continuity. Start listening to music at home, take it to the car. Start a podcast in the car, finish it in the gym.
That would still work, as you can use Bluetooth.
And use the phone’s UI for anything more complex the pause/skip?
Nah, I would not do it.
That's right, my 2 point wasn't complete enough
That still works with apps though. Spotify app in a car would do the same thing.
But I get the point.
I appreciate my 2011 vehicle that only has a car radio with FM tuner and CDs, and yes, I know that I could easily swap it but I didn't on purpose, let me explain why:
- all the controls that I need, that are basically volume, radio station or CD track, are easily accessible trough physical buttons and knobs, that I can use without taking my eyes off the street
- I get in the car, insert the key and the radio turns on instantly and start playing music, no things that have to boot, no things that have to connect, etc. I usually listen to the radio and I stay up to date with news, listen to programs, listen to music without the need to create a playlist, or not and always listen to the same songs, or worse paying a subscription to just listen to music
- if I want to listen something different I can just put in a CD, and considering it supports mp3 CDs a CD can contain up to 100 songs without a noticeable loss in quality
- the UI of the radio in general is well designed, no useless functions, everything is easy to reach, no distractions. The radio is well integrated into the car dashboard, the design has something to say, not like a boring 10' tablet
- no distractions, notifications from my phone stay on my phone, calls don't pop up, simply when I arrive at destination I recall saying I was driving, or respond to the message
- finally, the sound quality is good, much better than most of integrated infotainment in modern cars that have 2000 useless functions, a shitty touchscreen, and a very poor sound quality. If I turn the volume all way up it shakes the car, the quality of analog FM radio is much better than modern digital radio that have the quality of a low bitrate MP3, and we are talking about the stock radio of a VW Golf 6, a normal car (when I bought it in 2011), not something fancy.
Your use case sounds like exactly the opposite of what I’d prefer.
And, I personally find the quality of YouTube Music Premium (256kbps AAC) superior to FM radio.
> And, I personally find the quality of YouTube Music Premium (256kbps AAC) superior to FM radio.
When it comes to playing music from phones in cars, connection type seems to matter more than the source, and iOS has some weird built-in sound normalization only for CarPlay that drives me crazy.
In my Audi A3 (2018), if I connect my iPhone 12 Mini via AUX or Bluetooth, sounds works perfectly fine. Same when playing via CD or USB stick inserted into the car, no problem. FM radio also works well, regardless of volume.
However, if I play music via CarPlay (Spotify [lossless], YouTube, on phone .flac files, etc) some built-in sound normalization seems to kick in and suddenly it ruins the music when playing even slightly louder.
I've tried for years to figure out what the hell is going on, tried every setting under the sun, but cannot get it to work so only thing left is some built-in sound ruinification ("normalization") that Apple does, only when played via CarPlay, not when playing via AUX or Bluetooth.
Seems to happen with every car I try it with, but I never tried a different phone. So right now I'm choosing between being able to have GPS or listen to music properly, as I cannot do both at the same time...
Hmmm. What other cars have you tried? I wonder if it’s the DSP path used for CarPlay. Or could it be the Audi system is clipping this source? I’d find it really surprising if Apple is doing something here.
Have you tried Android Auto?
Maybe it’s trying to split the output into more than two audio channels when in CarPlay mode? If it were only Apple Music doing this I’d be sure this was triggering its Atmos output, not sure how it’d be affecting other players, but maybe.
Tried every conceivable player, Spotify, YouTube Music, YouTube, Apple Music (local files), Soundcloud and more, all of them leading to the same thing, via USB+CarPlay the sound get normalized somehow but if using AUX/Bluetooth, works normally.
> Maybe it’s trying to split the output into more than two audio channels when in CarPlay mode?
I hope so, most of what I play is stereo, and works fine via AUX/Bluetooth.
On the other hand, you are limited by having CD's which compared to streaming stuff from Spotify is much much less convenient, take up space and you need to create/buy them, your playlist don't synch up with your other devices. CD experience is much less streamlined than a smartphone. Perhaps nostalgia makes them seem cooler for you, but I am not sold.
Whats even less convenient is opening up Spotify on a road trip to listen to some Sum 41, and finding out most of their catalog has been removed.
I agree that CDs have too much friction though. Theres no easy pathway from “I like this album” to listening in the car/stereo. Especially for someone who is constantly discovering music and keeping up with new releases from artists.
First of all, not all releases are even available on CD. Even if they were, I would be spending thousands of dollars per month for the amount of music I listen to. Not to mention the lead time from ordering CDs which could take a couple weeks or more to arrive. And then I can’t even listen in my new car anyway cause there’s no CD drive.
I like hi-res lossless audio files. I can load them up on a USB and plug it into the car. I don’t have to mess around with Bluetooth at all. It’s easier to get the music too. And it sounds better. And it can’t be taken away. And is cross platform. And its free!
Btw I like supporting artists, especially the less popular ones. If I like your stuff, Ill buy some merch. But thats after I have the music.
Not GP. But a decade ago, my brother’s car didn’t have bluetooth. We burned down a few mixes on CD and that was ok for long trek during town. He replaced that unit but we still used those CD from time to time. It was simpler than deciding which phone to connect.
Even today, while I use spotify on my work computer, it’s basically the same albums every day (around a dozen). Playing CDs would be probably better than switching to the UX disaster that is Spotify
> Even today, while I use spotify on my work computer, it’s basically the same albums every day (around a dozen). Playing CDs would be probably better than switching to the UX disaster that is Spotify
Why don't you switch to CDs then? Something is telling me this isn't quite the full story.
I'm sure lots of people who don't really need to use Spotify use Spotify all the time, if you really do listen to just a few albums, why not buy those off Bandcamp/Beatport/Whatever then listen to those and stop paying Spotify? I'd easily switch away from Spotify if I no longer saw/agreed with the convenience, but hard to beat it for discovery right now.
The full story is that CDs have a physicality to them that can be somewhat inconvenient.
But the concept holds. I have a directory in a copyparty share that I stream music from constantly. It's probably 20 albums worth of music, and it's just in a mix that I put on almost every day, whether I'm driving or I'm working.
I tend to tune into livestreams on YouTube for the discovery aspect.
You can still buy dedicated music players with many gigabytes of storage. Leave that in the car plugged into the stereo. They are comparatively dirt cheap from what was available before streaming took over.
I have a car that doesn't have bluetooth, and trust me, when it's not there, you miss it.
I’m in a similar situation, my car does have Bluetooth, but I mostly use cd’s and radio, the one thing I wish I had was a map in a convenient spot, I have to have my phone set up in some awkward holder to view it, I’m dependent on using the maps app on my phone
> the radio turns on instantly and start playing music, no things that have to boot
Currently my bane with the smart TV I have. Takes so long to boot and to wake from sleep that I’d press the power button, go to make my coffee and then get back to it. Otherwise I’d be halfway through my breakfast when all I wanted to do is watch a few videos on Youtube.
Seconding this. Who knew that the time an old CRT took to warm up would seem like an instant compared to the boot time of a 75” flatscreen introduced 35 years later? :[
I miss dumb TVs so much.
who asked?
Your comment got downvoted for being flippant but I agree. It's an interesting discussion but it really comes off as grandstanding. Doesn't address the main thrust of the article nor the comment to which it replies.
But how will they surveil you if you bring your own device...
Consistency would be nice. YT music on Android Auto moved the buttons around again recently. You can still see where the thumbs up button used to be from my fingerprints. It's not smaller and on the other side.
“Stays up to date over the long term” is in the “cons” list in my book - I’d prefer to have as few changes and rely on muscle memory as much as possible; and I find updates risky in this context.
I don’t mind a built in infotainment system stuck in a previous era, as long as it works.
Just wanting to point out that yours is a valid preference, but as Casey points out: Go right ahead and don’t use CarPlay. No one has ever been forced to use it on any car because it’s optional. If you want to plug an iPhone in for music or charging, you can tap “No” to CarPlay once and never be asked again.
I'd definitely mind being be stuck in the previous era of maps/driving directions.
To voice an alternative that isn't touched much in this discussion:
> - "It's on your phone"
Straight use your phone.
There is no need for the car to adapt, no updates, no back deal by the car manufacturer, nothing is tied to the car except Bluetooth.
Current screens are IMHO big enough, moving to a tablet or foldables is also an option
Mounting/unmounting is a solved problem since magsafe (or Peak Design like stronger updates), which also handles charging.
Voice commands will be enough for most operations and you're guaranteed to have physical buttons for volume up/down and screen off.
You're also 100% efficient with the interface.
Literally everything you said is not true for me
- My phone's screen is nowhere near big enough for me to "glance" at it while driving (to see if my turn is coming up, etc)
- I'm not carrying around a tablet with me - my phone fits in my pocket
- Mounting is _not_ a solved problem. It just... isn't. This is a whole topic on it's own, but mounting a phone in a good position, where it will stay without moving/falling/bugging (especially in 100+ degree heat) and not be in the way of _other_ car things is a pain
- I already have physical buttons (that interact with car play, where needed) for all those things in my car
- Interacting with the screen of my phone while driving is 100% not something I'm proficient with; nor would I want to be. It's not designed for interacting with it while not paying attention to it. CarPlay is
Fully agree on screen size. In my car the dash screen over twice the physical size of my iPhone 16 Pro Max and is much easier to read maps from at a glance.
CarPlay enables a car-friendly interface with big buttons, shortcuts to navigation/music/communication, and minimal distractions. I don’t know of any way to get that on the phone’s own display.
Can't speak for Carplay, but Android Auto does try to distract me with attempts of engagement like "Is the construction site still there?" and other shit. The car's (an Audi) system does not, but it fails on many other levels. Both make me angry, albeit for different reasons.
> Android Auto does try to distract me with attempts of engagement like "Is the construction site still there?" and other shit.
That's not Android Auto, it's Waze doing that (and it would do it on Apple too). And it's not "an attempt at engagement", it's a cost for keeping the real-time map and traffic data that Waze is chosen for up-to-date. Use Google Maps if you don't like the interruptions.
Tbf, Google Maps also has these prompts. One probably sees them less due to Google having achieved critical mass, but in quiet rural areas I see them quite often
Interesting, I hadn't noticed... Though related to the critical mass, keep in mind that Waze has been acquired by Google many years ago now (13, specifically).
Sometimes Google Maps does that too, I’m pretty sure.
It does, I saw it in Houston this past weekend on android auto and google maps, "police reported ahead; still there [yes] [no]"
Just came to say this as well. Happens in Europe too (well, obviously :) ).
I do that on the bike but the car screen integration is nice for navigation. Usually your phone goes in a worse position than the gauge cluster. Even on the bike, the couple cm farther down are the difference between looking down and it being in peripheral vision. The passenger can also fuck around with the music without changing connected phone or giving them the phone itself. And playing around with the phone directly is illegal while the tablet is fine (for me very minor, never been caught).
I think that last one is a negative. I remember where the controls are in any given car, and would rather all of the controls in that care stay in the same place, even if that car is a decade old. Learning a different radio interface in each car isn't a big deal, because there's many more much more dramatic differences from car to car, so I have to learn that car anyway.
Auto manufacturers aren’t likely to provide updates over the long term.
Imagine if your ten year old car hasn’t seen an infotainment update in four+ years. Or if you want to buy used.
Personally I’d much prefer my phone. It’s baked into Apple/Google ‘s business model to keep it up to date.
Also I only need my phone’s subscription, not an additional one with the auto manufacturer.
I can get the same thing with an aux cable
Aux cables were ubiquitous when cars were rolling speakers. I wouldn’t buy a car without an aux input, I didn’t care how many cds it could hold.
Now that cars are rolling screens, I wouldn’t buy a car without screen mirroring for the same reason.
No. No you can't. The specific example of preparing a playlist sure, but Carplay goes way beyond that. You can preload the navigation route, tweak it a bit, then when you sit down and plug your phone into the car its on the navigation screen. You can make phone calls using the microphones in the car. In a sufficiently integrated car you can have turn by turn directions pop up on the dashboard or a heads up display rather than having to look down into the center console while trying to work out which lane you should be in.
Surprised no one's mentioned it so far, but CarPlay / Android Auto aren't just features, they're consistency. Across makes, models, years. I know what I'm getting when I connect my phone - and if anyone uses my car with their own device, they get their own dashboard, as well. One interesting use case I saw was a couple where one used a left-to-right interface and the other a right-to-left UI. CarPlay makes this easy, because the interface is linked to your own personal device.
This is huge for me - I'm in rental cars every other week or so 'cause I fly a lot for work and getting to factories in the boonies isn't really doable on public transport. I used to spend 20 minutes in the europcar car park every single time and then have to log out of everything when I dropped the car off. Now I just hook up Android Auto and I'm back into the same podcast I had on the flight, my itinerary is planned in already and I can head straight to my hotel. Still have the old problem with smart TV's though. Can't usually be fucked to login for two nights so I just watch TV on my laptop.
> Can't usually be fucked to login for two nights so I just watch TV on my laptop
I recently had the idea of taking the FireStick 4K Max that I bought ~1year ago for the living room smart OLED TV which is getting a little older, I had gotten ready to take it on a few trips I'm doing this year, thought I was being clever, unfortunately it died a literal week after the warranty, boot looping constantly.
I won't buy another Firestick again, it was atrociously add-riddled and often showing things inappropriate for the kids in the middle of the day, but if generic Android TV stick like that was available with good performance and all the necessary DRM levels, I'd probably use that.
For now, I will just carry an HDMI cable and use my laptop.
My wife swears by using a FireStick. It was miserable due to hotel captive wifi portals often failing to work properly with the browser of the FS, and even when it does work, typing your name/room number is miserable on a TV.. Adding a travel router to the mix allows you to auth via phone/laptop, which makes things a whole lot nicer.
Unlike the sibling, I've never encountered a hotel with all ports blocked. But I have encountered hotels where there is no way to choose other ports. In that case, I've just unplugged their STB and plugged my FS in.
I haven't tried this on iPhone yet, but on android you can share Wi-Fi connection. Many times I've connected phone to hotel Wi-Fi and then chromecast to my phone.
Sadly, we're both on iPhone and you cannot share Wi-Fi like that on iPhone :(
This was a bummer just the other day where my iPhone somehow (and I still don't know how) auto-signed into an amazingly fast wifi AP managed by my cell provider, but I was stuck working on crappy guest wifi on my laptop and could not get the laptop onto the better wifi.
Hotel TV's often have all inputs blocked out actually. It's really stupid.
> Surprised no one's mentioned it so far, but CarPlay / Android Auto aren't just features, they're consistency.
No, they are not. When you press "Home" button on your car where does it go? In some cars it goes to CarPlay main screen, in others it goes to car's built-in system main screen. When you press back what happens? When you press Nav/Maps button where does it go? Again, some cars will launch built-in navigation while others will go in whatever last nav app you used in car play. Mazda disables touch screen when car play is enabled (which is good and I like it)
> One interesting use case I saw was a couple where one used a left-to-right interface and the other a right-to-left UI.
That depends on if car was originally made for left-hand or right-hand traffic, some cars allow you to change that (in my BMW it required messing with obd port)
Agreed. Extremely important on rental cars.
Exactly! I can't stop wondering: are these executives just not thinking, or are they blindly repeating what they were told to? If I get into a rental car, do they seriously think I want to spend the next 30 minutes logging into Spotify, mapping apps, Overcast and anything else that I want to use but that needs to know me? And then worry about logging out of all that stuff once I return the rental?
It is hard to make an executive not enshittify something when his salary bonus depends on him enshittifying it.
The power here is on the rental car companies. They buy the most cars by far. And so when they say that customers won't accept a rental car without a CarPlay, the car makers will listen.
Does their salary bonus depend on that though?
Car makers make money selling cars. Which buyers happily pay five figure suns for. An executive can add to the bottom line by raising sales prices/volumes with a more competitive product, or lowering component costs.
This isn’t some weird social media business with non-paying users and a reliance on ad money.
Yeah, this!
Getting all my information - calendar, maps history, music, contacts, etc. on a rental car without syncing that info to it is absolutely great.
I would prefer knobs and buttons over a screen flow in either direction, but no modern car caters to this anymore.
VW is bringing back physical buttons in their newer models, e.g. ID.3 Neo and Polo. Skoda never did away with them.
It's also part of the safety rating of Euro NCAP, and AFAIK China mandated physical buttons for important functions as well.
The wheel in an Enyaq before the facelift is the same haptic one-button shitshow. They have some buttons that act like shortcuts below the infotainment. But it the screen is still essentialistisk for managing crucial functions.
The steering wheel on my Scala has 8 buttons, two knobs (which can be clicked), 2 flappy paddles and 3 stalks...
I have a 2021 Skoda Octavia and boy do I have to touch the screen a lot.
Yes, you can open the AC screen by tapping the AC button but then you still need use the touch screen for any actual AC adjustments.
It’s a joke that that’s legal. Looking at my phone is illegal, yet it’s many times faster.
My 2025 Audi A3 is pretty good with buttons and knobs. The only time I need to touch the screen (other than for CarPlay) is to tell it, "no, you still cannot steal my data" every time I turn the car on.
My Hyundai Ioniq 5 has Car Play and knobs and buttons. It's not either or.
That's in fact one of the pros of carplay/android auto as opposed to just putting your phone in one of those windscreen attached holders; you get to use the volume buttons on the steering wheel. Annoyingly my car doesn't have play/pause buttons on there, but if it had, they would work.
Even on the holder, you'd use Bluetooth, and those buttons work. With Android Auto/CarPlay you can also use a joystick, if your car has one.
Our BMW i3 also has CarPlay and it’s all knobs and buttons for interaction!
