Next generation CarPlay is missing in action as Apple fails to hit its own deadline
Back in 2022, Apple loudly talked up its next-generation CarPlay before quietly committing to it being released in 2024 -- and now it's saying nothing about having missed that deadline.
The new CarPlay would take over all car information and entertainment functions -- image credit: Apple
Apple has always had a reputation for refusing to announce or even admit to something it was working on, until it was ready to ship. Yet when it gave what it called a sneak peek at the new CarPlay in 2022, it sounded as if it were ready.
"Automakers from around the world are excited to bring this new vision of CarPlay to customers," said Emily Schubert, Apple's Senior Manager of Car Experience Engineering at WWDC 2022. "Vehicles will start to be announced late next year, and we can't wait to show you more further down the road."
What Apple showed was nothing less than the complete takeover of a car's entire dashboard by CarPlay. Instead of being confined to a square-ish screen that shows a few apps, the new CarPlay runs everything.
The speed display, the rev counter, the trip counter, whether the car was in Drive or Park, everything. The new CarPlay would use every screen in the car -- and be adapted so that "no matter what type of unique screen shapes or layouts you may have, this next generation of CarPlay feels like it was made specifically for your car."
Schubert is a 20-year veteran of Apple, and in October 2023, she was promoted to Director, Car Experience. But while she is presumably plugging away at the new CarPlay, those excited automakers don't appear to be.
Apple showed a slide featuring 14 car manufacturers, from Audi to Volvo, and none of them have released a car featuring the new CarPlay.
To be fair to Schubert, her three-minute WWDC speech only committed Apple to how cars would start to be announced in 2023, and she wasn't wrong. In 2023, both Porsche and Aston Martin showed off what were basically concept designs.
However, they did so simultaneously on December 20, 2023 -- and neither has actually released a car. Aston Martin committed to a 2024 launch, but Porsche wouldn't be drawn on any date.
And if Apple's WWDC announcement was also carefully-worded, Apple's website announcement was not. "First models arrive in 2024," it said.
The key phrase is at the bottom -- "First models arrive in 2024" -- image credit: Apple
At time of writing, it still says that.
Money doesn't solve everything
It's easy to say that Apple has so much money that it can throw at any problem, but there are limits to even its resources. There are limits when you're working with any outside firms, let alone 14 of them, for which your CarPlay project may not be a priority.
Then it's surely not an easy task to have an iPhone communicate "with your vehicle's real-time systems in an on-device, privacy-friendly way, showing all of your driving information, like speed, RPMs, fuel level, temperature, and more," as Schubert said.
It's just unusual that Apple would either announce a major release early, or that it would fail to correctly assess how long the project would take. There was speculation in 2022 that the announcement was really made because car manufacturers appeared to be abandoning support for CarPlay.
Schubert also said in her speech that "79% of US buyers would only consider a car that works with CarPlay," which did definitely sound like a shot across the bows of car makers thinking of leaving.
Some still did, though it's not been a great or popular move for those manufacturers.
There was also speculation that this new CarPlay was actually a sneak peek at the Apple Car -- but the car project was then abandoned.
Maybe CarPlay has been abandoned too, although there have been signs of its life in regulatory databases.
We've been here before, on a smaller scale
Or maybe it's just a larger-scale version of what happened with Apple Music over its classical music app. Apple specifically promised that Apple Music Classical would be released in 2022, after the company acquired classical streamer Primephonic in 2021.
While it missed its 2022 deadline, Apple Music Classical was also constantly rumored to be about to launch. There was also evidence, too, in the form of code in iOS.
In the end, Apple Music Classical came out as practically a surprise, a few months into 2023. It's still been a long rollout to different Apple devices, although most recently it was made available -- on CarPlay.
The new CarPlay could go the same way. But unlike Apple Music Classical, its fate is not entirely within Apple's control.
Instead, it depends on Apple and at least 14 major car manufacturers.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
In this case: “If Apple must relay in car manufacturers to launch a product… the timeline will surely slip!”
(But remember… blaming Apple for anything —even Lord William's age— brings page views… aka ad revene!)
I would suggest that Apple dropped the car project because this problem was now causing their car to undermine rather than reinforce their carefully curated Apple ecosystem.
That is a very hard sell (no matter what iPhone users may say about not buying a car with CarPlay) because NEVs are basically smart vehicles with batteries and the secret sauce is in all the 'intelligent' aspects.
The big ICE era manufacturers blew it with their own efforts by not shipping effective solutions in good time. That applies to Apple to. Those manufacturers are now seeking joint ventures with many Chinese brands, many of whom don't make phones.
Of course, Huawei and Xiaomi are the two elephants in the room here as they do have stakes in the automobile sectors which are tightly integrated with their phones. To a degree that was perhaps unthinkable four years ago.
