GM Plans to Phase Out CarPlay in Future EVs

I fully agree wtih you. I just took delivery of a new Acura and the CarPlay integration with my IPhone is seamless. Is "It just works " still an Apple tagline? In my case it should be, and it’s awesome. I start the car and I’m hooked up to the phone without doing any pairing or other fiddling around. Why wreck what works? I can just imagine the dreadful interface that GM and Google would dream up between them.

My current car – a Toyota Prius – also predates CarPlay. At the time, its sound system seemed advanced (and it does mesh well with my iPhone. BUT … I have regular compatibility problems because you can’t update the firmware in the car when Apple updates the phone, or even iOS. You can’t use the onboard GPS because you can’t update the maps – and roads have changed since the car was built. And Toyota at some point dropped support for Pandora (not that I used it), but the system can’t be upgraded for Spotify (which I might have used). Bad idea. Good reason not to buy a GM car.

My 2020 Subaru supports both CarPlay and Android play. It is unfortunately still wired (plug phone into USB) even thought wireless CarPlay was available at that time. I suspect Apple must require a chunk of change from the mfg to go wireless, although that’s just speculative on my part.

Anyway, at this juncture, I would not even consider a vehicle that doesn’t support CarPlay. I plug it in and my 11" screen in the dash lights up with CarPlay and everything works. There have been occasional issues with the Harmon-Kardon head unit but Subaru as been good about getting software updates for those issues (of course never as quickly as we would like).

This is undoubtedly about subscriptions. GM seeing opportunity in being able to get some ongoing revenue after sale.

My 2017 Bolt has CarPlay and we use it all the time. I will not consider a vehicle without it so I’m hoping GM’s ‘phasing out’ will occur after I decide to purchase a new vehicle as GM is being very aggressive on pricing for their next generation of EVs.

After dealing with no CarPlay for years on my Prius Prime I swore that the next car I bought would have it. So last fall we bought a Mustang Mach-E and have been very happy with CarPlay. I don’t change cars often, typically 5-8 years, but if GM doesn’t change then they are off the table. Lack of CarPlay and the Twitter twit were the reasons we didn’t consider a Tesla.

If enough consumers just refuse to buy cars that lock them in to some proprietary system (potentially with subscription BS) GM and every other manufacturer will come to their senses. Get the word out. Make the right call.

That said, seems to me though that GM’s move to abandon *Play is not a real threat for anybody but somebody who has no choice but to buy GM.

The car market is large and there is lots of competition. If consumers truly value options and *Play, they will opt for one of the many other manufacturers in this market and eventually GM will have to take corrective action.

This is very different to many other markets these days where there is only pseudo-competition at best (eg. 4 nation-wide airlines or 3 cell carriers for the entire US, or 2 phone OSes/ecosystems for the entire world, etc.) and consumers can easily find themselves without true choice and unable to truly exert market pressure on suppliers. The vehicle market OTOH is large, diverse, and very competitive. Consumers will find what they need somewhere and mistaken manufacturers like GM will eventually be forced to adjust.

Ditto me and my husband with our Toyota Avalon. When we needed to rent a car about a year ago we sure did miss CarPlay and the ability to ask Siri.

This upcoming feature sounds very interesting to me:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/apple-eyes-fuel-purchases-dashboard-it-revs-up-car-software-2022-06-30/

And I keep reading about Apple hiring automotive design and manufacturing talent, and rumors keep flying about Apple Car:

https://www.autonews.com/automakers-suppliers/apple-hires-lamborghini-exec-work-its-ev

While I am likely in the minority I fully applaud GM’s decision and sincerely hope others will follow for all their cars. While it may be painful in the short term for some, I believe it is the right decision in the long term. Here are the reasons:

• Apple technology has become a closed system with a paradigm seeming to be to make Apple products incompatible with everyone else other that that which is absolutely required to maintain short term profitability. One of the most recent examples of this is the latest release of Car Play feature update which is incompatible with all existing vehicles that have been sold as of late last Winter. Apple now considers your car to be an accessory to their iPhone and requires you to buy a new one of a luxury brand that Apple has licensed the update for. Otherwise you are stuck with only the previous features. In my opinion Apple has simply gotten to big for its britches.

• Historically, in my experience, Carplay has been somewhat unreliable when making connections and in sending directions to map apps on the vehicles navigation system. In my case I have a 2019 Acura RDX with the full technology package. It initially cam with only CarPlay as a phone connection. Connection with two different iPhones has always been flaky, the latest one being a 6 month old iPhone SE. In less connection is made in a very specific manner when entering the vehicle the connection will likely fail with useless error messages and require me to either actually leave the vehicle after turning off the vehicle and then reentering the vehicle and starting over or manually resetting the vehicles entire navigation and control system to get it connected. The somewhat complex reset procedure is neither described in any iPhone or Acura documentation normally available to the user. This issue has never been fixed either by Apple or Acura.