Lots of modern cars cater for this. It’s actually a marketing point with manufacturers like the VW group publicising how they’re bringing back tactile interfaces. And some ranges of cars never took that away (for example Jaguar).
How can they be "bringing it back" if they already offer it? So they can't be currently catering for it.
Also, the Jaguar F Pace was a big screen with the only knob being the vents, so they did take the majority away.
They did away with a lot of physical buttons in the past. Now they are in the process of bringing them back. There are some models still sold with the old design while all new models have physical again.
Also some of their brands had physical buttons all along. I think Skoda never removed them in the Elroq or Enyak.
Even physical controls can be a downgrade if poorly implemented.
R.I.P. Anton Yelchin, who brought us joy with his portrayal of Chekov in the Star Trek films, before losing his life at only 27, from a switch poorly masquerading as a brake lever.
In my mind it's always because he played Kyle Reese once and the car was just confused about it.
At this point, I feel like automakers should be criminally liable for redesigning the automatic shifter UX. It's probably the 3rd/4th most dangerous control in the vehicle; why do we want people to have to relearn it every time they're in an unfamiliar car?
(I stick with a manual for my vehicles, so fortunately I'm mostly immunized against the madness.)
I bought a BYD that is as close to that as I could.
https://esv6hz7yeij.exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/b...
From everything I’ve read about BYD, I’m thinking it’s almost certainly going to be the car I buy after my move to Mexico.
But still no pause button, only mute! Just maddening, do they think I only listen to radio?
In my Hyundai pressing the mute button while on Bluetooth/Android Auto pauses playback and mutes. Pressing again resumes playback and volume to previous level.
That's a great solution, I wish mine did that.
Not only does my wife’s vehicle pause CarPlay audio when I mute it, it can also pause the radio, and pick up when I play it again.
Must be frustrating for the radio host to have to wait mid-sentence for you to unmute.
Presumably pressing Play will pause when already playing? Like it's been a case for like 40 years or so?
Well, either I'm very dumb and didn't think to press play on the car I own to solve the problem I've had for years, or you're missing the fact that there is no play button on BYD cars.
I wonder which it is.
There's clearly a play button on that photo referenced in this thread. Whether your car has that is irrelevant, we're not discussing YOURS.
Ah yes, the play button, and also clearly the reverse play button on the opposite side, which presumably makes the audio play in reverse.
I have the same car, those are the previous/next buttons.
You feel better about yourself when you patronize this much?
We're literally talking about a car wheel, how do you get off on it so much?
There's no Play button on the whole wheel? That roller, doesn't it also play/pause when pressed?
The roller mutes when pressed.
This is what set me off:
> Like it's been a case for like 40 years or so?
That thing set you off? Really?
Just guessing they wouldn't have said it if it wasn't the case.
Oh yes the mute button, very useful when trying to pause a podcast :(
I use CarPlay all the time and I almost never use the touchscreen - as you shouldn't while driving. The car has buttons and knobs, on the dash and on the wheel, to call up all sorts of options in the UI. The only time I need to touch the screen is if I want a full screen map (instead of the three-panel usual view).
I'm unconvinced. Navigating the UI via knobs seems much more distracting to me. I have to reach farther in my vehicle, but more importantly, I have to watch the screen anyway to make sure the knob ends up on the right control.
Am I missing something?
It really depends on what you are doing, but yes - if you need to look at the screen to do anything, you still fail safety. A knob is nicer than a touchscreen because you don't have to adjust to a moving vehicle to hit the right spot of the screen (for this same reason recent airplanes have buttons in addition to touchscreens).
Still, if you are very used to the UI, you can say the music app is one item down from the map, and the phone is two, so you can count presses. I was able to SMS people with a Nokia phone with a hand on the steering wheel and one on the phone (back when it was not forbidden).
Voice controls?
My 2023 Mazda CX-5 uses knobs to control car play, it basically acts like using Tab key to walk through selectable UI elements.
Mazda has knobs and buttons that can even control carplay
Same with Toyota (fun fact—I discovered earlier this year, over three years that I bought my Prius, that there were whole displays in the dashboard I didn’t know existed while trying to adjust the volume from the steering wheel while I was backing out of my garage, but because the wheel was rotated 180°, I hit the wrong button. Turns out the navigation between different info displays is 2-dimensional and the ↑/↓ gives additional views into some of the information that I had no idea existed, as well as revealing some functionality I didn’t know was there for the HVAC).
I believe even they dropped it in the latest cars, unfortunately
Yeah, the latest CX-5 and 6e went all in Tesla screen derangement and folks don't love it.
All the effort put in to stopping drivers distracting themselves with phones while driving, then we get big distracting touchscreens with apps front+centre in many new cars, and apparently that's OK.
I think it's just typical that this is allowed because it maximises profits; let's be real, a big fat touch screen and nothing else, is significantly cheaper than all of those expensive buttons, knobs, dials and switches that have been engineered and tested to perfection.
Did cars get cheaper when they took all of those out? I certainly didn't notice.
Some still have knobs. My mom's caddy has knobs in front of the armrest that control everything, so the touchscreen is optional but works just as well for those that want it.
Jeep may not be modern, but all of the windows, climate, etc, are physical buttons.
It will also depreciate by 50% or more in 5 years, so there’s that. Honda and Toyota mostly use knobs and buttons for important controls and retain their value much better than Stellantis trash.
My Mazda controls Auto/CarPlay with a physical controller so it's not either/or.
Last time I got a rental car, it was a Mazda 3. I really enjoy how the dial works.
How could you say something so brave yet so true
Author says "I literally will not buy a car that does not support CarPlay."
From July 2022: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/22/apple-carplay-could-be-a-tro...
Not only does it irritate me not having it in a practical sense, it’s also an arrogance on behalf of the manufacturer. “We can do it better than iOS/Android”, or “We have a better reason to do it”. No, and No.
I’ve had ~15 cars over the past 25 years, different make and models, some really cheap, some fairly expensive. One thing they all have in common: their terrible infotainment UI.
I’m sure they are trying and it has gotten slightly better lately - but it’s still not great imho. If they really want to do it better than Apple etc., they seriously need to up their game - and I really wish they would, but I don’t see that happening, the cost is too high.
I don't think they can. The infotainment is outsourced to who knows where and those people develop based on specs sent by the manufacturer: as cheap as possible and as fast as possible. Unless you actually spend time understanding what people want, how they want it, if they like it or not, you cannot have a superior product.
I have a newish car (2023 make) with an Android based infotainment system: the built-in maps move so slow, no online updates (I have to use a stick to update them once a year) and so on. Basically they put it there I think out of habit, not that the majority of their customer demand in-car navigation as a must to buy it.
Even if they can do better, will it be better than Carplay in 10 years? Or 20? Will I get free GPS map updates for that long?
Some brands don't even do OTA updates, so you'd have to get your car in for a service if there's a new feature or bug fix in an update you care about. I'd never want to do that for a map fix when I could just use Carplay where Google Maps (or whatever else) has already fixed it.
And even if they do OTA updates, they won't be updating those maps in 10 years, much less 20.
Car Infotainment Systems vs Built-in TV UI/Apps shittiness FIGHT!
It's a real competition, not sure who would take home the gold.
It pains me when I see people using the built-in TV apps. I've bought and/or gifted older Apple TVs and the like (Fire/Chrome stick/box) to show there is a better way. The lag and general slowness of those interfaces drive me nuts.
Winner goes through to the semifinal against an in flight seatback entertainment system, but will go down in the final to a WiFi router configuration web interface with default password ‘admin’.
I worked at a car company. It's not arrogance, it's greed. They do want their own proprietary infotainment to be good, but it's more that they don't want to abdicate control, both out of a possessive feeling over what you're looking at, and over the potential for selling you access to their own stuff on that screen.
Ironically, it’s the same greed that has made Apple rich: the carmaker wants to own a platform where the only way onto that screen is by cutting them in on the profits. Of course, on a “much less accessible to small businesses” scale. I assume Spotify or Audible have to pay large annual lump sums just to be there on the GM platform, rather than “just” the 30% shakedown Apple charges. So it excludes any developer who isn’t part of a Fortune 500 company.
Every time I have to cycle through the SirusXM hardcoded ad in the AM->FM->Bluetooth->SirusXM cycle of my car stereo's mode picker, I get angry at Toyota.
Even if they could "do it better" it is still locked into a single device/vehicle and can't match the eco-system that Apple and Google have developed across a family of devices and services. In order to really compete, they would need to enter markets already dominated by big tech companies.
They can do it better than your phone but only if you are a professional driver in your car for at least four hours a day. The typical person spending half an hour going to work or going to get groceries has everything on their phone and the hassle of setting up their card just how they want it isn't worth it. The typical person also is more likely to be thinking the address I need to go is in my calendar system and that's going to be more hassle getting into the car then the open in maps function from the phone.
That’s just a line. More like, “We can collect our own data”, or “We can lock them in and collect subscription fees.”
Mostly the second point.
They already collect and track you, even with car play. I strongly recommend this CCC talk, where they hacked a Volkswagen database that contained unfiltered, high-accuracy, timestamped locations of a large majority of electric cars from VW group.
Based on that they were, for example, able to identify cars owned by members of Germany's security apparatus: where they work, where they live, where they drop off their children each morning. Who visited brothels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGzoXbbth0s&t=30m
The frustrating thing is I bet they’re still tracking and collecting this when you stop paying for the tracking / telematics.
Just curious, are car manufacturers required to obtain explicit consent from owners for collecting such data according to GDPR? Or German car lobby's pocket politicians were able to carve out some exception for them?
And what of passengers?
Where's GDPR when you need it?
good thing that brothels are legal in germany.
Irrelevant - it’s still a great type of kompromat when you want to gain leverage on someone. They probably don’t want their wives to know, for instance. Same if they’re a prominent backer of religious moral values.
They all think they can do better, and it is sheer arrogance, because even the best of them is utter garbage compared to software that is actually built with fast iteration, UX research, and real user testing. No car manufacturers do a good job of this, and they all bake their atrocious UX into a $50k piece of hardware you keep for decades and which *never* gets a significant software update. The fact that they don’t see how impossible it is for them to win at this game is why they will never win. Sorry Rivian. Your vehicle is great but you’re handicapping yourself with software hubris.
I hear so many complaints here on HN about "car UX". I am not a Tesla fanboy, but lots of people who review Teslas say they have great "car UX". Can you share some specifics about what you don't like?
I used to be a person who thought I would never buy a car without Carplay, and Tesla won me over.
I don’t pay for any Tesla subscription services, but I do not miss Carplay. Would it be nice to have? Sure. But there was/is no equivalent car at that price with Carplay.
From a non-(voluntary-)user perspective, that kind of arrogance and frankly abuse is what got Apple diehard fans, so it wouldn't surprise me if Rivian is also aiming for that.
I mean they can’t have no option and rely completely on CarPlay and if they do that they can’t half ass their own system. There’s no excuse for not supporting CarPlay though.
Since then GM has dropped CarPlay. Rivian has appeared following Tesla and refusing to support it. And I thought there were some other existing manufacturer who was either getting rid of it or thinking about it.
Basically despite the popularity the market seems to be moving against it slowly. And the more those cars succeed the more other auto makers will be willing to follow.
It's not that the market is moving away, but more like car companies realized if they want to sell monthly subscriptions in the future, they need to own the software.
The car companies need to stay in their lanes on this one. You’re risking selling a >$40k piece of hardware that requires professional service every six months in order to sell me $240/yr in software subscriptions.
I turned down buying a Rivian for exactly this reason, but it seems plenty of consumers don’t care.
Curious if anyone has been able to calculate the sales and profits surrendered by the likes of GM and Rivian due to this switch. (My guess is it’s low.)
This is part of a broader trend I see in all consumer markets: especially in markets with just a few large important players: the companies start making very unpopular moves in the hopes that their competitors will realize the massive profit potential and follow them out of greed rather than try to steal customers by being the good guys.
Examples: self-ordering kiosks at restaurants, every change made at every airline in the last 15 years, bandwidth caps at ISPs, “resort fees” at every hotel, tipping for car services, etc.
They know that since there aren’t many options, it doesn’t matter if customers all hate it, as long as they have no choice. The automakers (at least in their fantasies) smell blood in the water for the idea of CarPlay/Android Auto, and want to kill it if they can.
Aviation is an incredibly low-margin business - airlines are less trying to earn "massive profits" and more just trying to continue to operate year over year
$240/yr in software subscriptions but likely far more than that by selling the extra metadata they can extract from the service
its likely not the metadata, since they already have access and sell that, but then they can sell ads on maps like Google does.
This is crazy to me because the primary value proposition of Rivian's Connect+, as I see it, is enabling the hotspot while you're in the car and being able to monitor Gear Guard while you're away from the car. These are entirely separate from supporting CarPlay/Android Auto.
If Rivian et al. truly want to sell a premium product, their software needs to be premium. And frankly it's just not there. The other day I was trying to listen to an upcoming album that has a few singles released. On my phone I can do that no problem. On the Rivian Spotify app, the album just didn't show up. It wasn't possible to play those songs in order without searching for the songs one by one. There are a ton of things that I love about my R1T, but as more time passes, the gap between what they offer and what other manufacturers offer becomes more and more apparent
I'm in this camp: I will not buy a car without CarPlay. And I put so few miles on my car that while I'd like a new one, if the vendors make this impossible then no one gets my money.
Same here. I have a Chevy that supports wireless CarPlay and I refuse to buy a car that doesn't have it. We're looking at replacing it soon, and we're going to go with a Subaru in no small part because it supports CarPlay.
Are there vehicles that support it in a way that isn't buggy? I have a few friends with it and I don't think I've been on a single ride with them without a glitch. Freezing interface, spontaneously jumping to regular Bluetooth, music playing but no actual volume, plugging into usb power causing some kind of mode-shift that makes the screen hang or briefly cease to work, all kinds of nonsense. Also kind of weirdly bad interface I feel (very subjective opinion there, obviously that's not a "fact").
I've only had Android Auto in my own vehicles, and while it hasn't been as buggy, it feels slow. I never use it anymore.
I have a mid-aughts VW and have never had any of these issues. So I suppose you can count mid-aughts VWs.
I own a Ford and a BMW, both with CarPlay. The BMW is flawless. The Ford just refuses to connect about 10% of the time and requires the infotainment system to be rebooted. It also occasionally connects but leaves audio coming out of the phone speaker. So yes, implementations vary.
I have a Ford that after 13 years is reaching the point where I'm considering replacing it.
Their homemade infotainment system prior to CarPlay was awful, and has an overflow error which hits me about once every 6 months which requires pulling the fuse to hard reset it. As far as I can tell they keep adding new songs to a stack, and never flush it so at some point you'll reach the end of a song and it won't play any more. Once you reached that you can only use the phone function, attempts to use music result in you getting your Bluetooth connection terminated.
Regarding Android Auto being slow, it could just be due to your phone. It has to stream the whole interface as video to the car's infotainment system over USB (or Wi-Fi on newer models), then handle taps and stuff that it receives back, if you're using an old or budget android phone then that can be pretty laggy.
I have the Nothing Phone 3a now, before that, I had all flagship pixels. 0 were not slow. I always figured it had to do with the infotainment centers implementation of the protocols or simply their hardware.
It was always stable for me, just sluggish.
If I had to pick I'd take sluggish over constantly buggy of course. So props there.
The infotainment setup on my Tesla though is golden with only the occasional quirk. After using that, Carplay and Android Auto feel very regressive. A guy I work with has an R2 so I got to tinker with it and I figured it would be comparable but it actually kinda sucked.
Which cars specifically?
I haven't seen a broad range, but Mazda seems very fast and reliable.
Chevrolet (prior to recent models that drop it) and Honda do it well.
my mazda cx-5 has had no issues. it's an extension of my phone at this point.
fun car to drive too. zoom zoom :)
Ooo they do look badass. Really pretty shape.
Haven’t had issues with Hondas or Toyotas since the 2020ish models at least
It's funny you mention Toyota, my Dad's 2022 Civic Hybrid is the one I get to witness being buggy garbage pretty much non-stop with CarPlay. Lord don't plug it into the USB port that does data if you're already on wireless Carplay. You might be done until you pull over. I also love the way using speech to reply to a text often resumes the wrong song (seemingly just starts a random song midway through, and multiple times the Joe Rogan Podcast which dad doesn't listen to and is not subscribed to - when this happens it always starts at the same point in the intro).
I don't actually know if the Toyota infotainment setup is to blame though. Since I've never encountered a reasonably stable, glitch free Carplay experience in the last 5 years, I've always just figured "that must be how CarPlay is". I have never owned an iPhone so I only get the cliffnotes version of the experience. But since it's got a 0% track record in that limited viewing, I'm either unlucky, emit magical anti-apple em waves, or am possessed by the soul of Steve Jobs favourite black shirt.
I don't know if the sensitivity to Siri can be turned down, again not an iPhone guy myself, but it bugs me how often we will be talking and suddenly the audio stops and Siri says "I don't know how to help you with that" or something similar. Sometimes we just don't talk so that we don't constantly have Siri interrupting Hardcore History.
Just a small note: Civic is Honda, not Toyota.
> ”Rivian … following Tesla and refusing to support it.”
Actually, Tesla is apparently planning to add CarPlay support via a software update.
It hasn’t happened yet, as apparently it’s been waiting on a new feature from Apple which will allow navigation data to be shared/synced between CarPlay and the car’s self-driving system.
This Route Sharing feature was announced at WWDC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykwG0I8UGjg&t=771s
Tesla might actually support car play soonish: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-13/tesla-is-...
Same here. CarPlay is in the top 10 features for my next Car. Even for my older 911 which I bought second hand, the first investment was a Pioneer head unit with CarPlay.
In my opinion, anything older than a 996 shouldn’t have an infotainment screen. Looks very out of place. Just use a phone mount for navigation or use audio navigation through a period correct radio.