Another problem was that when Apple was announcing the next version of CarPlay, Huawei was shipping a far more advanced solution to its automobile partners with very deep integration and a spread of different solutions that partners could choose from. That has only taken giant leaps since then and to the point that if you are looking at something like an AITO M9 you are also probably weighing up a Huawei phone purchase if you don't already have one. At least in China and that's where the main market is.
The same scenario applies to many Chinese manufacturers and right across the price bands from 'affordable' to 'ultimate luxury'.
Outside China most options will seem stone age in comparison and anyone letting Apple/Google provide a solution will probably not want to give them too much control over the car internals. It's not looking good for deeper integration but the EU and US markets are currently flailing in their efforts to come up with a stellar solution and no one knows what Apple plans to do with any core solutions it may have been developing. For example, does it have an equivalent to Huawei's GOD network system and, if it does, would it be willing to sell/licence it to car manufacturers?
Was really interested, but just not a fan of electic vehicles. If Apple would have bought them, I definitely would have bought in. There may still be an opportunity as Lucid is struggling a bit with nearly 50% production drop this last quarter. If Apple bought them and hired some of Tesla's business guys (say what you will, but they know how to navigate volatile markets and come out on top), business would be booming. That could lead to reneable energy offerings as well. If anyone knows about renewable energy, it's Apple. If I had the equivanent of a Tesla solar roof and PowerWall, an EV for daily commute would be a no-brainer. Perhaps Apple saw that allof the above was covered by Tesla already and didn't want ot get into a market where they weren't an end to end solution?
I'm hopeful that things will soon change for me because I noticed a new cell tower is going up nearby and it should be line-of-sight to my house to mitigate the cellular connection issues. At home most of my Apple devices use WiFi calling and everything works great, until the power goes out, which is very infrequent.
Speaking of Honda and annoyances that never seem to get fixed, every time I start of the CRV it starts playing music regardless of whether I was playing music, even if I had the entire audio system was turned OFF when I last turned the car off. It does this regardless of whether I'm using CarPlay or the crappy Honda infotainment system. This has been happening since Day One of owning the vehicle. WTF? Once again, a total a-hole product manufacturer forcing an annoying behavior on their customers and refusing to provide a way to disable it. Making annoyances the default or opt-out behavior is bad enough, but not allowing customers to turn the damn thing off is a violation of acceptable customer service.
I'm starting to see Apple inflicting the same type of customer disservice in its latest OS releases. The poster child of course is the Photos app, which is annoying as ^%$# in its current form. I'm not one of those "Who moved my cheese?" people. I just want to be able to control how I organize and use the apps on my devices. They are not broke so don't fix them. Let me turn new features/experiments off. I'm starting to feel that Apple is in a panic state trying to prove to the market that it is relevant in AI. The problem is the way they are going about doing it. Making silly changes simply for the sake of change or to garner "Look at me!" attention has created a discontinuity in how they bring new products and features to market.
Apple was doing great by establishing their own path and plans and releasing stuff that actually worked pretty well and were in a reasonably finished state from Day One. Now they're following other people's paths and plans and kowtowing to things that are more trendy than useful. They're also over promising, trickling out way too many unfinished/incomplete features, and the reliability and predictability of their software has definitely slipped. Foundational features that once worked reliably and predictably, like Time Machine, are now broken with no fix in sight. It all smells of desperation, not the dominance we have come to rely on.
That very well could be correct. Whether it's Apple or Mazda, it was not a problem with iOS 17. The hard part is always getting one company to not say that it's the other company's fault.
Apple is trying to move from the cute entertainment display to taking over the core of the car interface. The part that interfaces with the driver and defines the driving experience. What is the upside for automakers? Should an automaker be unable to deliver an acceptable experience it might look at what Apple has to offer. I'm thinking Stellantis (Jeep, Chrysler, and a lot of 3rd tier European brands). Would Apple be interested in doing a deal with a 3rd tier vendor? It would be like partnering with Aldi.
Apple really should have present a new plan. Is it technical or are automakers a bit more careful about partnering with Apple?
Absolutely. I really thought GM would pay a severe price in sales when it abandoned CarPlay and Android Auto in favor of its own proprietary and profitable infotainment system, but that hasn't happened. Not hard to see why a car company would pursue this: there is SO much consumer data that can be gathered in a car, then sliced and diced and sold to whomever! (Oh, you mean you didn't read the 1500 page EULA you signed when you picked up your GM car that gives them ownership of your data?) The most infamous example so far of how this can be used against the driver occurred when GM started selling the data it was collecting on personal driving habits--average speeds, braking distances, hard turns, etc.--to insurance companies, which then jacked up the rates for drivers with "poor" data. And then, of course, GM can take the most desirable features of its infotainment system and charge a monthly subscription fee for their use. And now that GM seems to be getting away with this, with little to no consumer blowback, this can only encourage other automakers to go the same route. As it did with GM, Google is only too happy to partner and help automakers create their own proprietary system.