entropys

AppleZulu said:

Apple's latent plans to build its own car undoubtedly drove at least some other carmakers to develop and begin implementation of a plan to do their own dashboard software. Letting an actual competing carmaker live in your dashboard would indeed be nuts.

Then Apple dropped the car plans. I suspect that decision was at least in part due to other carmakers starting to back away from CarPlay. CarPlay reinforces the Apple ecosystem and sells iPhones. Trading that for a gamble on a new car in a densely competitive market, maybe not so much.

With that question out of the way, some companies like GM may now be feeling double-crossed, because CarPlay really does provide a huge service to carmakers. For the one-time cost to the car manufacturer of including a dummy terminal, Apple provides updated software for satnav, music, phone, and more in perpetuity. Any future need for more powerful hardware to run that software is also handled by Apple, by selling updated iPhones.

Carmakers are used to selling cars as finished products, with no expectation that they will ever update anything on a car that has left the showroom.  Sure, scraping customer data and selling subscription services could be a whole new revenue stream for carmakers, but that comes with the huge costs of creating a new division that must develop, manage and update all of that for years after a consumer buys a car (while also creating something slightly newer and better but yet still backward compatible for new car models). Apple is able to include the cost of years of software updates, including new features, in the price of an iPhone, and users are accustomed to buying a new iPhone every four-ish years to accommodate even more new features. For a car, people expect the average lifespan to be a lot more than four years. Consumers are also unlikely to be enthusiastic about paying to replace a head-unit or some $1,000 computer component every few years just to run new software in the car they already paid $30,000+++ for. 

So I think even with the expanded CarPlay Ultra, a lot of carmakers will start to adopt it. Late-model Honda/Acura cars (and many others, no doubt) already have digital instrument-cluster screens that can interface with CarPlay. With "regular" CarPlay, mine already displays podcast or song titles and album covers inside the tachometer. It seems pretty likely that CarPlay Ultra will be rolled out there soon enough.