There doesn’t have to be a big screen.
Porsche sells head units with car play for their cars going back to the 1960’s. I think they look great.
https://vehicle-accessories.porsche.com/prod/pag/Vehicle/Acc...
I agree. I find it tacky when people buy old BMWs and Mercedeses just to throw the original (often mint condition) radio unit out and put in a cheap carplay display.
Like you have this 30 year old car with a pristine wooden trim where all components align nicely in design and you decide to ruin it for the convenience of having notifications in your face while driving? A phone holder looks much less invasive.
It's a 997. it had the original OEM double din stereo with the Nav. Porsche offered the PCCM CarPlay upgrade, but decided the Pioneer unit was much better.
Nice one. Yes on the 997 a CarPlay screen will not look out of place!
Tesla and I think Rivian goes deep into the computer as a control surface. They save $10 not having a handle for the glovebox or whatever.
GM just wants to extract a pound of flesh. All are companies making dumb decisions by ignoring what customers want.
It will cost them customers. My company buys like 10k cars a year and we make CarPlay a requirement. We see it as a safety and productivity issue. We want employees using maps to navigate and avoid hazards, but don’t want them operating our vehicles unsafely.
Personally, it would be a long shot for me to buy any GM product due to high depreciation. The CarPlay/Android Auto thing disqualifies them.
Tesla might support it.
https://www.teslarati.com/apple-developing-missing-link-tesl...
GM has not dropped CarPlay. I just checked out some 2026 GM vehicles (Chevy) and they list CarPlay.
GM 100% dropped it in their EVs and announced moving away from it.
https://www.theverge.com/transportation/804562/gm-apple-carp...
It may be for MY 2027. I know the new Bolt drops it.
Right now it’s only dropped in GM’s EVs. Of course when this causes a drop in EV sales, they’ll use that as an excuse to kill off their EV lines.
They’ll attribute that to something else and claim dropping CarPlay was a huge success and do it in gas models.
Most likely they’ll do both, with a straight face.
Blazer EV dropped it and sold like shit lol
I have a vehicle that's basically a BMW, which has excellent navigation integration with a HUD. Recently, they announced that my vehicle would receive map and software updates, for basically as long as the included modem was functional.
My vehicle doesn't support the carplay to hud stuff, but that's okay. The thing is... when my car stops getting map and traffic updates, I will still be able to switch to carplay for at least the command screen presenting information. I intend on keeping this vehicle for a long time, so that's important to me.
On top of that, carplay offers better bitrate than bluetooth.
For people that wish to keep a vehicle for a long time, carplay/android auto isn't just a convenience anymore. With the increased integration of headunits, aftermarket becomes a tougher sell.
> I have a vehicle that's basically a BMW
Why not just name the brand?
I assume it's a Toyota Supra
It could also be a Rolls Royce or a Mini.
Or a Grenadier.
That's just engine and gearbox i believe, not really a BMW.
Could be an Alpina
The screen is also BMW.
Isn’t that a type of fish?
I assume it's a MINI, which is made by BMW
It could be a small brand not sold in the US that a large portion of the audience here wouldn’t recognize.
Excluding whatever's going on in China right now, there's just not that many small brands left. You only have to have a passing interest in cars to be aware of pretty much every global car brand - excluding high end supercars, kit car weirdness and whatever mayhem is happening in China.
If only there was a global repository of information about everything that was readily accessible at our fingertips that anyone here could access!
Let’s create such a marvelous thing! What shall we call it?
> She delivered a shocking stat: 79% of U.S. buyers would only buy a car if it supported CarPlay.
I would be shocked by the number being that high because while iOS has a slim majority of the market share, it's nowhere near 79%.
A household might have three or four mobile phones, but only one or two cars. Many cars also can and do support both Android Auto and Carplay. If my wife and I used Android and my teenage son used Apple, I'd definitely want our car to support both.
I would love to buy a Rivian R2 but I will absolutely not drop that kind of money until they support CarPlay. To me - a refusal to support CarPlay is an extremely user-hostile decision.
Sounds like the Apple monopoly has made yet another industry its bitch.
These companies are giving up sovereignty of their primary product to a company that can steer away customer loyalty and disrupt any hope these companies have of increasing their already scant margins.
Any car should be able to interface with a phone without Apple or Google's legally binding terms and NDAs. The direction of control should be on the side of the customer first, and the automotive company second.
Where the hell are the regulators? This is not okay.
That doesn’t make any sense… The comment you’re replying to is about people’s desire for a particular feature, but pretty much any car that supports CarPlay also supports the Android equivalent, as well as still having media playback and often some kind of navigation without either!
Your comment would only make sense in a hypothetical situation where the car infotainment only worked if you had an iPhone or if there was some kind of exclusivity agreements to preclude it working with Android, but that isn’t the case in any circumstance I’m aware of.
It makes perfect sense. Android Auto is not libre. You need an attested Google device to use Android Auto and an attested Apple device to use CarPlay, so both options are anti-user at their core, forcing you into being non-anonymous and tracked in a myriad of ways that you can only bypass if you run a custom ROM.
Seems like, if anything, the right action for regulators would be to enforce car manufacturers to not refuse to support existing consumer connectivity protocols... or at least not unless they can come up with something at least as good. And definitely something that isn't "pay us a data subscription so we can track you too while you use a crappier re-implementation of what your phone can already do."
Or "we're gonna cut off our older models to force people towards new cars instead of older ones." That's a bad pattern to let people selling $30,000+ devices get access to.
What regulators and the industry should have done was to devise a touch-over-HDMI protocol, so that CarPlay can be deprecated and its successor sectioned off as they like. That was IMO the root cause of this problem.
This wouldn't be a solution to the argument in the article: Rivian and Tesla don't want to support phones projecting to infotainment
As it is, CarPlay is implemented as a h264 video stream which receives touch, microphone, and metadata from the vehicle, the protocol is fine albeit proprietary
As a owner of a GM without android auto, never again. Everything is on my phone but I can't safely access it while driving. Also can't legally because my state makes using the phone while driving illegal (for good reason. I suspect most states don't allow it)
Consumers having a preference is not ok?
I feel the same way about Android auto. I refuse to be locked into some terrible, never updated or expensive subscription vendor nav unit. I have a phone. I want to be able to use it.
Not just that, but car makers have proven they can’t be trusted with our data. My phone has all my appointments and addresses in it. I’d much rather use the nav on the phone where the data already is, then sync it with my car so they can do god knows what with it.
The customers want to be able to control the infotainment system, by functionally replacing it with something completely different, since the defaults are garbage across the industry. Both Apple and Google have outdone every single carmaker in what is supposedly their own game (or at least their own arena). Can't blame them for that.
What monopoly?
What do you want the regulators to do to Apple in this case? What have they done wrong?
> Where the hell are the regulators? This is not okay.
To quote a wise man:
>> We need to stop this helicopter civilization bullshit.
>>We're building 1984 to protect from god knows what imaginary harms.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48755473
These are the companies that undersigned the Orwellian "protect the kids" act.
These trillion dollar companies are the problem. They're moving into other healthy industries and crushing them. They're sucking the oxygen out of every market.
Stop cheerleading this. They need vibrant competition. We need a de-ossifying forest fire. We need lots of nimble smaller companies.
Instead the giants place a ceiling on the growth of every other industry, then when they need more growth, they start to creep in and dump on healthy markets unrelated to their original enterprise.
Look at Amazon giving away Lord of the Rings, running a $200M ad campaign for free on its Rivian trucks, printed boxes, website, app, etc., buying up MGM... How do actual companies in these spaces compete with the dumping?
How do businesses keep Apple and Google from strong-arming them? Rivian doesn't want to be Apple's bitch. You guys are cheerleading it and telling Rivian to bend over.
Google and Apple are the companies that want to track you and turn the internet into a land of device attestation and mandatory ID sign in. They're both actively building "age assurance" into their platforms, and it won't be long before they start gating internet use via these tendrils.
Google and Apple are not good companies.
You're all building this Orwellian hellscape. STOP.
You know the reason why companies like GM don't like CarPlay is because they think they should be the ones who get to track you, sell you various subscriptions, and sell the resulting data to third parties. Right?
You'll note that it wasn't Apple who sold out their own customers, it was GM. [1] False-equivalence arguments are both pointless and, in this case, unnecessary. There is a lesser and greater evil here, and the lesser one in this case happens to be Apple.
1: https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/gm-pay...
Android Auto is also a thing.
Android Auto is in the vast majority of cars that also have CarPlay.
What’s your point?
Do you understand how headunits work and have you ever sat in a car? It doesn’t sound like it since you think cars are forced to use CarPlay.
Ah yes, the solution to any and every problem, real or imagined, is more government.
I literally will not buy a car that has a microprocessor in it
(I will, apparently, never buy a car)
The 1977 Oldsmobile Toronado is generally considered to be the first car to have microprocessor control.
But Ford's EEC was built around Toshiba's TLCS-12, the world's first 12-bit microprocessor, developed specifically for engine control, and might have been in cars produced prior to 77, but documentation is spotty.
So do you only drive cars built prior to the late 70s? Because sacrificing the enormous safety improvements just for a bizarre feeling of moral superiority is a really awful hill to die on. And literal death is a real possibility
Or do you not drive and never planned to buy any kind of car and thus your claim is meaningless?
You can get up to 1983 without computers if that's what you're looking for. 1984, they all had computers. Then if it had a carburetor, there was still a computer somehow controlling that carburetor.
TPMS (tire pressure monitoring system) is a coin battery powered computer inside each tyre of your car. They’ve been around for a couple of decades now. Even the lowest end cars have TPMS in each wheel. If you change wheels you need to go to a wheel shop and have them re pair (as in re pair wifi) the wheel with your car. I had to do this recently with my 2014 ford focus.
Anyway those are just four of hundreds of computers in your car these days.
Not exactly a great example as it's unnecessary and expensive to replace. Lots of other microprocessors actually make your car easier and safer to drive.
TPMS has been mandatory in the U.S. since 2007. It turns out riding on under-inflated tires is dangerous, and people don’t regularly check their tire pressure.
My car will not exceed a certain speed if TPMS is malfunctioning.
Conveniently it cost around $200 every 5-7 years to replace all 4.
It amazes me that people don't notice. I was driving with a friend once and had to tell them to pull over because they had a puncture.
A TPMS doesn't make your car easier and safer to drive???
You can buy a tire gauge at a gas station for $10 and check your tires when you clean your car.
But then again, I am old enough perhaps to have been taught to regularly check your tires before driving to begin with.
The $10 gauge is of dubious accuracy. Especially if I bought it at a convenience store that happens to sell gas.
Did I just read an argument that it’s easier or safer to manually check your tire pressures rather than having the car do it automatically every time the car drives fast enough to “wake up” the TPMS units?
It's easier to do that than to pay to replace them when the battery dies. Just stop adding more unnecessary costs to my car maintenance!
That battery lasts longer than the tire. People sometimes try to say but I don't drive my car much and that doesn't change the math because tires are destroyed not just from the way of driving but also the sun and ozone in the air destroy tires it still needs to be replaced every seven years., it still needs to be replaced every seven years.
I’m totally comfortable going out to 12 years on tires. Beyond that, I’m replacing them. 7 seems excessively conservative for road use.
Some cars use ABS speed sensors instead of that which is usually a bit less accurate, but also less of a hassle.
Yes. But in my car the downside is that it does not tell which wheel has a problem, just a generice message: check tyre pressure.
Real TPMS sensors inside the wheel give much more accurate information.
That's a software issue rather than an inherent limitation. I've driven cars with abs-sensor based TPMS that will tell you which tire is under or over-inflated
I don't think this is a useful stance to take for more or less any reason (any reason you can point to will have a different underlying issue). Cars functionally have to have microprocessors, if nothing else but to control emissions, and that's a good thing. I don't want society to smell of exhaust, so that's an obvious and gigantic benefit. There are many other good reasons to have them, like rear cameras, tire pressure sensors, infotainment, the lot.
There are downsides, but many boil down to 'manufacturers are knobheads' (data collection, pushing subscriptions) and lessened control (tuning computers can be easier than tuning mechanics, you just aren't given control, so this to is arguably a case of 'manufacturers are knobheads', or sometimes liability issues).
I mean, "no microprocessor" means no engine designed in the past 30 years, because the fuel pump needs one.
"No antenna/modem I can't readily remove" might be _slightly_ more achievable.
I'm guessing you mean fuel injector? The pump that pushes or pulls fuel up from your tank is not very sophisticated, afaik.
Fuel injector timing and quantity, along with ignition timing, is generally computer controlled, certainly on any modern vehicle.
50, as another commenter pointed out.
That was the first such car. Even though the automatic transmission was invented a long time ago, new cars are still made with manual ones
That’s a very hard line
I am clearly in the minority here but I have driven cars with and without CarPlay and honestly do not care whether a car has it. I use my phone for navigation and mount it such that when I look at it I am not taking my eyes off the road. I find this to be far better than having to look down at the center of my dashboard but CarPlay navigation UI via Google Maps or Waze also works fine so it’s not a huge difference.
Realistically the only navigation UI have seen that was better was a 2012 or 2013 BMW 5 series which had a HUD that projected my location, speed, heading and turn by turn navigation (with lane info!) onto the windshield. That system rocked because of how the projected UI had your eyes focus farther out so you had a very easy time perceiving the road ahead while getting the next direction info.
I assume my next car will have it and I might even upgrade the radio in my current car to have it but it is to me entirely optional.
> having to look down at the center of my dashboard
that's why more recent models move the screen higher up. it sometimes looks a bit silly (like they glued an ipad on top of the dashboard), but it's a lot more usable
> HUD that projected my location, speed, heading and turn by turn navigation (with lane info!) onto the windshield
the latest carplay implementations are compatible with the inbuilt navigation aids, so turn signals from waze/maps/whatever will feed into the HUD
I wish everyone would just have an option to see the navigation the the gauge cluster.
That's a very common feature nowadays, isn't it? For a rather new models.
E.g. Peugeot 4008 I was driving a few months ago could show CarPlay/Auto maps on main gauge cluster.
My Kia Soul has a version of this, but it doesn't integrate with Carplay, and the maps that came with the car are already outdated enough to bother me.
you actually may be able to update these. it's worth looking into.
The maps? Why would I bother when I can use Carplay instead?
The car's integration with Carplay? Even models that are 4 years newer than mine seem to still not have this. Not sure what's going on there.
I meant if you wanted to update the maps in your gauge cluster.
https://update.kia.com
you said they bothered you, so I suggested a fix. no obligation to do it if you don't care.
It's a non-fix if I have to do that every year (or every however-often-I-notice-an-error, the first error I noticed was within a year). Google Maps is constantly updated. Not to mention that Kia aren't going to be supplying updates in 10 years, while Google probably are (and if they aren't, I can still use Carplay and a different set of maps).
> The maps? Why would I bother when I can use Carplay instead?
Because, I quote: "they bother you". Which would explain why should you bother, right?
(Also, I was specifically talking about having Android Auto/Carplay projected in gauge cluster.)
Carplay's a better fix for the map issue, since then I don't have to update them whenever I find an error. With Carplay, errors instead don't happen.
The directions being shown in the gauge cluster via carplay is still not a thing on later Kias from what I can tell, so that problem is unfixed no matter what.
Weirdly enough, some cars don't even have that cluster any more. Like the Volvo EX30.
I prefer it to the side a little bit. The glance down at my gauges means I completely lose sight of the road at least in my case.
After using a HUD , I don't want to go back to gauge cluster.
We all know driving looking at a phone is bad, starring at your cluster for a few seconds can also be bad.
It works with Apple Maps and Google Maps, Waze doesn’t pass this information to the car.
> that's why more recent models move the screen higher up.
That's far from optimal, that would be where I have my phone, at eye level just to the left of my head, right in front of the pillar. It's perfect in every way, especially since I'm longsighted.
Slate has the right idea, car makers should get out of the user software/interface business and prioritize choice. The instrument cluster is fine, as are basic controls, but they just tend to screw things up and add complexity.
> it sometimes looks a bit silly (like they glued an ipad on top of the dashboard), but it's a lot more usable
... until there's some child walking right into that visual "dead space".
> I am clearly in the minority here but I have driven cars with and without CarPlay and honestly do not care whether a car has it.
I'm in the same boat, though with Android Auto or whatever. I'm honestly surprised how many people seem to need CarPlay; a comment or two down there's a stat claiming 79% of buyers wouldn't buy a car without it. Is it that different from the Android implementation? Is there something special about it?
I don't get it. It's a nice to have for sure, but honestly not that special, and gets annoying at times (when Android Auto connects on my phone, it tends to stop me from using the maps app on the phone, plus a few other minor grievances). And it's not much easier than just plugging in an aux cord.
In some states you no longer can interact with a phone at all unless mounted. Phone mounts kind of suck or you’ll be in a rental without your nice mount. A 15” screen is easier to read than a small phone bouncing on a mount.
If I’m spending $10K on something, I want the Android/iOS experience to be first-class instead of some shitty UI designed be people who I presume don’t drive cars.
Cars are otherwise fungible between brands. If one has CarPlay/Android Auto there is little reason to pick a brand that lacks support.
I recently upgraded to a car with CarPlay, and it's actually a worse user experience than just having my phone on a really solid Brodit phone holder.
For example - when using Google Maps on my phone I can pan around the map to look at nearby places really quickly - maybe while I'm stopped at traffic lights, and then reset back to the navigation. Spotify in CarPlay is really hard to use - much harder than the normal app. Whether it plays the song you want seems to be a game of chance.
