The old cliche about automotive writers is that they used to complain when a car wasn’t a brown, manual, diesel station wagon. That’s the old cliche. The new one is that we won’t stop kvetching about the lack of Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Honestly, yeah, accurate. If a car doesn’t have CarPlay, it’s hard for me to imagine owning it.
Lately, there are only three major carmakers that have shunned CarPlay, and all have done so for electric cars. The first is Tesla, which has long had its own, fairly robust user interface (UI). Rivian, following in Tesla’s footsteps, has long integrated a lot of the features one might get from CarPlay or Android Auto. General Motors started with its electric cars, but is planning to roll out the, uh, absence of CarPlay across the board as it resists outside forces creeping into its infotainment.
People famously do not like this and want CarPlay for their vehicles. While automakers may have some reasonable complaints, including handing over power over their own cars to a company like Apple, they’re also ignoring what consumers use. CarPlay and Android Auto are simply the easiest and most predictable experiences for using your phone in your car. With Google getting Supercharger data, it only makes sense to allow Apple to integrate CarPlay, right?
It’s also well-timed, given that Tesla sales have been weaker this year, leading the company to try all sorts of new programs, including renting its cars out directly. What’s amusing here, at least to me, is that Tesla CEO Elon Musk has had a longstanding beef with Apple and has insisted Tesla didn’t need the product, as Bloomberg points out in its reporting:
Adding CarPlay would mark a stunning reversal for Tesla and Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, who long ignored pleas to implement the popular feature. Musk has criticized Apple for years, particularly its App Store policies, and was angered by the company’s poaching of his engineers when it set out to build its own car.
Pride goeth before a fall, so perhaps Tesla is willing to swallow some in order to move some more cars. From the report, it sounds like this would work in a separate screen and not integrate with other features of the car, like FSD or Autopilot. So this is a baby step towards giving consumers what they want.
This should, I hope, be a wake-up call to other automakers hoping to kick Apple out of their cars. If you can make a truly seamless experience that’s awesome, but no one has yet, and even super-tech-forward Tesla is reportedly considering just giving in to CarPlay. The last non-CarPlay-equipped GM product I had was not intuitive, and even something as simple as navigating through a podcast was unnecessarily hard.
Top photo: Tesla
Got a Droid, wouldn’t own Apple or Tesla if you paid me, just here to profess my current (if conditional, it’s been a bit dodgy allowing voice commands on Spotify) love for Android Auto.
“Does what it says on the tin,” I believe they say in Limeyland?
Is this a big deal? I have an Android phone, so I guess I will just keep using a good car phone mount and not know what I am missing.
You kids being so wedded to your phones that the lack of CarPlay would keep you from buying a car completely and utterly baffles me. I guess I am just old. I’d like to have Bluetooth, but a couple of my cars not having it in no way kept me from buying them, never mind CarPlay. Doesn’t work worth a poop in half the cars I rent with it anyway.
Nobody is saying they would skip a manual transmission Miata or an air-cooled Porsche over CarPlay. But the Miata comes with it and the Porsche can be easily retrofitted.
They are saying that when it comes to soulless electric car A vs. soulless electric car B they are going to pick the one with CarPlay. If nothing else on principle since the company that does not offer CarPlay is doing it intentionally so that they can tell investors that they are locking buyers into an ecosystem and stealing more of their data.
I’m not buying either one, but Hardigree literally said he can’t imagine owning a car that doesn’t have it. That rules out a HELL of a lot of very cool and interesting not new cars. Unless the car manufacturers change there ways, I have bought my last new car, and I am not holding my breath over that.
And I am very much over messing up the dash of classic cars to fit some naff modern bullshit when I can just use my entirely adequate phone display directly to do whatever. I’m old, but I’m not blind yet, and my phone has a screen bigger than any of the stand-alone GPS units I ever had. And that’s all I care about using a phone in a car for anyway, other than you know, phone calls (the thing a phone is meant for).
An early-90s or earlier car probably does not have the original head unit anyway, and a clean DIN or double-DIN Bluetooth+CarPlay head unit will likely be an aesthetic improvement over whatever cheap CD unit a previous owner installed. It’s the late-90s+ cars that are a mess to update.
Almost nothing I have any interest in has a double-din slot. The Europeans didn’t play that game as a rule. You can still get period-correct head units, they just cost more.
I tried the Android headunit route in my ’04 Volvo V70, it was terrible despite being a well-reviewed one, and the GOOD adapter mount for it that doesn’t look like ass had to be shipped from Europe for a small fortune. Nope, if I was dumb enough to buy one of those again I would keep the stock stereo and just get a Parrot BT/MP3 add-on or equivalent and call it a day. I absolutely loath screens in cars anyway.
More (2000’s) VW’s than you might think came with double DIN slots, but it’s not obvious because the factory CD player looks like it’s integrated into the dash.
You need to spend a few coins on what is essentially a specifically shaped bit of metal to pull it out, but once you do, there’s a normal double DIN slot.
You are making the incorrect assumption that I have any interest in 2000s VWs.
Purchased a $50 head unit from amazon and put it in my 96 bronco. Works better than most new cars.