Apple CarPlay is used more than 600-million times a day but some car makers have had enough. GM is removing support for smartphone projection software in future vehicles. It’s a decision aimed at keeping authority over the dashboard experience and not letting third parties dominate driving screen time. If you’re a Tesla driver or GM EV driver you won’t notice or care – but for the rest of us – it’s a big deal. A deal breaker you could say. It certainly is for me as I would not consider a new car if it did not support CarPlay or Android Auto.
So why would any car manufacturer not want CarPlay? In one word … CONTROL. Car makers are worried that Apple is taking over the dashboard – same with Android Auto. Although this is understandable, particularly with CarPlay Ultra, it’s a dumb move. CarPlay and Android Auto are popular for a good reason … CONTINUITY.
When you jump in a vehicle, whether it’s your car or a rental, CarPlay gives you an unbroken relationship with your smartphone. Our lives revolve around phones and it shouldn’t be disrupted due to a poor UI experience in a motorcar. A recent survey found that almost half of new car buyers would not purchase a vehicle without CarPlay or Android Auto. That’s a lot of cars. So it will cost car makers sales, no matter how good they tell us their software performs.
Other car makers like Aston Martin have gone all in with Apple by embracing CarPlay Ultra. It dominates the owner’s experience, enabling the driver to control most of the car using their phone’s interface. The car brand remains in the User Interface and the execution is nicely done on the Aston Martin dash. Other car makers are not so keen on CarPlay Ultra. It could be pushing the friendship too far. Their loss.
Australian drivers don’t have much to worry about following the release of GM’s plans but it will be interesting see how the rest of the car making world reacts to GM’s decision when they finally cut off CarPlay.
Ironically, some of the best executions of CarPlay are coming from Chinese-made vehicles, like the GWM Tank 500. During the company’s Tech Day in Melbourne, GWM made a strong point about listening to its customers. CarPlay is very easy to launch wirelessly and relaunch from the main screen with one button. Concerns raised by GM about the ability to switch between interfaces are not found in the Tank 500 from my recent testing. I’ll have a full review on this system soon as part of our exciting new Auto Tech category.
Privacy is the other important aspect to consider when using CarPlay. Every app is powered by your iPhone, not the car. This means that Apple gives only limited metadata to the car and only when that metadata is essential. Third-party apps also have Apple’s privacy protections.