I'm one of the people that wouldn't buy a card without android auto and carplay support
Car UIs are just universally awful. Even if somehow you find one with a decent UI, it will never get updated and within 5 years it will suck
I use Android and having Android Auto is absolutely a must have for me.
AUX cord? It's been a few years since I've seen a phone with a headphone jack, or a car with an AUX input. I also don't miss the time where my phone had to be connected on one side to USB for charging, on the other side to the sounds system, and my navigation was done using a a 6" screen that kept falling between the chairs. Android Auto/CarPlay let's you connect one thing (or not at all), have your phone charged, your navigation clear, and your music playing smoothly and controlled with the physical car knobs.
> Is it that different from the Android implementation? Is there something special about it?
It just works and it is, like others before me said, consistent. I can connect my iPhone to any car I drive that has CatPlay and the dashboard looks like I like it. And Spotify starts right from where it left off in the other car.
Can't speak for the Android experience.
The Android Auto experience is very smooth and fundamentally exactly the same.
CarPlay is better than android auto in that it works with my iPhone; as to why it is currently in _my_ requirements, it’s simple: I rent cars when I travel, I’m too lazy to memorise so many maps, and I don’t have a good mount I can bring with me.
That being said I think there are a few things that make my carplay experience _worse_ than my friends’ android auto experience: for example today I am annoyed by google maps spam me with notifications trying to get me to use googles maps instead of waze which is so fucking stupid since it’s also google and it just makes me more annoyed with google instead of being the sort of thing that would convince me to switch to android. But I have to admit the google maps and waze integration on android is better.
How do you mount your phone in a rental car? Do you bring your own phone holder with you?
When I plan to use a rental car I usually pack a phone holder that fits on air vents. You never know if you’ll be able to connect your phone to the car so that’s a small backup.
Be sure to let them know at the rental corner if you are dissatisfied because it doesn't work with your phone. Run car companies buy a lot of cars and in turn actually have input to how a car is made and they also have reason to care about your satisfaction. rental cars is one of the best places to get things to change because the rental car companies can get a change that you alone otherwise couldn't get made.
You pay 50 USD extra for the holder, duh!
I'm going to jump in and say I mostly agree.
It's no big issue for me one way or another to have a car with the technology from factory, and I do like having the wireless connectivity - music from the phone etc is really nice - but visual maps and visual UI add no value to me personally.
The setup I have for my project car is ideal for me - a small bluetooth receiving amplifier that feeds the speakers directly. It's all hidden behind the dash, has no visible UI, but I get in the car and the phone takes over, it's in a cradle and becomes the head unit.
I never need to see a map on screen (Maybe because I grew up doing orienteering, or can just listen to the verbal directions, I'm not sure) so that doesn't bother me. And siri can handle hands-off interaction with the device when needed.
I did upgrade the head unit in my family/daily car to support carplay etc, but the primary motivator there was finding a unit that could support a reversing camera. It certainly made the interior feel more modern, but again I don't think it adds much value to me personally.
When I put in directions on my phone it gives me turn by turn directions in the gauge cluster so I don’t have to look at the center screen as often
I use CarPlay as an extended screen but still do everything on my phone that is mounted on the dashboard. Works good for me.
Having my phone mounted is fine but it’s been hard for me to find a good mount that works with random rental car I get. Any suggestions?
I don’t hate carplay but some things annoy me like I can’t Shazam what I’m listening to in the car because CarPlay pauses the cars audio. I would be willing to try to make it optional until CarPlay works better.
>that works with random rental car I get. Any suggestions?
Clip based ones, worst case you can mount them on the aircon vents. They are not great in general but they are cheap and you can fit them pretty much anywhere
Do you have a specific suggestion?
I have tried everything that is available at my local shops (which looks like it came from Temu)
You can try 'ugreen phone holder car' in amazon. Ugreen is an ok brand. Usually there will be a hook and some tension mechanism for the air vent.
I used to refuse to buy cars without carplay. For many of the reasons I expect others do.
I have a rivian, and my wife has a car with carplay. I've had rivians for years now. I don't miss carplay when i drive my Rivian.
In truth, I used carplay for 3 main things - navigation that didn't suck, listening to music on the apps i wanted to, and reading text messages out loud.
Rivian has made those things not suck. So i don't miss carplay.
On my wife's car, those things suck, badly, without carplay.
I'm sure there are people out there who heavily depend on carplay for other things, and thus, it really does matter if they have carplay or not.
and maybe a day will come when the features carplay could provide me are as shitty on the Rivian as they are on my wife's car, and i'll start demanding it again.
But at least right now, that's not true, and so I think Rivian's choice is fine.
My Polestar didn't have Android Auto when I bought it.
Navigation was still Google Maps, and text integration was there.
But no Pandora for music. And that's the problem, in my opinion. Even Android Automotive is way behind Android Auto in app support. That reduces the owner's choices for which software they want to use for their use cases.
I’m in a similar spot. I miss CarPlay much less than I expected because the Rivian software is really good. The big thing I really miss from CarPlay is having text messages announced. Google Maps on the phone is a bit better too but I got over that quickly (TTS, features like showing road hazards, and general rendering)
I own a Tesla not a Rivian, but I agree with you here. As a software engineer, I find CarPlay to be a tack-on solution. For that, it works well, but only because the base infotainment systems on almost every OEM are utter trash.
Something that I don't believe is discussed enough, especially here, is how bad 90% of software is in general. Software from non-software companies, almost without exception, is just junk. It has stuff tacked garbage from a partner deals, confusing organization that seemed like a product or marketing guy that never used the software. I could go on.
The exceptions, of course, are Rivian and Tesla, who actually make first-class software. On them, I don't miss it, And actually, I would be slightly annoyed if they had it, simply because it breaks up the consistency with infotainment.
I can’t be the only one who thinks we’re going a bit too far with the attention grab of vehicle infotainment.
CarPlay is a fantastic system because it keeps you off your phone.
But some of these new infotainment systems, and the complete lack of physical controls, are starting to feel extremely unsafe.
Luckily the pendulum is about to swing back the other way for most brands, as they have to reintroduce physical controls to comply with the updated EU safety regulations
I've been hearing that for years, and I'm still waiting. Incidentally, my 2020 Ford Escape has buttons, which was a strong selector. I hear it's because it was designed for the European market (as the Ford Kuga)
> CarPlay is a fantastic system because it keeps you off your phone.
Tinfoil hat time: CarPlay was created as a 4D regulatory chess move, because it enables users to continue interacting with their phones in a legislative environment where said action is otherwise illegal.
It would be hard to argue that it’s illegal to use the phone in a way that’s nearly identical to the way you interact with your vehicle controls.
I admire the restraint the CarPlay designers have in adding features. E.g. in music apps, you can't click-through to an artist page from a song page. Annoying on the surface, but it actually naturally restricts your mucking about in menus. I bet any money that that one choice has saved lives.
Your thesis is right but in this example this is instead one of the “Alan Dye” hidden UI instances where the functionality is intentionally hidden (I presume in the name of aesthetic minimalism rather than safety, because this is what Apple design does outside CarPlay too). At least in Apple Music, I think you tap on the artist name in the now playing screen, and I think you get a menu to go to album or artist from there. If I’m wrong, somebody correct me and I’ll delete, I’m away from my car today and can’t verify.
You can verify from my comment history that I love talking shit about Mr Dye as much as the next guy, but no. Car Play limitations are certainly not an Alan Dye decision. Everything in CarPlay is stripped down cause it's not safe to be navigating menus and doing deep interactions while driving.
The passenger can use the phone if you want to be able to scroll through an artist's catalog, rearrange playlists, etc. CarPlay's UI is a quick way to access your current library.
This interaction works in Apple Music on the phone, but not in CarPlay.
So this goes back to the loss of the DIN in vehicles. Vehicle manufacturers shot themselves in the tire decades ago when they stopped caring about DIN space and started forcing themselves to develop and then abandon the lead position on vehicle infotainment. Carplay isn't very special when you consider any 90s and early 2000s vehicle with a DIN slot or two can have all the exact same functionality as Carplay with unlimited upgrades for around $200 in hardware. The OEMs failed to innovate and outright hubris meant they would not roll-back to what worked well for everyone. Apple deserves to eat their lunch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_7736
I think CarPlay is evidence of failure.
My aim is device independence. In the old days, to print I had to hook up my printer to a computer. To print from a computer on the network, I needed a print server. I had to administer that. Now the printer itself hooks to the network, which is far superior.
I have an older thermostat which allows me to program vacations directly on the unit. This is superior to the newer thermostat, with which I must use my phone for this.
My dishwasher requires me to use my phone to do a delayed start. This is inferior to what it replaced, which was a model that allowed me to do delayed start from the panel on the dishwasher.
Devices should work on their own. So it’s a failure if the first thing I need to do in the car is tether it to a phone. The car needs nav, it needs radio, etc. It would be better if it has those things built in.
I understand the complaint in this thread, which is that the carmakers are bad at this. I don’t own a Tesla or Rivian, but some folks are saying their interfaces are good. Those carmakers have the right idea. I begrudgingly accept CarPlay. I don’t like it. In this era when computing is as cheap as it is and where even a TV can hook directly to network to play back content, it makes no sense that the solution on a $40,000 car is to plug it in to a phone.
But it does make sense. You probably looked up where you're going before entering the car on your phone. You probably want to hear the same music or podcasts as on you phone. Do you really want the car to have separate internet connection, and login for every app?
Also you need to connect the phone anyway if you want hands free calling.
I agree that devices should work independently. But I believe the fundamental baseline should be open interoperability. Yes, the dishwasher should allow a delayed start from the machine itself. But it should also have secure yet open interoperability so other authorised systems that care about the dishwasher can interact with it. I think there's ultimately a user experience benefit. I'm familiar with my phone, its UI paradigms etc. If I (or my gran) can use the dishwasher through an interface or voice assistant we're already familiar with then that's a win. Especially if the form factor of the device itself makes it challenging to deliver a great and intuitive interface in-situ.
In this regard CarPlay is evidence of success - a sufficiently interoperable car that allows users to bring their own context and ecosystems.
CarPlay is only evidence of failure if your expectation is that the car should provide a comparable ecosystem to Android or iOS - one that must also somehow follow you in your pocket when you leave the car.
This is a good point, but CarPlay is not open interoperability. Open is DisplayPort. Open is 3.5mm jack. Open is Bluetooth.
The car has two proprietary tie-ins to two dominant mobile operating systems. That’s another reason this feels like failure to me. If the car had some standard way to hook a device to it to use touch screen and output sound, I might like that.
Instead my car (2016 Honda Accord) eliminated the standard 3.5mm jack and added a janky CarPlay implementation that sometimes freezes up entirely, and there’s no way to update it. This is not progress.
You're absolutely right, but I don’t think we'll ever get to a point in which what a car ships is better than what Apple ships. This only gets worse over time when you have a new iPhone and a 10-year-old infotainment system, it's just not possible.
Car automakers are not going to support your infotainment system (for free) even just 5 years down the line.
Even just thinking about the integrations gives me a headache (will my music app work on my car? how do I transfer my trip from Google Maps on my phone to my car?)
So the solution for today and tomorrow is to just stream your entire phone to the car.
I kinda disagree. I want the top of the line map system that goes with me everywhere to follow me into the car. I want to carry my computer around with me and don’t want a different computer in each location.
> that’s not the way we see ourselves interacting with our users
You lost me right there Rivian. Start picturing yourselves worrying more about how your users picture themselves interacting with THEIR car... and stop worrying about controlling interactions between you and your users. Switch your frame of thinking around.
This is the problem with so many modern companies. Instead of focusing on building great products that their customers will enjoy using, they're trying to build relationships with users.
Maybe I'm overthinking things, but to me "user" implies a different more subordinate role where you take what you get, there's no "the customer is always right" when it comes to "users".
Rivian has a monthly premium subscription for their infotainment
If they introduced CarPlay they will essentially be taping their wallet shut themselves from their point of view when they need the money
But their current infotainment has a lot to be desired and a bunch of dumb bugs. CarPlay would allow me as a customer to have a better experience of their vehicles to sidestep their shit navigation
I hear the r2 software will help. But CarPlay would be better experience that includes apps I want to use, like overcast. Rj just wants that subscription money and power instead of what a large percent of their users want.
Subscription money of $10 mo minus the cost of the cellular data connection and data, which is probably ~$8mo. So, a whopping profit of $24 a year?
I hear this theory a lot but it doesn’t actually make sense given the numbers
I’m fully bought into the Apple ecosystem, and I’ve had Teslas for 8 years and we currently also have car that supports CarPlay. The CarPlay interface is overall far inferior, especially with navigation. First of all, searching for destinations is terrible on CarPlay compared to Tesla! Even worse, Apple didn’t even add multi-touch support to CarPlay until iOS 26, and the vast majority of cars (including ours) don’t support it, so you have to hunt for and tap the zoom controls, which is pretty barbaric compared to the fluid pinch and zoom gestures that work on Tesla and our other devices. Also on our CarPlay car, it never seems to know the direction the car is facing until it starts moving, which becomes incredibly frustrating navigating out of a parking lot. The final major downside is having to switch apps out of navigation to control music then switch back, whereas on Tesla (and Rivian) you can choose and control music while keeping navigation on your screen.
I have a boring Mercedes mid-size SUV. Carplay works. I can skip/repeat tracks using the standard control on the steering wheel; the instrument cluster shows the current track the same way it's done with connected phones forever. On the center console screen, we use the Carplay view with 3 splits - one for Spotify, two for navigation (map & next direction). Google Maps and Apple Maps are both reliable where I drive (Miami).
Tesla is a great car below the from the headlights down, I love driving my dad's Y performance to the grocery store when I'm visiting home. But no way I'm going to get a car where I can't point the vent at my armpit without using a touch screen. No way I'm going to get a car where I can't talk to whatever agent I want while stuck in traffic. I much rather have a boring car that doesn't tick me off.
If Tesla (or Rivian) add Carplay, they'll really move up the my list (still want physical vent control tho). Would you stop driving your Tesla if an update added Carplay tomorrow?
See my comment below. I think they should add CarPlay support but I personally don’t see myself ever using it.
I wouldn't stop driving my Tesla if they swapped the UI for Carplay but I'd be incredibly disappointed at the downgrade
why would they swap. add
Apple product users don't believe in free will.
Personally I find the feeling of air blowing on me, no matter how pleasant initially, to quickly become grating. In most cars I adjust the air to blow where I am not, and compensate with a notch higher fan speed.
Having the ability for the air stream continually moving is more valuable to me than constantly moving it by hand.
Being able to pre-cool the car before entering it is more valuable to me than sitting in a hot car and pointing the MAX A/C directly on my face.
Cars have had remote start with the ability to cool down (or warm up) the car before getting into them for decades before the Tesla was ever invented.
Yes I know, one of my cars has this. My comment had nothing to do with Tesla. I'm only speaking in principle.
> The final major downside is having to switch apps out of navigation to control music then switch back,
But... you don't. Tapping on the home button once more or swiping to the right on the app page reveals the home screen which has navigation and music together:
https://devimages-cdn.apple.com/wwdc-services/images/D35E0E8...
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/wgH6RZrtKkuAQkJUjfWW8V.jpg
It even adapts to vertical screens:
https://i.redd.it/n7e0st8ebyh81.jpg
Our CarPlay car has a small screen, so I prefer to keep navigation full screen most of the time. In split mode, it’s way too tiny for me, but I occasionally leave it there if I know my way around anyways. It’s definitely not a well designed experience.
It sounds like the issue is mostly your CarPlay cars small screen compared to Tesla's large one. This didn't seen to be a CarPlay problem beyond maybr Apple trying their best with the screens most of their customers are given.
I believe iOS 27 brings a MiniPlayer, but I don’t know the rules about when it does/doesn’t show.
Would this not be an issue with any interface if the screen is that small?
I mean, you choosing not to use the feature doesn't mean the feature doesn't exist and fulfill your needs.
I have a Polestar 2, 2022 model even so it's not fresh off the lot.
CarPlay navigation shows on the instrument cluster. The speed, state of charge, etc all move to the side so the map is right in the middle for quick viewing. Then the infotainment screen can show music or the tiled music/navigation view that CarPlay supports.
Basic music controls are on the steering wheel of course, readily accessible.
The lack of multitouch is slightly annoying, but it's not something I ever use. If I ever can't see what I need on the navigation I simply look outside for the road signs, which still exist.
I find Tesla’s interface to be inferior as soon as you want to use an app they haven’t built. Like my podcasts app. Or receiving / replying to a WhatsApp message. Even the built-in text message support can’t handle replying to a group text.
Personally I’d stick with Tesla’s nav and use CarPlay for media and messaging, and that’s the optionality and user choice I think this post is trying to get at.
Curiously, being herded onto tesla's software is the number one reason I won't buy one. I don't like the navigation or media software and the rest would feel better as a physical control or just seems useless in a car.
I find the media stuff all works just fine - gotta say I control it all almost exclusively by voice, and it Just Works - but the navigation… sucks donkey ass. I hate that it only treats superchargers as possible charging stops - where I live they are few and far between, yet other high speed chargers are common. The routing is often abysmal. It’ll be like “heavy traffic ahead. Taking you into it.” The traffic camera database is incomplete. The behaviour between the mobile and in car app is wildly inconsistent.
You know, I don’t care so much about having CarPlay as I care about having Waze or ABRP or just any routing app other than Tesla’s.
Can’t you do split screen navigation via the home screen (Dashboard View)? At least on cars I’ve rented I could have navigation on one side and music on the other in CarPlay.
Split screen can be finicky and kinda sucks on the small screen we have. Also, I don’t think I can browse music with split screen…
Is Siri this horrible? I do most of picking music with Gemini. How are you not distracted from driving while scrolling through things?
> I’m fully bought into the Apple ecosystem, and I’ve had Teslas for 8 years and we currently also have car that supports CarPlay. The CarPlay interface is overall far inferior, especially with navigation. First of all, searching for destinations is terrible on CarPlay compared to Tesla
Tesla and surprisingly Hyundai are outliers, the vast majority of cars have terrible infotainment systems, and them deciding to suddenly focus on it does not assure me at all.
Most OEM infotainment sucks, and it's taken a while for things to improve. I'd be willing to say your older car has a resistive touchscreen and physically couldn't support multitouch
CarPlay is definitely an improvement if you're comparing it to something like Ford Sync for example
My car supports multitouch in factory nav but not CarPlay (24 plate VAG).
“Searching for destinations on CarPlay”
I think this is the difference for me - I’ve decided where I’m going before I get in the car. Either I’ve planned a route (on my phone) or got a destination through a message from a friend on LINE. Either way I already have a plan.. on my phone. So having to somehow get that into the car navigation is always going to be worse than just using my phone
You can control music and still navigate while in CarPlay. I do it all the time.
When I first started using CarPlay, the screen that has the music and map showing simultaneously was not obvious and it wasn’t until well into my third long trip with CarPlay that I finally discovered it. I had thought the only display options were app full screen and app list. I think there was a change sometime in the last 3 years that made that the default starting display (or maybe I’m just a little less dumb now).
OK you don’t like it. How is that an argument against allowing people to choose?
Quite the contrary, I’ve long thought Tesla should add support for CarPlay to alleviate the concerns of many buyers over it not being supported. I think it would have been starkly worse than Tesla’s interface before they supported multi-touch this past year, but nonetheless they should have supported it by now. Better late than never that they’re finally adding support for it, it’ll especially make Rivian look kinda silly for continuing to be so stubborn about it. I think only a small fraction will actually use CarPlay on their Teslas, but it’s still pretty dumb to let that missing feature hurt their sales.
The main dashboard screen of CarPlay lets you navigate, manage music, and view the calendar and take calls all at once. Have you used that before?
"The final major downside is having to switch apps out of navigation to control music then switch back". That's no longer true for CarPlay. It now has a mode where you see Maps and Music at the same time.
I have a Tesla and a Lightning.
One of them lets me send iMessages to groups as well as non-phone recipients like my kids. The other is my Tesla.
I’m glad for you, but if Tesla supported CarPlay I could get what I wanted and you would not be affected at all. I’m baffled why people like you even bother to share your opinion. Nobody is suggesting that you be forced to use CarPlay. See also the entire topic of this discussion.
I’m baffled you think sharing a well-sourced opinion on a discussion thread is a bad thing, or that you think I believe Tesla adding support for CarPlay would somehow force me to use it. As I said in other replies, I’ve long thought Tesla should add support for it, but that few people would actually use it much.
> you think sharing a well-sourced opinion
You misunderstand. I am baffled why you would share your opinion in this discussion given that the entire premise is that CarPlay is additive, not a replacement. You made an entire point that was contrasting CarPlay with the built-in infotainment as if it were an either/or proposition
Give me CarPlay on my Tesla, I will use it AND the built-in apps too. Then I get more than I would have with either one by itself.
The author of the original piece is asking for a choice.
Your opinion is not an argument for that. It’s also not an argument against that.
So I’m not terribly sure what it adds to the discussion. I’m not surprised there are people who like Tesla’s UI. I’ve seen plenty of them online over the years.
I don't own a Tesla.
I have rented one though, so I know enough about the software experience to know that there's (currently) only one reason why I might wish for CarPlay over the integrated software experience, and that's Waze. Maybe.
I own two (petrol) cars. One has CarPlay, the other has a rigid phone mount between the steering wheel and centre console. While I appreciate the former for its nice large widescreen map, I still prefer the latter. Waze in CarPlay mode (due to the restrictions on what can be shown on the phone screen) is simply more annoying to operate. So if was in the market for a Tesla, and I had the choice between CarPlay support or a nice phone mount between the centre console and steering wheel, I'd probably choose the latter.
(I would still campaign for Tesla to support CarPlay, because why not.)
Like the author said, if your built in is good, then great you don’t need CarPlay. Literally nobody is asking you to switch.
Second all these points! No multitouch is such a bad experience on maps!
I honestly cannot believe how bad CarPlay is — I can't believe how many rave reviews it gets, I think it's absolutely awful compared to Rivian or Tesla software.
All of this nonsense critique is massively outweighed by 1. having a HUD (your tesla will never get one because Elon is an idiot) and 2. having carplay/android auto sync your turn-by-turn directions into that HUD.
I agree with the author: CarPlay is table stakes for me. Whenever an automaker says a car won't support CarPlay, I mentally cross it off my list. Which is fine, because there are plenty of other viable options.
I think what’s become more interesting/impactful for me is why they elect not to support it.
Most firms moving away from it (or who never implemented it) seem determined to either sell additional subscription services to their user base (connectivity) or sell their user base to a third-party (either as data, or eyeballs). And for a product at this price point I find myself very annoyed at the attempted payment extraction.
Either way, I’m with you. Lots of vehicle manufacturers out there that will support it.
We bought a Honda Prologue last year and didn’t even test drive the built-on-the-same-platform GM cars (e.g. the almost-identical Chevy Blazer EV) because they didn’t have CarPlay.
People like us have got to be affecting GM’s sales by some measurable amount, right?
I love Android Auto but I don't miss it when driving my Tesla because the Tesla has all things I want anyway.
Tesla is more of a technology company than a car company, that's why they managed to make a good UX.
Classic car makers are not able to make decent UIs. Plus, each car would be different. So I prefer Android Auto: it's always my Android Auto, regardless of which car I'm driving.
I owned a Model Y for several years, but, at least in my city, I always felt Tesla’s navigation had pretty poor route selection during busy times of the day - like dorecting me to streets that were notoriously stop and go during rush our when the highway alternative was known to be much quicker.
As an R1S owner I feel like the elephant in the room is that the Rivian developed infotainment software is just not very good. For example, the Spotify app has weird scrolling issues and the interface for offline downloads is clunky and unreliable. The maps/route planning is fine but not really any better than Apple/Google Maps (or ABRP). So I find it hard to give much credit to their argument against CarPlay when they’re not providing a better experience via their native apps.
One of those silly little issues with inbuilt software that drives me insane is the number of times I’ve had to log back into Apple Music or Spotify (or one of the video services to occupy the kiddo while parked for extended duration).
That’s another one that phones have just solved with the integrated password manager. The friction of providing credentials on my other devices has been reduced, but all of a sudden I need to go hunting through that pwd manager, and hunting and pecking on the infotainment keyboard, to enter a 20+ char unique pwd that modern “best practices” has established. It got bad enough for a bit (swver changes resulting in needing to re-log in) that I stopped using all of these apps for 2-3yr on our Model Y because I got tired of having to do it.
It’s interesting one of the most sold accessories for a rivian vehicle is a phone mount that goes next to the huge main center screen.
I completely agree with you
In the end they treat a podcast like this as PR. "We're great". Elaborate rationalizations of their decisions.
How well does Pandora work for music?
Car manufacturer build infotainment never is.
It's simple - carplay is a financial threat to car manufacturers.
- It commoditizes the car
- it eliminates upsell features/subscriptions after the sale.
- it costs money to add carplay
- like car manufacturers don't want interchangable head units, they want to own the infotainment system.
- like wireless carriers didn't want the iphone - they wanted locked-down phones where they were the only ones who could sell you ringtones or music.
Tried clicking the links to the Rivian web page. What a horrible experience.
I have been trying to get some useful info about the cars (e.g. range), and the only option I had was to play a completely useless video which only made me dizzy.
Then, desperate, I tried asking their AI chat what’s the expected range. It told me (great success!) but then it directed me back to the useless page.
How useless.
I’m with Casey on this: I will not buy a car without CarPlay. Of course, I haven’t bought a car since 2013. That one is a Tesla Model S and I think its UI is pretty decent for maps and playing audio, but I have rented enough cars since then to know that I would much prefer CarPlay support. If I had to replace my car today, I’d probably buy a Volvo EX90, which is the electric version of the XC90 Casey talks about.
Rentals it is more important. Your own car doing the one time setup every few years is no problem but when it is a rental you don't want to take that time.
I love the "pick your own off the line" rentals because I can snoop the cars for CarPlay.
I use CarPlay all the time in my car and love it.
I rent quite a lot of cars. I’d rather CarPlay was taken from my car and left in all the rental cars than the other way around.
The car manufacturers are awful with their interface design, and being able to get into a new car at 9pm in the dark, and have a familiar interface while navigating some unknown city is invaluable. Consistency is safety and comfort in this situation.
Like the author, CarPlay is table stakes for any vehicle purchase. I literally installed a Sony screen receiver in my 2016 F150, that was given to my by my father after he lost his license due to his age. That was a fun weekend with the dash apart reliving my younger days when I did car audio installations. The truck lasted 1 week before I had the dash apart to get CarPlay back. The native Ford infotainment system was so crap.
They want to hold you captive to subscription plans. If they allow CarPlay, it gives consumers more options for cellular connectivity, music, navigation, and other apps.
Cellular connectivity is something I would rather cars not have.
E911 is mandatory in cars in a lot of countries. So you have it or not, even if it not used for data transfers.
That's one of the reasons CarPlay is non-negotiable for me: It limits the automaker's ability to enshittify the ownership experience.
Nothing prevents them from removing CarPlay in an update, though? Unless you make sure to never connect the car to the internet. Some garages will update FW for you unasked I hear.
This would not fly in Europe. You would be able to return the car for having lost crucial functionality, at least within 2 years of the sale (in some jurisdictions, 5 years). They could do it after that, but functionally forcing a subscription to get back a worse version of the functionality one already had for free sounds like a bad way to encourage sales of said subscription.
Removing an advertised-at-sale feature in an update wouldn’t fly in the US either.
I’m not sure it would be legal for them to remove something they actually advertise as a feature to sell the car.
Also I’m sure they’d be hit with a class-action lawsuit immediately if they tried it. Manufacturers sell a lot of cars which would lead to a lot of pissed off owners.
I've had CarPlay on my last two cars, a 2018 VW Golf and a 2024 Ford Maverick. It's fine. Sometimes you plug your phone into the USB port (unlocked) and it refuses to connect for several minutes very frustrating when you want to start navigation and media playback before leaving the driveway. My favourite headunit experience was my aftermarket single DIN Kenwood (https://www.kenwood.com/ca/car/caraudio/receivers/kdc-bt282u...) in my MK4 Golf it was an easy swap. You could plug in any iPod or iPhone and it would play and control the audio directly from the headunit and show title information on the display. Plus, it would take any USB storage device and play music. It was such a simple and efficient experience.
Maybe it’s cause I’ve never actually used it, but I really only care about a stable / well supported Bluetooth connection.
I have a holder for my phone for when I use GPS and basically never interact with it directly after it’s set. Only real interactions are media controls via the steering wheel.
The only use cases I can see car play helping with are those who take a lot of calls/texts in their car while driving and those who listen to music and want to listen to specific songs.
For me it’s about the waste. Engineers have taken the time to build a screen into the car with a good viewing angle, that works well with glare, doesn’t obstruct the drivers view.
Then the software side just makes the whole thing useless with a terrible UX that will never be updated.
CarPlay is a great solution because the non safety critical stuff (music, navigation) gets offloaded to a competent software company.
Plus it improves every year.
On my previous car it never changed from the day I bought it, other than navigation getting more and more out of date.
On my current car I get software updates occasionally. I’m not sure that function ever changed though.
Meanwhile my iPhone gets better every year. And if I buy a new phone? CarPlay can get faster. My car never will even if I wanted to pay them.
So, I fully recognize this is dumb, but humans (like me!) are dumb and lazy.
The ability to just get in your car and have the phone-powered interface right there without having to take your phone out of your pocket and mount it in the holder is something I didn’t ‘niceness’ of before experiencing it.
I was super bought into carplay and android auto until I actually owned a car that had it. Oh great, it requires USB. Well my phone is 4 years old and the port is toast, so that doesn't work for me. Okay, wireless then. Car doesn't support that. Lovely. Bluetooth implementation is half-assed and the pairing process is Byzantine. Terrific stuff.
That car ended up sucking in other ways too. I quickly sold it and went back to buying old Lexuses. Wireless charging phone holder, and off you go. The siren call of infotainment is powerful, but actually living with it is just more fiddly bullshit I don't need in my life.
It doesn't negate the problems you are pointing out, but there are several devices that bridge the USB wireless gap. (Aawireless, etc)
I drive a 2025 Kia Ceed and the all the infotainment does is get in my way. Id pay to have it removed. Carplay & Siri helps me stay focused on driving in a safe way.
I considered buying a new 2-DIN CarpPlay stereo for my 2003 Suzuki Grand Vitara but went with a simple 12V LENCENT Bluetooth V5.4 FM Transmitter instead that plugs into the cigarette lighter socket.
The reason was that the original stereo has a custom shape that fits the dashboard, it's rounded and the fascia is apparently easy to crack when removing.
I attach my phone with a CD-mount that goes into the CD-player (I hate those vent-mounts) and then I just connect the radio to whatever frequency the FM transmitter is set to.
It works surprisingly well, I was skeptical at first reading some negative reviews but I'm super satisfied.
The signal never cracks but YMMV, I have it set to 87.5 in rural Sweden and it sounds perfectly clear in the domain of 128 kbit MP3.
I'm a sound guy but I think with the poor sound isolation of the car and the OK speakers it sounds perfectly adequate and even a bit nostalgic— it's how I remember car trips in the 90s and early 2000s.
It costs €30-40 and I also get a USB-C PD and a second USB-QC 3.0 on the device.
Simple and keeps everything original in the car.
All i want is car without infotainment of any kind. And a nice place to mount phone or tablet.
When I bought a Rivian I missed CarPlay. There were a few things that really stood out.
1. Proper Voice Texting
2. Google maps for routing with (good) traffic data.
The Voice Texting just a release or two ago - its okay so far but not as good as CarPlay. Google traffic landed a while back (in Rivian's map which I prefer over Google Maps)
I'll take the voice texting for what is otherwise a very elegant and well designed UI - that keeps getting better.
Full disclosure. Even when I have a rental with CarPlay I just use Spotify and google maps. Both of which are integrated into the Rivian UI. So YMMV
And that’s the thing isn’t it? Often the same app is better on CarPlay/android auto than it is in the native UI for the vast majority of cars.
CarPlay is also a contract between mobile devs and automakers. It allows for things like displaying "current playing" on the dash, media buttons on the steering wheel that control apps, and turn by turn directions show on dash and HUD. A screen cast may be able to do this but not in a consistent dependable way.
Also no one is mentioning that maybe we should not encourage users to use 1000s of apps in their car? It would be irresponsible to easily allow users to watch youtube while driving. Keeping the set of apps usable through the car is a responsibility in automobiles that are already becoming too distracting as is.
CarPlay is for cars with shitty software
As someone who only had 20+ year old cars and motorcycles, I don't see what's CarPlay supposed to solve? All I need is a Bluetooth-capable radio and a phone holder to display the navigation, so I can listen to my music and focus on driving. Phone doesn't need to be touched unless changing destinations. Do people seriously need to be constantly entertained while driving?
Carplay isn't about entertainment for me. It's just a vastly superior and convenient way to view the same map you can see on your iPhone.
I have a beater subie (2018). It has CarPlay (fairly basic variant). It also has very few touchscreens, which I like.
I could easily afford better, but have little interest in doing so. It’s low miles, paid for, handles well in the snow, and is in decent shape. A car gets me from Point A to Point B, and I want it to do so reliably and safely. I couldn’t care any less, what people think of me. Life’s too short.
I also write iOS apps; ones that make a lot of use of navigation stuff.
I like being able to use my app to determine a destination, plug it into CarPlay, and immediately get a map to where I want. Point A, meet Point B.
I’m sure that some of the systems fancier cars use, may be fine for this kind of thing, but CarPlay does it very smoothly.
I’m with the author. No CarPlay, no sale.
I really don’t think any manufacturer is concerned about what I think, though. There’s a lot of fish in the sea.
That’s the great thing about CarPlay it makes the usually junk infotainment system in cars (especially older ones) irrelevant, so they still seem modern.
For a budget car, I’d be perfectly happy if they had a screen for CarPlay/Android Auto that didn’t do anything else if a phone wasn’t connected. I think this makes a lot of sense as a cost cutting measure. Maybe it would just be used for the mandated backup camera.
I also love it for rental cars. I can get in any rental, and instead of having to learn my way around or figure out a Garmin add-on, CarPlay can make the navigation and music instantly familiar with all the data I need.
I’m not a big fan of the dumbed down interface. Using the Music app on CarPlay is frustrating. I prefer operating the music app on my phone with a phone mount. Same goes for navigation apps. Finding a restaurant with pictures and reviews is so much faster on my phone.
> Same goes for navigation apps. Finding a restaurant with pictures and reviews is so much faster on my phone.
You shouldn't be doing this while driving. If you're doing this while not driving, you still can. Carplay doesn't make your phone inert while connected. You can still use Google Maps on your phone to punch in a location or look around the area, while still connected to Carplay.
I was responding to:
> vastly superior and convenient way to view the same map you can see on your iPhone.
The map and the interface is vastly superior on my phone. Google Maps on iOS is barely usable while connected to CarPlay.
You shouldn’t operate anything while driving. Do that before you leave.
> The map and the interface is vastly superior on my phone. Google Maps on iOS is barely usable while connected to CarPlay.
When browsing? I guess. When driving? I have a hard time agreeing with that.
> You shouldn’t operate anything while driving. Do that before you leave.
Exactly, so you not being able to do anything with Google Maps on the Carplay screen doesn't matter, since you don't need to do anything through there to begin with. Set your destination on your phone before you set of (whose functionality isn't reduced by being connected to Carplay), then the screen is naught more than a display after that.
When the wireless CarPlay connects I can’t use Google Maps on my phone screen anymore. It’s one of the reasons I dumped it for other navigation apps. I also disliked the Google Maps spam I got on CarPlay while using other navigation apps. Very intrusive.
> When the wireless CarPlay connects I can’t use Google Maps on my phone screen anymore.
Huh. That doesn't happen with wired carplay (at least for me), and I can't see why this would be different.
> I also disliked the Google Maps spam I got on CarPlay while using other navigation apps.
I haven't noticed that either for that matter. When you say 'spam' here, what exactly do you mean?
When I look up a place on Google Maps but don’t use it for navigation. I then use another app for navigation. After 15 minutes Google Maps starts showing notifications on CarPlay asking me if I want to use Google Maps to navigate to my destination. I classify that as spam and distracting while driving.
This was about a year ago, I completely stopped using Google Maps since.
I've disabled notifications for Google Maps, so that'd explain why I don't have that problem. It's either open and I'm actively using it, or I'm not and it shouldn't talk to me, so I don't see why it should notify my about anything.
I do see the maps - on my phone. What does seeing them somewhere else add? It seems completely redundant to me.
The bigger screen is nice. The integration is also nice. I can push a button on my steering wheel to activate Siri to tell it where to go. Music controls on the wheel also pass through to CarPaly. I have a low res auxiliary screen to display added data (oil temp, weather, etc) and the music option will display music track data from CarPlay as well.
So instead of trying to look at a tiny screen that’s clipped onto an air vent, I can use the screens and integrated controls, keeping my hands on the wheel and my eyes more in the road.
Also, the biggest battery drain is having the screen on. CarPlay allows me to have the screen on the phone off while still accessing all the data. With a wireless adapter, I can also leave the phone in my pocket, so I don’t need to set it up every time I get in the car or remember to grab it when getting out. So it feels more like the native experience of using the car.
With the exception of the screen size I can do all of that with my phone in a mount as well. But you shouldn’t be operating your phone while driving, not even with CarPlay. It’s illegal in many countries.
Your phone in a mount provides integration with your car's steering wheel buttons to allow for control without taking your hands off the wheel? Your mount allows you to leave the screen on your phone off while also using navigation with a screen?
I don't know that I believe that.
Exactly. You shouldn't be touching screens with your hands while you drive. That's illegal where I live. But my dash mounted phone has Siri and Bluetooth so I can be hands-free for commands and I can use the steering wheel controls for media.
The car screen is much better, for me. Much safer, and less distracting.
I’d rather have the map shown on the headunit screen rather than have the phone screen next to a larger but unused headunit screen.
I have a 15 year old Mercedes. I got the old integrated CD player and radio pulled out and Alpine makes a nice dash surround and canbus support module for the steering wheel controls. It has a 7" display where the old stuff was and wireless Android Auto.
It's pretty much like any new car as far as entertainment and maps. Plus, it's got physical buttons for everything else. I think recent cars may well be coming back to what I have on my old car.
ps. not mentioned, Anrdoid auto and Carplay are H264, later H265, video players with touch control and buttons in a return channel. The phones render the display internally and project it as video to the display. That's all. This is why much older generation displays with at least reasonable SOCs can run them near perfectly. They are not running Anrdoid themselves. In fact some of them are operating system-less SOCs that have nearly no firmware but a video player and the support for the touchscreen and buttons. Much like that crappy video player built into old TVs ten years ago.
I have them on my motorcycles too. It's way better than a phone, in that the user interface is designed to be less interactive and more focusses with larger buttons.
I use to think this until i got a car with carplay. Now I can’t live without it. In fact wireless carplay was a game changer. You have to experience the convenience to know what it’s like.
Personally I found CarPlay to be incredibly underwhelming. Very limited app support beyond navigation and music. In addition I frequently have issues switching which phone it's using thanks to terrible iOS BT and of course the ever annoying issue where someone is using the phone that is projecting, and your music suddenly cuts out to play obnoxious audio.
The only advantage over a traditional car media center/nav is the always updated and personalized map/nav.
Over 90% of new vehicles sold in the U.S. already support Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
So it is kinda expected to be there: if it is not there then a car needs to be something special. So I think buyers don’t even ask for it because they assume it will be there (and absence becomes much more noticeable than its presence).
That was the statistic, with GM‘s move to ditch it is that still true? Wasn’t there also some other legacy auto maker that was planning to?
I prefer my WV Up! infotainment system. It's just a dumb radio/media with a factory phone mount. The actual radio has physical buttons to navigate the config and modes and for everything else you use the phone's touch screen. With 6.8" phone screen it's really good.
A good middle ground would be to have physical buttons to interact with the manufacturer interface and the touch screen to interact exclusively with CarPlay
I hesitate to propose ulterior motives, but given there have been several seemingly obtuse objections to projection from Rivian, perhaps the CEO is concerned that, if Rivian supports projection, it will harm the perception of the value of their software stack? Related, I think they licensed their stack to VW.
I think Rivian is disguising a hidden factor: CarPlay prohibits vehicle manufacturers from collecting metrics and selling anonymized or identified user activity data, and this loss of telematics data / income stream is unacceptable to manufacturers (for example, GM*) who see the smart TV business making billions on that precise data.
The correct route for someone with interview access to Rivian to clarify whether this scenario applies would be to review their legal terms for owners and then point-blank ask in a recorded interview ‘whether Rivian’s vehicles are reporting to Rivian what music their buyers play in Rivian vehicles’. This is a nuanced sentence: whether is yes/no; information is too broad to weasel out of; ‘on what music’ focuses on a private aspect of car ownership and is a callback to the VHS rental rulings; ‘in their vehicles’ is not only restricted to what’s connected to the headunit by usb or Bluetooth or radio, but also covers the headunit-connected microphones in the vehicle as well. If they say yes, the questions become obvious. If they say no, the followup should be to ask if Rivian contractually guarantees that they will not someday issue a software update that begins doing so. Either it does not, or it does. Two questions max to either confirm or refute a suspicion.
GM cited ‘the ability to improve cars’ as why it’s refusing CarPlay, but as the OP article clearly shows, GM could simply continue to improve the cars and the screen surrounding the CarPlay dedicated window, while continuing to improve their own built-in functions using the data from those who do not use it for the benefit of those same users. GM’s justifications last year in this regard are just as obtuse as Rivian’s this year. Given that similarity, I suspect you’re right: Rivian does indeed seem to be trying not to appear desperately in need of cash by reselling user data for subscription revenue profit: ‘buy our three-ton six-figure vehicle so that we can make $1/year off of you to keep our business afloat’ is horrendous optics and would lead to open mockery of their business.
* The GM/FTC 2026 case only prevents GM from selling data associated with vehicle driving. Headunit usage cannot be readily assumed to be ‘driving’ data in the case context of vehicle insurers, and so continued sale of radio usage data to (for imaginary example) Nielsen would be unaffected by the specific, narrow, and temporary 2026 ruling.
> I think Rivian is disguising a hidden factor: CarPlay prohibits vehicle manufacturers from collecting metrics and selling anonymized or identified user activity data, and this loss of telematics data / income stream is unacceptable to manufacturers (for example, GM*) who see the smart TV business making billions on that precise data.
The car's own cellular connection can still report large amounts of telemetry, such as the car's location in real time, how many people are in it, etc. And if modern cars are anything like smart TVs, send "content recognition" screenshots home to infer what drivers use the onboard screen for.
I refuse to drive a car without first unplugging the cell modem; this is more or less easy depending on the make and model, so do your research.
This is all true, but has little to do with CarPlay in specific — except for the content recognition bit, which, yes, that’s exactly why the careful phrasing around the microphone. I endorse the fight against continuous telematics but I’m only addressing Rivian’s obtuse refusals of CarPlay and how to force one likely intention into the open (and thus discussion of whether Apple’s flat refusal to allow telemetry sharing for such purposes is appropriate!), rather than trying to boil the full ‘fuck telemetry’ ocean in a CarPlay post.
They want software subscription income. It's as simple as that.
Yep. Subscriptions and incentives.
Every car I have purchased has satellite radio factory installed. And each time SiriusXM will not shut up about trying to get me to sign up. Over and over. It takes years before they give up.
I don’t want it. So why is it in the car? Because they pay Ford and Honda and everyone else to put it there.
Why did they both have Spotify? And iHeartRadio? Who even uses that? All sorts of other things. There’s a kickback for every one.
But unlike satellite none of them work without a cell connection. And they won’t use your phone. You have to pay the car maker for their overpriced connectivity. That’s what they want you to do.
Money money everywhere. But if I use CarPlay or android auto guess who doesn’t get a cut.
“People will think our software is bad.” It is, that’s why I want CarPlay.
They want my money. After the car payment I don't have money leftover for another subscription. Use my phone subscription, that is what I'm paying for for.
That’s one of the things that’s always seemed odd to me. I’m more likely to use some service on the car that you get a kick back for and can spy on if I can use my cell phone data plan.
If you try to put a gate in front of it of a $25/mo car data plan, forget it.
It’s 4G? Wow. My phone is only 5G. It’s a hotspot? So is my phone. And I’m the only one here anyway. I get updates to your maps? I don’t like your maps.
It’s like they’re trying to sell flavoring to make dirty water taste better, without ever stopping to think most people don’t like dirty water.
And your data. Auto makers love selling user data.
TBF for a lot of stuff they could probably just monitor the audio system to fingerprint things the way TVs do these days and sell that data even if you use android auto or CarPlay.
But they certainly get a lot more if you use their maps and entertainment apps.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" -- Upton Sinclair
This is the CEO of Rivian's software arm -- his job is to create and sell software that runs in the car. Carplay and Android Auto effectively make him unnecessary.
If you listen to the interview, he has bold ideas about how the car should somehow be the center of one's computing ecosystem. It's ridiculous because the smartphone is already the center! And people like that! And it just makes sense! They're fighting this dumb battle because they have to. But ultimately every car manufacturer wants to get away from Carplay so they can own that tiny fraction of computing that happens on the drive to and from work.
The car industry got "mogged" as the kids say by Apple - cars went from status items (see any 60s/70s movie) to "an iPhone accessory" overnight and they've still not recovered.
>If Rivian’s native UI is so great, then their customers… won’t use CarPlay. It’s that simple.
I kind of disagree with this. Airpods are purely additive, customers can just choose to use different headphones with their iPhone if they want. But they don't want, because Apple lets Airpods interact with the iPhone in a way that other manufacturers can't.
So no, carplay wouldn't be mandatory but it's likely that Apple's leverage will kill their in house offering.
I've never seen a normal car infotainment system I liked (at least beyond 'put in a CD, then use next and previous track'), and Carplay is such a massive improvement over that. It's good, it's consistent, it's the same everywhere, it's up to date, it uses data from my phone. There's nothing to not like. The rest of the infotainment system could literally not exist[1] (beyond integrating buttons to actually control Carplay), and I wouldn't care. The car's infotainment system could just be a Carplay runtime and I'd be good.
[1] There are probably some features I'm forgetting that probably count as part of the infotainment, but which Carplay doesn't touch, like AC and battery info and management. The AC in my own car is completely separate from the infotainment system, but that probably doesn't apply to all cars. But even in those cases, it'd be better if integrated into Carplay, or just left out of what's happening on screen, and instead be given seperate manual controls.
This is familiar to me from an adjacent industry…smart TVs. The reason Samsung, LG, et al develop their own UIs is not because they are good at it. It’s because if they give up and let their device become a dumb host for apps, they lose their relationships with customers (i.e. ad revenue) and accelerate their race to the bottom as commodity hardware vendors.
Customers don’t want this stuff. They want to launch Netflix or Prime Video or Disney and watch. But the premium hardware brands need to fight to stay alive, and giving customers what they want is a death sentence.
Are there really no customers who want the TV to have Netflix built in? At a streaming company I worked at, we put quite a lot of effort into working around all the smart TV firmware quirks so that you didn't need to buy a separate box if you had a supported TV.
A surprisingly large number of customers DO want the smart TV to "just work" and play their Netflix.
Like car infotainment, they figure out how to use it, bitch about it, and some connect an Apple device and use that instead.
Even when CarPlay is full screen, it is possible to have a the manufacturer's UI available. My Ford Sync 3 will let me get back the the car UI via an icon that is the Ford logo - it loos like a regular app, but it's sole purpose is "go back to the car's infotainment." This is useful for controlling the radio and tweaking settings, but not a lot else.
CarPlay is a nightmare for many because its premise only considers 2 options: use CarPlay, don’t use CarPlay.
If you want to mix and match features across what your car offers and CarPlay offers (e.g. use Podcasts app but stick with native navigation), the UX starts to breakdown very quickly.
No, this scenario works fine. Car audio (and UI) can interleave with CarPlay. I can put podcasts on my center screen, my car manufacturer's navigation in the driver's screen, and the navigation prompts will duck the podcast and interrupt as appropriate. This isn't hypothetical or hard, my car does exactly this today.
Is the mechanism through which CarPlay/Android Auto works locked down? Could a third party make a competing app for iOS or android that would connect to cars and run on the screen? Or perhaps a special piece of hardware to hook in to older cars?
Casey is right, but the whole point for the Rivian position is they see themselves as the car software platform of the future. The idea we want primarily phone UIs in our cars is antithetical to their very existence, or why VW invested in them.
The idea customers should have control over the interfaces they use needs to be reinforced. If anything this is why the AI wave has gained so much hype as now people get to bypass so much nonsense masquerading as UX.
All CarPlay is is sending video and audio (like a Moonlight stream) over USB Ethernet. It should be a recognized standard at this point so that you can have a custom device plug in to your car, and have your own UI. But regulations (think watching YouTube while you drive) unfortunately prevent this
The strangest part is that this should be an easy win for car makers. If your native system is better, people will use it. If it isn't, forcing them to use it doesn't make it better, it just makes the car feel worse
Android Auto has upgraded Google Assistant to Gemini recently. Huge improvement. All the AI conversations are now available with a single button on your steering wheel. You can say "play that song about [something]" and it will get it most of the time.
Preference for Android Auto/Carplay is much more than (subjectively) better navigation/media. It's about all the other apps that Tesla/Rivian don't support like WhatsApp, Waze, etc.
I don't own a car, and I found the article mildly interesting, but I can't get over the sentence
> Our last three cars, the eldest of which was from the 2017 model year [...].
Is it common to buy three cars in let's say 10 years? That seems like a large amount of spend (afaik cars depreciate in value rather quick?) and -- barring accidents -- a really short time to have to replace something as sturdy as a car; If I get less than three years out of a phone it feels like a waste and it feels like the main barrier for phone longevity (besides batteries, which are replaceable) is security updates.
IDK, since I don't see any comments on it, it must not be that strange, it just struck me as odd.
The average car in the US is about 13 years old. Just like with phones, some people upgrade every few years even though it's a poor financial decision. Many frugal or less wealthy people only buy used cars and drive them until they die.
I happen to listen to ATP, a tech podcast of which Casey is a co-host.
I believe his family owns 2 cars, but had to replace one of them recently when a pebble caused a freak accident, essentially totaling the engine in one of the cars. Hence 3 cars purchased in 10 years.
Edit: Episode #592, at the very end: https://overcast.fm/+ABQnv4mYCFc/1:40:38
In the USA at least, you seem to either be in the "buy/lease new, trade in every 3-5 years" camp, or "buy it and drive it until the wheels fall off."
If you do the first, you end up not being out a terrible amount of money, especially these days with the high value of used.
CarPlay is great. Generally much better than the interface offered by traditional manufacturers.
But Tesla and Rivian both have excellent UIs. I don’t find myself missing CarPlay in a Tesla.
Read about half of the article wondering when it was going to explain why carplay is addictive
I’ll buy an accessory display that supports CarPlay/Android Auto and attach it to the dashboard and still won’t use the navigation in the infotainment system.
Software in cars ages like milk, and car manufacturers are not good at software. I would much rather just have a dumb screen my phone pairs with.
Won’t buy a car without CarPlay is crazy… lol CarPlay head units are like $200 tops
carPlay is a horrible every time you sit down inside of the car, you need to care about connectivity, if your phone charged etc. It's a neurotic habit.
As a tesla owner, i feel carPlay is such a dumb idea. you buy a car that cost ~$50k+ to rely on every drive on your phone. It's a freedom to be phone free.
And yeah, it's still integrated. My profiles are in sync, if my wife sit down in the car, it adjust the seat height, wheel, temperature , music etc. If I'm listening Spotify using my headphones it switches to car the moment i open the door etc.
“Stop being so intransigent” / “I will NEVER buy a car that doesn’t support CarPlay” is pretty funny.
That said, I agree with the author. Autos are not software companies and they are only locking us in for their own benefit. Anybody not supporting other common standards is probably not telling the whole truth about the reasoning.
carPlay is Stockholm syndrome on wheels.
people have suffered through its clunky handshake for so long that they've started defending their captor.
My friend's $100k Audi makes him spend five minutes accepting terms of service just to enter a GPS destination. On contrary, he can hop into my Tesla and drive off instantly ...location already sent from my phone, key shared from the phone, but wow, no car play involved. One my friends owns android. No problem at all.
The interesting thing is that there is a lot of evidence that Tesla is about to embed Carplay. Rivian has taken over the privileged insanely expensive EV car market, as the Model Y is the closest thing to the old Honda/Toyota dominance, just in the EV space.
Tesla at least somewhat busted ass in the whole "iPad screen in the car" movement, and CarPlay was more invasive in some ways then than it is now.
Personally, I avoid all cars that have CarPlay. This technology has nothing to do with a car. It's just a phone on a bigger screen, pure marketing by Apple that stifles innovation within the car manufacturing industry. I love Apple products, but CarPlay is boring af. And don't get me wrong i do understand why people love CarPlay. Problem is, majority of people don't know why CarPlay is so bad - many haven't used anything better, and they won't, because Apple stifles innovation in this space. It's a loop.
"You can read Wassym’s full answer at the episode link, but here’s the part that stuck out to me:
The challenge with screen mirroring solutions is that they take over every single pixel in the car, and that’s not the way we see ourselves interacting with our users."
I kept reading past this part thinking I didn't misread the title, because as he explained, a mirroring solution that takes up every pixel could potentially be addictive, and it made sense that he didn't want the UX to fundamentally change when people drive Rivian's cars. And for that, kudos.
But now I realize your case is that CarPlay is additive. Ok, great! I do wish I could use Android on my car, which is newer than your 2017 one but only features Bluetooth, music and Phone, pairing, rather than a full OS mirror.
Do I wish it had more? Yes. But am I less distracted on the road? Yes. So I would buy a Rivian.
I don't know about Rivian, but I'm generally less distracted on the road with CarPlay due to Siri & Voice Control. I wish I could extend it to my native car controls such as climate control etc.
Yeah, I actually use a cell phone mount for navigation since my car doesn't have one. It's far from ideal, and I think more cars should have an easier and more secure way to attach/clamp a phone/tablet rather than require the driver to use their infotainment system, Although that can sometimes be fine. Having a flimsy car mount can be worse/more dangerous than a limited or poorly updated in-car navigation system. https://github.com/hatonthecat/Open-Source-Car/blob/main/ssr...
> I'm generally less distracted on the road
You should be not distracted at all.
Rivian refusing to bend the knee to Apple should be met with more respect. You are free to force yourself to never buy a vehicle without Apple software, however you're just adding another shackle between your life and their massive walled garden. Should Rivian continue to innovate as Tesla did, your choice will become hard to maintain. Never is quite a long time.
I have a chapter in my book Kill the HiPPO titled “Cupholders vs CarPlay”.
The premise of the chapter is that some features in software are like CarPlay when looking for a new car - they become an important must-have for the buying decision - as opposed to “cupholder” features, those features which are a mere minor improvement for existing users.
https://killthehippo.com/
Congrats on writing a book, big accomplishment!
I'm confused about the cupholder example though: I'd MUCH rather skip CarPlay (which I love) than cupholders in a car, but I wouldn't shop for a car based on whether it has cupholders because surely they all do, right? It seems like shopping based on whether the car has A/C or something.
> Congrats on writing a book, big accomplishment!
Thank you!
The point is that you must make sure your product has the “CarPlay” type of features in order to get new customers for whom those features are must-haves.
Beware of spending your time only on adding new “cupholder” style features, which make existing customers slightly happier but don’t attract new customers.
Especially be aware that when you launched your product X years ago, some of today’s “CarPlay”-style features didn’t even exist. Your current customers are not asking for them, because they are mostly happy with your product as it is.
If you only listen to what existing customers are asking for, you might not even realise that these new “CarPlay” features are stopping you from getting certain new customers.
Isn't it dangerous and illegal to do stuff on your phone while driving? In this case it's on a bigger screen so it's okay somehow? (I haven't experienced one of these in person though, so I might be missing something.)
I don't know how CarPlay is, but Android Auto restricts the apps and app interactions you can do in the Android Auto user interface. On my phone the only apps that show up are google maps, spotify, and my podcast player and my phone interface I think.
You can control Carplay the most relevant parts with buttons. Next-previous track, volume, voice commands, probably more I can't think of.
Not to mention that yes, a bigger screen probably is better. Bigger target = easier to hit. The legality can become a lessened problem, depending on jurisdiction. Using your phone while driving is often specifically illegal, but using your car's infotainment system might not be automatically illegal (it might count as distracted driving or whatever, but the threshold of proof is higher).
The amount of confusive naming of CarPlay vs CarPlay Ultra and Android Auto vs Android Automotive brings into this conversation is amazing.
Author: I literally will not buy a car that does not support CarPlay.
Me: I literally will not buy a car that does.
I’m not even that old, but I’d really love to argue to simplify the entire auto infotainment stack. I don’t even need a screen. I just bring my own by magnetically attaching my phone that I’ll use to navigate and Bluetooth music or podcasts. If CarPlay becomes the standard that allows me to not pay for whatever crappy tablet UI automakers are pushing, fine. But that doesn’t make CarPlay a necessity, it just makes it the least bad option.
A rear camera is mandatory on new cars in the US these days, and it's honestly a good idea to have them either way. This makes a screen a necessity more or less no matter what (I can't see it being implemented with a bring-your-own tablet solution).
That doesn't mean they have to ship most of the infotainment system though. They could just leave that hole there for Carplay to fill. But that would be admiring defeat, and we can't have that.
The rear and mirror cameras being active is one reason I don't like it when my phone is connected to it because they overlay what Carplay/Android Auto is trying to show. It's sort of like downgrading from dual screen to one.
I've never found it to be inconvenient. When I'm reversing, I'm not using Carplay actively. I guess it could be annoying if you're a passenger trying to key in a destination or something, but I'd just use my phone in that case (or have the driver unlock their phone).
My car has side cameras that activate when the turn signals are active and that is usually precisely at the same time that I need to see directions for a major interchange or similar. I'm guessing it's been fixed but I find mixing the UI of my phone with my car's built in UI can create some unexpected behaviors.
That's horrible. That'd be a no-buy from me if I were to discover it during a test drive.
Many European EVs work like that. Fiat, Opel, Citroen have models without even a radio.
It sounds like you want a Slate: https://www.slate.auto/en The closest it gets to an infotainment system is a tablet mount.
There's so many comments on the lines of "I would never buy a car without android auto/car play support". I 100% used to be on this camp, "A car without android auto, what am I, a caveman!?".
Anyway, separately to anything car related, I got fed up of some of google's treatment of android and switched to Murena's /e/os which is a de-googled spin of android. It doesn't support android auto, and that held me back from switching for ages.
Long story short, I don't miss android auto at all. Bluetooth is absolutely fine for playing media from my phone etc.
(my car does already have functionality like google maps built in though, so I might feel differently if it didn't)
> (my car does already have functionality like google maps built in though, so I might feel differently if it didn't)
See if you care in 5 years when the maps are out of date.
Just give me a head unit with an aux in and a cd player and I'll be happy
I imagine the Venn Diagram of Rivian buyers and Apple users is basically a circle (or one small circle inside a much larger one), this seems like a wildly obtuse position for them to take.
Tesla was similar. There was a report years ago about how Apple parking lots were just full of the things. And yet Tesla wouldn’t play ball.
If the cainfotainment system is good enough, I don't use CarPlay - at most I just connect Bluetooth to make calls.
The reason CarPlay and Android Auto exist is that car infotainment systems used to suck.
They still suck (modulo Tesla and maybe a few other very recent models).
>The challenge with screen mirroring solutions is that they take over every single pixel in the car, and that’s not the way we see ourselves interacting with our users.
Wassym Bensaid sounds like an incompetent person to be a chief software officer working on cars if he does not understand this is not how carplay works. It's either this, or he's just weaseling out of saying "we want to capture all our users data, and we want to put in rent seeking subscriptions into our cars, which is going to be hard if we enable carplay".
Do not buy cars from companies like this.
Rivian should buy overcast.
That way they can silence people being too vocal about what they want. The tech way.
In all seriousness though, Tesla can’t include CarPlay fast enough to make companies like rivian take a moment and actually consider carplay.
Also atp is one of the best podcasts out there
but what do people actually use carplay for? Navigation, music and calls?
I suspect that 90% of the people that "need" carplay are actually just using it as a bluetooth speaker and would be fine with a good phoneholder and bluetooth/aux connection.
I always feel strange connecting to someone else their carlpay or to a rental car.
> just using it as a bluetooth speaker and would be fine with a good phoneholder and bluetooth/aux connection.
Is it unreasonable to have this functionality built in to the car? I can't see any good reasons not to have it from the consumer's point of view. Carplay doesn't even have a licence fee, so it's basically free to implement.
And it's not like there's a shortage of options. Removing the cars that don't have it of your shortlist is an easy way to filter off the options that don't even pretend to respect you as a user.
> I always feel strange connecting to someone else their carlpay or to a rental car.
Honest question, why? It is literally remote desktop + some pipes for audio and screen touches. It's no different than connecting an external touchscreen to a smartphone, lapdock-style.
It's a strange feeling reading these comments because not only have I never used carplay or android auto, I don't think I've ever noticed anyone else using it in a car someone's driven me in. Everyone I know just has their phone in a dash mount. I don't think it's that small a sample size either! I drive a 2014 Accord and it auto connects to my android with Bluetooth when I turn on the car. It's hard to really imagine the experience of maps or music being improved by seeing it on my dashboard screen compared to right next to it on the phone.
I imagine everyone who is fully involved with the carplay ecosystem feels equally as strongly in the other direction and has for a long time.
CarPlay and Android Auto only really started seeing adoption in post 2017 Model Year vehicles.
Anyone I know that has one, will immediately either plugin or connect whenever they go live.
There's other benefits like (in the aforementioned article), CarPlay Ultra being able to send data to multiple screens like the front dash. Where having my directions right next to me speed means I don't have to check two screens.
I only got a car with Carplay this year... before that, phone in a dash mount.
But just getting into you car and having it project your phone interface instantly from your pocket on a screen that is part of the car is really nice. I don't even have a super large screen (10.5 inches, widescreen) but it's significantly better than looking at my phone. It even integrates with the heads up display.
> It's hard to really imagine the experience of maps or music being improved by seeing it on my dashboard screen compared to right next to it on the phone.
It might be hard to imagine but it shouldn't be. I would find it very hard to go back to fiddling with my phone rather than have it nicely integrated into all the buttons and dials on my car. Never taking my phone out of my pocket and forgetting it in the car -- I did that a lot. The audio integration across the radio, phone apps, and navigation is perfect -- Bluetooth doesn't come close and was always a frustration. It's just better in every way, that's why people like it.
> I drive a 2014 Accord and it auto connects to my android with Bluetooth when I turn on the car. It's hard to really imagine the experience of maps or music being improved by seeing it on my dashboard screen compared to right next to it on the phone.
How about instead of your phone? You don't need your phone dash mount if you have Carplay.
I personally only need the map up sometimes so I find the whole thing kind of patronizing. The last time I tried it I didn't like that I couldn't switch between different music apps without exiting the entire system. Maybe it's different now but I'm pretty content not using it. Also the Carplay / Android port on my car is old and doesn't support fast charging.
> I personally only need the map up sometimes so I find the whole thing kind of patronizing.
You should be able to have it only show the music app or whatever if that's what bothers you. My cars default infotainment shows the map by default too, so this is more or less the same from my point of view (other than the fact that the car's maps are out of date).
> The last time I tried it I didn't like that I couldn't switch between different music apps without exiting the entire system.
As in you need to exit one app to open another? You can add whatever apps to the home(?) screen if you need to see them both at the same time, but if you want two apps to be fully open at the same time, that's not happening, as that's probably a hold-over from phone UI. Or am I misunderstanding you here?
My car's default system is running Android 4.x and has big "Audio", "Maps", "Climate" physical buttons on both the wheel and the center dash but rarely use the car's Maps screen. I usually have it set to Audio and it just shows what's playing via Bluetooth. I'm mostly driving around LA so my typical driving pattern is knowing 90% of the route and needing to sometimes lookup traffic and then looking at the directions for the last 10% if I'm going somewhere new. Otherwise I'm playing either Spotify, Soundcloud, or Beatport.
When I tried Android Auto it actually took over my car's infotainment system and made my phone slightly slower having to drive another screen? I dunno it's been years. I just don't see the value in it personally.
If you just use it for music and are happy with bluetooth, it's understandable why you don't see the benefit. Heck, do you even need a screen at that point (barring a backup camera)?
For maps, having up to date maps is an enormous relief compared to relying on the outdated maps that came with your car (at least in my experience).
> When I tried Android Auto it actually took over my car's infotainment system
Yes. I prefer it that way. The car's default infotainment system might as well not exist for all I care, since I prefer the Carplay experience.
> and made my phone slightly slower having to drive another screen?
I haven't noticed this problem.
I’m not a huge fan of it, but I do find it more convenient than BlueTooth alone.
For context, I drive a ‘91 GMC pickup, so neither cars nor car audio are super important to me. I still bought a CarPlay-enabled Android head unit because it’s less of a hassle to use.
I use Android Auto a lot when traveling in rental cars. The alternative is annoying. With Android Auto, I at least know how to navigate and play audio with minimal effort. Otherwise I just use my phone and in a rental I typically don't have a mount so it's annoying because my phone discovers new and unexpected places to hide. First world problems, I know.
> I literally will not buy a car that does not support CarPlay.
I think you mean addictive.
Can anyone recommend a good aftermarket CarPlay unit manufacturer (or stand alone unit that I can mount on dash? Wary of cheating out and getting an overheating cpu or bad touch screen
I got a cheap generic one (aphqua brand) and it's fine. The touch screen is fine. The aux out is fine. It doesn't seem to get hot. It's not amazing, but for the price it's functionally perfect.
I will not buy a car.
There should be a standard. (Yes I know the XKCD) Apple and Android each having their own is ridiculous and actively prevents smaller competitors(one can dream)
For what it’s worth I’ve heard they’re basically identical. It’s just some two-way data and an h264 video stream. There’s a reason basically everyone supports both. Seems to be really easy.
I don’t know whether the auto makers actually forced them to be compatible or it was a choice in Google’s part to get into cars that already had CarPlay.
But it really doesn’t seem like it’s a big hassle. Most of it is probably just certification testing to be allowed to use the names/logos.
My car has wired carplay/android auto, but I have a nifty little USB dongle that receives carplay/android auto wirelessly and passes it to the car via USB. Sometimes called an AI box, I think.
These things contain a whole System-on-a-Chip board. I presume what it's acting like a middle box; pretending to be the headunit to the phone, and then sending the phone's output to the headunit, pretending to be a phone.
Since they need a quite beefy CPU to do that, I'm guessing they don't just pass along packets, but actually speak the protocol on both ends, and perhaps transcode the a/v stream.
Every time I've used CarPlay or Android Auto, I just remember how much better the experience was with a tablet velcro'd over the main display. Immediately obviously better in every single way, and dramatically cheaper and easier to replace if desired.
I get the goal, and I'm glad there's at least some semblance of a standard. But it's still bad.
At this point it's very easy: no CarPlay, no buy. So no Tesla (obv), no Rivian.
Opinionated, but Tesla's interface seems better than any CarPlay?
The thing with CarPlay that I hate the most is that it is laggy. I have it on a Series 5 BMW and Spotify has a delay of at least 4s when you select a song and when it actually starts playing. Same thing when you rapidly skip tracks - the interface changes but the speakers (or any other non-CarPlay interface) can't really keep up. It really is a joke, especially on that kind of vehicle.
Yikes. That doesn't sound right. It works fine in my Kia, so this sounds like BMW's implementation is really bad (how did they even do that‽).
The car industry is currently in the "rodeo" phase that the telcos where in when it came to the internet. Loosing power- and very soon tamed, because the Chinese competition has no such qualms.
What the auto industry should have really woken up to is the idea of a singular carplay for both android and ios. I have a 2021 BMW that only supported carplay and was fine for many years. It is wireless even. I love it. But now i have a pixel.
Maybe someone already said this but my pet peeve is restrictions on wireless CarPlay. We have a top of the line Kia Telluride that only has wired CarPlay. Then we rented a crappy Kia sedan on vacation and it had wireless. Apparently the developer of Telluride’s fancy built in navigation system prohibits wireless CarPlay
As an Apple fanboy I have to say I’ve never been impressed with CarPlay. I’ve used it in rentals quite a bit but have found it generally infuriating.
Primary reason is the map. On the Tesla you have this beautiful map that you can pan around and pinch zoom in and out of.
On the versions of CarPlay that I’ve used, you can this minimal map that can’t be pinch zoomed. Seems like you have to tap the pan buttons by hand to get it to slide around.
It’s just generally unusable. Like I don’t even know why people like this. Oh and then the nanny aspect of your phone becoming a black screen of just enumerated turns with no way to actually see the map yourself (if the car screen is unwilling to work right, my first instinct was to go to my phone but alas no they brick it).
Before I owned a Tesla I remember thinking what a mistake it was that it didn’t have CarPlay because I assumed it was the best. Well it’s not. Not by a long shot.
Rivian sees Apple (CarPlay) as competition. So what is surprising?
Carplay is a convenient - FREE solution to car infotainment that car makers cannot control. They cannot sell you subscription based services for in-car stuff if you can get that from another app, and that's not in their interest. The CEO here knows well what he's saying is BS. We are lucky if something like Carplay will survive in the car subscription based era. They might charge you for the use of Carplay in the future, or free access to their infotainment that is complemented by subscritions. Car makers sell cars with thin margins so they need to find ways to increase them.
I am also in this camp. As soon as GM announced they weren’t going to support CarPlay, I scratched GM off of the list.
Ford Mach E it was then.
I thought I would be okay and bought a GM. I regret it because of the lack of android auto.
I hope you made your dissatisfaction known. Otherwise I’m sure they see your purchase as a success, validating your decision. Make sure they know you’ll never by another GM car.
There is no useful way to complain to GM.
However making sure everyone knows on various forums is a much more powerful way in the long run. It will take more time, but I'm not alone.
What makes you think they would care? If they cared they wouldn’t have done it in the first place.
They will care of sales slump and the feedback they are getting is all asking for CarPlay/Android Auto.
Even Tesla said they started working on CarPlay support when their sales started to suffer for unrelated reasons.
You said “let them know after you already bought it” - again, why would they care?
They do care about future sales. Not only you, but the people you’re going to tell to stay away from them because of this.
GM objectively makes the best American cars and it's not even close, even despite this.
C8 corvette has been car of the year since 2020 and will remain that way until the C9.
I agree, I want one. But not without CarPlay. Ford it is until then.
I don't listen to the opinions of people who try to sell me a podcast subscription
Why do people want so much to be distracted from and while driving? Is there still a single responsible driver left on the road?
I'm still angry that I can't just run Android Auto directly anymore on my phone when I'm in a vehicle that doesn't have Android Auto support and my phone is just dash-mounted (or handlebar-mounted).
Usedtacould.
I don't particularly care about Android Auto (I generally prefer standard bluetooth for audio, and directly setting the phone up for navigation), but if a manufacturer supports CarPlay and not Android Auto, they can get lost. I hate how Apple stuff is an assumed default.
Effectively no one does that. I think there might be one or two ultra luxury cars that do, but in general no one does. Because they don’t wanna cut off any of their audience.
And at this point it seems like 80% of car manufacturers just ship android automotive anyway. You really think they’re gonna do that and turn off android auto support?
Am I the only person who hates plugging their iPhone into their car to charge and completely losing control of it?
When I plug it into the USB socket, my Peugeot 207 starts playing a random podcast track on my phone. No way of stopping it. If I stop it, it starts again. I can't select a different audio output, e.g. the phone speaker. There are plenty of people complaining about this on the forums.
Yes, it's a bug in either the iPhone or the car. Yes the bug shouldn't be there, but it is. I should be able to disable it.
I'm in the habit of bringing a spare battery with me so I can use phone sat-nav.
Your car is broken, and was apparently sold as such. I'd return the car for that, or just never buy it in the first place if I noticed it during research or a test drive.
It's a quite old, third-hand car. But there are plenty of people reporting the same thing.
But why can't my iPhone let me set permissions for the thing I plug it into? It's unreasonable to prevent me from changing the audio output.
Examples:
- https://www.peugeotforums.com/threads/mp3-ipod-random-play-p...
- https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254051162?sortBy=rank
> It's a quite old, third-hand car. But there are plenty of people reporting the same thing.
Presumably it's been a problem since day 1. Meaning it was broken on day 1.
> But why can't my iPhone let me set permissions for the thing I plug it into?
There's the 'trust this device?' popup that should prevent the problem if you don't want the car to do anything with your device. If you want finder control, then from Apple's point of view, it's probably that this would needlessly clutter the UI, given that it shouldn't be an issue in the first place. Then again, I don't think Android supports finer controls either way.
Thanks, I might try and reset that 'trust'. I don't recall if it popped up or not originally.
I’m with OP, here: CarPlay is additive to the experience, but also is something that provides me a degree of consistency across my automotive experiences - when vendors bother to implement it properly.
I have an old Honda Fit that I installed one of Pioneer’s “app radio” units into, which included replacing the dash facia. I use CarPlay on it almost exclusively, but if I want Pioneer’s incredibly mediocre UI/UX, it’s a single button-tap away - either on the left side of the radio via a capacitance button, or on the first page of CarPlay’s app icons.
When I rented a car to drive to visit family, it had CarPlay. The infotainment experience was familiar, so I could focus more on the road ahead instead of fussing with some newfangled vendor-specific infotainment shitshow.
When I rented Nissan in Canada, it too had CarPlay - but with a nasty bug where using voice commands or making a call would crash the whole unit. I figured out very quickly not to do that, and the rest of CarPlay worked a treat for the trip - a far cry better from Nissan’s UI/UX.
This is why I didn’t hop on board infotainment systems until CarPlay and Android Auto were mature options, opting to stick with my phone over USB for audio/iPod controls instead: none of the major manufacturers except maybe Panasonic actually give a shit about the UI/UX. They don’t build intuitive systems that can be operated without looking, and they scoop up far too much superfluous data to enable simple features. I refuse to buy the vehicle maker excuse of “superior experience” anymore when time after time, the reality is these car companies think the infotainment data is some sort of goldmine of revenue and letting Apple or Google have any say over the experience is tantamount to leaving money on the table.
If I cannot have CarPlay, and your EV or vehicle won’t let me swap the infotainment unit for an aftermarket one that does, then I am not buying your fucking spyware on wheels. I don’t think anyone else should tolerate that bullshit either, especially on what averages to be a $70k+ purchase nowadays.
CarPlay is subtractive for the car manufacturer who wants to track you and sell your data. That's all you need to know about this debate. Of course CarPlay is the far superior UX. It's entertaining to see car manufacturers bend over and come up with ridiculous justifications for why they "cannot" give you the option to just use CarPlay.
And here I am, ideally not wanting any screen in my car, but just the good ole buttons and knobs of yesteryear... sigh...
You can have a screen and buttons. If anything, a rear view camera is really useful, and you kind of have to have a screen for that to be of any use.
True, everything is better than a pure touchscreen cockpit.
Wonder how GM is doing it
It's difficult for me to admit - because I really dislike Apple, Google, and the other predatory monopolies - but I wouldn't buy a car without CarPlay either.
Like I said, it's not because I'm a fan of Apple. Honestly, fuck Apple. Fuck their stupid walled garden and their $99/yr developer fee and their planned obsolesence and their lack of a headphone jack and everything else. But fuck Google too. And especially fuck all the car makers with their crappy infotainment software.
The truth is, I put up with an iPhone and with CarPlay simply because it is slightly less shitty than all the other shitty options.
As a disclaimer, the three iPhones I've ever purchased have all been used. I keep them for as long as possible. I don't use iCloud. I don't buy apps. In fact, I don't give Apple any money as far as I know.
I wish a Linux phone was a viable option but they are years away from being truly usable and decades away from any hope of mass integration with cars.
android isn't linux-y enough to be able to use android auto on a more typical linux kernel?
I love how people are pushing for Android Auto and CarPlay on the basis of consistency and ubiquity and control, yet fail to realize that their advocacy will reduce what is currently a thriving marketplace filled with unique options to a duopoly.
Once that happens we all know what comes next: enshittification.
> a thriving marketplace filled with unique options to a duopoly.
If the car infotainment market is what counts as 'thriving' with 'unique options', then I don't want a thriving market, because that's apparently a bad thing. Sure, there are plenty of unique options. Outside of Carplay, Android Auto and Tesla (and maybe a few other very recent models), they're all shit.
I don't want hundreds of bad options. I want one (at least, more is preferable) good option.
"My one walled garden won't let my other walled garden in."
It boils down to "who owns the field". Facebook and Apple killed Flash because they wanted control. Rivian is trying to say "we will own the users eyes, their phones be damned".
iPod, aux cable, phone holder for maps.
Anything else can wait until I stop.
Quite interesting, particularly with statistics shared in comments. Personally I hate CarPlay because of it's limitations - oh you can't respond to messages, oh you can't watch videos and sorts. Much easier to have a tablet there free of these "safety" limitations.
Imagine if customers demanded MacBooks boot into Android when an android phone was connected .
The cars primary UI is the screen. Car Clay defers the cars experience to Apple .
Customers have been demanding CarPlay because most car UIs are poor. But if done properly, they can exceed CarPlay while being consistent and well integrated
I don't think I can honestly say I've seen a car UI done so well I'd forego CarPlay on the same vehicle.
MAYBE in the rare case it has wireless CarPlay only, but can play music over USB from my phone. Maybe.
Car manufacturers don't want this because it gives Apple/Google leverage over their products. The alternative is some kind of open standard, but that undercuts the ability of manufacturers to hard fuck you on trim options.
One of the more irritating parts of late stage capitalism is the complete inability of its scions (CEOs, etc.) to say any of this. The gaslighting is insufferable.
Don't like Siri but want CarPlay? oops, nope.
There are a bunch of CarPlay devices on Amazon, for example, with all kinds of screens, designed for Tesla and other cars that don't support it, that cost about $200 for a nice one. Why not just buy one of those and who cares if it's natively supported?
In most cases it puts the CarPlay screen in a more difficult to reach location than the OE screen.
The one that interests me now is the one that selectively takes over the Tesla screen.
Plus it’s not going to integrate with your steering wheel controls, navigation system, or anything else.
Those are a great solution for a car that doesn’t have an infotainment screen.
But Teslas, Rivians, and GMs all do. So why should anyone have to do that?
Why buy a car where you need to do this and get a more janky experience, when you can buy one with it integrated, with no downsides?
I get where the author is coming from, but it seems to me that the core issue here isn't CarPlay, it's that car manufacturers are absolute dogshit at software. Most Tesla owners don't seem that upset about the lack of CarPlay, I'm assuming because the native Tesla experience is really good. I'm not sure people would care as much if that were the case more often.
And cars are increasingly a software-bound experience that CarPlay can only get you out of so far. I have a Volvo XC40 EV, and even though it's a decent car and I've had multiple Volvos that I've loved, I probably won't buy another one because the software experience is so bad. And that's WITH CarPlay!
Slightly off topic. Is it just me, or do others also feel it's horrendously difficult to read these AI written articles?
The author is in a podcast that I classify as Apple apologist. They feel because they have used Apple products for 8+ years the world should bend to their knee. And anytime new non-apple tech comes up on the podcast they do not give any opportunity to acclimate to new tech, because they drink the apple kool-aid. Which is fine, but just admit some products are not for you then if you want the Apple ecosphere, where they dont respect their customers, their developers or their partners.
> I literally will not buy a car that does not support CarPlay.
This is silly. I have installed Android Auto head units into each of my last three cars. It costs a few hundred bucks and takes an afternoon.
I simply will not buy a car that won't easily accept a double DIN head unit.
I think that ship has sailed, my friend.
My last car could accept a double DIN head unit but I never put one in because then I'd lose any way to control all the settings in the car. And that was a car from 2014! The integration is even tighter now.
As long as used cars exist the ship will never have sailed.
Eventually used cars will be today's new cars.
This is the reason our car with the best entertainment system is ironically my old piece of junk clunker.
> I simply will not buy a car that won't easily accept a double DIN head unit.
Are those even a thing anymore? The vast majority of new cars have some sort of custom all-in-one dashboard display.
I don't know or care if "it's a thing anymore", there's an inexhaustible supply of existing cars with double DIN. My Subaru from 2017 has double DIN and I don't see any reason to own a more modern car than that.
> Let me help you, [Rivian Chief Software Officer] Wassym
Casey Liss, let me help you:
Apple and Google are monopolies.
You are boot licking an invasive species trillion dollar company.
These two megacorps are trying to put their greedy tendrils into the automotive industry and extract even more money from an industry that is not healthy and very difficult to succeed at.
It's high time the governments of the world told Google and Apple to fuck off and leave both consumers and other industries alone. Told the both of them that it's time for their platforms to become an open standard.
That phones themselves must be an open standards. With open web installs without scare walls and deeply hidden settings.
The inversion of control needs to make Apple and Google the bitch here. Not the automotive industry that can't even dream of the insane margins the tech industry has.
Cars should be able to interface with any phone without having to subjugate themselves to Google and Apple. Because this is a perverted inversion of control.
People own cars. Not two tech titans.
Geez, did Apple CarPlay burn down your house and kill your livestock or something?
No, that was the original Ford SYNC for Windows Phone
> Cars should be able to interface with any phone without having to subjugate themselves to Google and Apple. Because this is a perverted inversion of control.
Bluetooth?
Um, my favorite feature of CarPlay is that I can just not use it.
CarPlay is bad for the car manufacturer and is far worse than the modern car software. People who complain about loosing CarPlay are not using the new software but reacting in fear thinking the old car software will come back.
The author acts like manufacturers get CarPlay for free when it has a high cost, high constraints, and gives over most or all of the dash over to another company.
> gives over most or all of the dash over to another company
The dash isn't the manufacturer's property. It's the car owner's.
> gives over most or all of the dash over to another company.
This was covered in the article, that’s just CarPlay Ultra, which is still fairly new and hardly any companies have implemented it. That’s not what’s being asked for.
> fear thinking the old car software will come back.
Why would this not be a concern? Condition forces higher quality. If these car companies are competing against Apple and Google, they need to stop phoning it in. If they block them out, they can ship more junk and drivers are just stuck with it.
If they believe it what they ship, they shouldn’t be afraid to also build in CarPlay/Android Auto support. Have the sales people go over the built in system so people give it a chance. Impress the customers with it. Advertise how good it is. Eliminating the competition and claiming it’s for the best, does not inspire confidence.
> This was covered in the article, that’s just CarPlay Ultra
And Apple doesn’t just take it over. It requires a per-model design package the OEM makes with Apple’s help. So they can keep all their logos and design elements they care about.
They still don’t do it, as you pointed out. But it’s not like using an AppleTV to avoid the terrible built in smart TV interface. The OEM is still there.
> CarPlay is bad for the car manufacturer and is far worse than the modern car software.
I have a new car with actually pretty decent modern car software; far better than the decades of crap software I put up with my last car. Carplay is still better. And in another decade, Carplay will be even better and my decent car software will be the same.
(And the car software and Carplay actually play very nicely together -- it is not all or nothing)
I drive a 2026 Toyota, how do I enable this new good native infotainment system of which you speak?
The one in my car sucks, and to use the most basic features (navigation, music) that cost nothing on CarPlay (beyond my phone bill) cost $15-25/month from Toyota.
> CarPlay [...] is far worse than the modern car software.
This is satire. I refuse to believe anything else.
I have a Tesla and want CarPlay. What car has this better, newer software that you say I’m unaware of?
For a blog named with a wordplay on "Less is more", this text sure has a loooooot of unncessary bullshit before getting to the point.
Pretty sure it's an ad for theverge subscriptions
I've never seen CarPlay work properly. 2026 and they still can't make a car play music without jittering like a CD. Every car brand I've rented, every iPhone I've owned, gotta turn that junk off every time.
That’s very odd. I’ve used my phones with 3 different cars regularly using CarPlay every single time I drive for literally a decade without ever experiencing that.
Plus various rental cars!
So I own a new Honda and have either borrowed or rented GM, Chrysler, Toyota, Nissan. If you've only driven say Ford, BMW, Hyundai, Mercedes, VW, I didn't test those.
I own a Ford now, had a Honda and I’m in a relative’s Honda somewhat frequently.
Rented a number of GMs for sure, maybe a Nissan? Some of that is more fuzzy.
(n=1)
This isn't like Linux where the combo of motherboard, kernel version, and day of the week affects your Bluetooth audio, but ok cause n=1. Apple stuff is supposed to just work. Most of it does, but not this.
Just like the article and every other opinion in this thread...
Problem is between steering wheel and car seat.
Sorry, next time I'll make sure to use it without being in the car?
> There exists a flavor of CarPlay — CarPlay Ultra — that does take over every screen of the car.
I wish software leaning Internet people stop framing that center console tablet as "the car". It's worse than people pointing at display monitors and calling it computers. They're just cheap complimentary tablets attached to the car. If we were to fully embrace the line of thinking that frame the touchscreen being the car, the Slate Truck cannot exist, since it lacks the car of the car. In reality it does exist, because that thing is just a tiny add-on unit of a car.
The reason why there's been zero cars with CarPlay Ultra is because those cheap tablets remote controlling features of the actual car that hosts it, like speedometer, is weird, and way too complicated, and plain unworkable, on top of being too controlling.
I'm not defending car brands, I find conversations with misunderstandings like this less than ideally productive. The 5.25" DVD drive unit is not the computer.
Huh? Your own quote literally does not frame the center screen as "the car":
> that does take over every screen of the car.
The author clearly thinks that the dash and and the nav are connected to the same thing in the back, when in reality the nav is a self contained unit that runs on the power from the car. That only happens when people frame the nav as the car.
Casey is one of three hosts on an Apple focused podcast. They’ve discussed CarPlay Ultra numerous times. He’s discussed watching the WWDC session where how it works and gets themed was first explained.
I promise, he knows exactly what it is.
CarPlay Ultra takes over the infotainment as well as the dash displays. The author is correct. In cars that support CarPlay Ultra, the dash screens are just additional infotainment screens that default to gauge display.
And I'm saying zero cars support CarPlay Ultra because that's not how cars work. The dash screens cannot be made into just additional infotainment screens because the infotainment is explicitly architected as an external device to the car.
What I've been saying is that the infotainment is external to the car, not significantly more connected and integrated than the spare tire, and that everyone needs to understand that.
Here's an explanation of CarPlay Ultra, which really is the phone driving your dash and instrumentation: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/05/carplay-ultra-the-nex...
There's only a couple of Aston Martin cars that support it, but there's supposed to be more coming. See: https://www.stuff.tv/features/apple-carplay-ultra-compatibil...
What year do you live in?
The "infotainment" (the display on the middle of the car) controls a lot of things now. On my car I can change things like lane departure or collision warning, changing the car's behaviour, for example that it brakes itself if it thinks it's about to hit something. You can even set a speed limiter, changing the behaviour of the car when you put pedal to the metal. Instead of going faster and faster up to 220km/h, you can modify the car to go faster and faster, but only to e.g. 120 km/h. How's that "external to the car".
You are mistaken, sorry. Even the normal everyday infotainment on most modern cars has receive-only telemetry available to it from the car control computers. Some elements are passed through (like EV state of charge) to old style CarPlay as well. Think data diode (making no claims as to the actual physical implementation, but logically it works)
CarPlay Ultra is just an extension of that where the gauge cluster is now just another infotainment screen that displays the received telemetry data. It does not have access to the ECU, cannot interfere, can be rebooted with impunity, etc.
Wouldn’t that mean CarPlay Ultra is flat out impossible?
But it exists. And is available in at least one production car.