• When entering directions into the iPhone, especially by voice or using Alexa more often than not the directions are not transmitted to the vehicles navigation apps. Apple is fully aware of this as they indicate so in the Siri acknowledgement of adding directions, indicating to check your iPhone for notifications if failing to work properly. Often the notifications do not appear immediately or appear in different locations - i.e. notification screen, map app on the phone, or the Alexa app. Needless to say that when this happens when driving it can often result in severe driver distraction, breaking the law by using your phone while driving, all which can lead to collisions and possible injury or fatalities. Yet in almost 5 years nothing has been done to resolve this issue.

• Apple’s constant software and security changes/updates leave vehicle manufacturers constantly having to do their own updates to the vehicle technology in order to keep the vehicles compatible with existing CarPlay. This is costly for vehicle manufactures, possibly the customer, as well as dealerships that often need to spend time assisting with such updates for their customers.

So what I am hoping for in the long term is that if or when other vehicle manufacturers hopefully follow GM’s lead that Apple will be forced to rewrite CarPlay software to be more open and compatible standard interconnection technologies thus finally leading to a universal connection technology that all vehicle manufactures can use that is finally stable and reliable enough to make it safe to use while driving thus putting to end all this confusion, unreliable performance and driver distraction.

I’ll never buy another GM car so this doesn’t matter to me at all. We just bought a new Toyota with wireless CarPlay. My wife doesn’t love it - it’s not perfect - but, all in all, it’s quite a bit better than the proprietary Toyota system in our last car.

I really like getting CarPlay in rental cars.

Joy of Tech hits on this topic today.

Wow, great points and I fully agree.

Absolutely: Apple is much better at maintaining their software than any car I know.

To me, the biggest value I haven’t seen mentioned is that, with CarPlay, you bring your experience TO the car, not the other way around. I can rent a car somewhere else in the country, plug in my phone, and all my apps, settings, subscriptions, music, podcasts, EVERYTHING is there.

Or, instead of switching cars, we switch family members in an existing car, and once again you bring your life to the car, not the other way around.

A car will never be able to do this unless they also own your phone. Or at least until they own the Apple ID to which your whole life has synced.

And this has nothing to do with Apple per se. If you don’t like Apple, simply swap in Android to my arguments.

That is why you’re absolutely right and GM is going to reap the whirlwind.

Many older vehicles equipped with GPS navigation systems can be updated with new maps through the dealerships, though it can be surprisingly costly. For people who plan to keep their older cars for a few more years, it can make a lot of sense to replace the original radio with a third party CarPlay compatible unit. For people in the USA, Crutchfield carries a wide variety of units.

…and I’m sure Google is delighted to collect telemetry from the vehicles and to pay GM for the privilege, much like how Google pays browser developers to have Google as the default search engine.

I bought a 2023 mini Cooper last year. Support for CarPlay was a must-have while shopping. If CarPlay wasn’t supported, the car was immediately eliminated from consideration. GMC is making a huge mistake here. (And wireless CarPlay works flawlessly with the mini, btw.)

I may be misunderstanding you, but on the surface at least my experience doesn’t bear out this assertion. I have a 2020 BMW X3. CarPlay has worked just fine from the day I got it up to this moment. What sort of incompatibility are you talking about?

You’re far too optimistic here.

Yes, Apple’s system isn’t perfect and could use some interoperability improvements.

But if you think GM (or any other auto manufacturer) is going to do a better job, think again. Proprietary infotainment systems were the norm until very recently. They were usually full of bugs, making them incompatible with phones (from all manufacturers) in countless ways.

And the company would never issue software updates. Ever. Once you’ve bought the car, they have no reason to fix anything (unless its a safety recall so big as to publicly embarrass the company). And they know you’re not going to base your auto-purchase decisions on how well the radio works.

Oh yes, and they will charge you over $100 to upgrade the maps in your onboard navigation system and will use every DRM-based trick in the book to make sure you can’t do it yourself.

You may not like Apple, but trust me, auto manufacturers are even worse.

I bought a Toyota before the company added support for CarPlay, and I can attest that Toyota’s proprietary Entune system leaves a lot to be desired. It reminded me of pre-iPhone cell phones. The features are there, but you never use them because the user experience is just awful.

I definitely agree that removing CarPlay from autos would be a step back. It’s difficult to give credibility to a person who refers to a Subaru Outback as a “gas guzzler”. I purchased and Outback last year primarily because it suits my needs in a vehicle and was a big step up in milage from my Blazer. Even better is the fully wireless CarPlay!

Are you referring to the CarPlay 2.0 whole car system? Honestly I’m not sure I care about that, either. I’m happy with the current features of CarPlay ( though having two apps showing data at once, such as showing navigation and the current playing media app split screen - that’d be nice.)

Your issues seem to be centered around a specific vehicle and a general distrust of Apple. The former is not a general problem—most CarPlay users report an overall positive experience—and the latter ignores the facts that, as others here have pointed out, Android/Google is no better and automakers’ attempts at incorporating technology into their interfaces have been almost universally horrible.

I sympathize with your issues with your Acura. I really do. But they don’t justify a blanket contempt for CarPlay. It sounds like there’s either an issue in your vehicle specifically or in Acura’s implementation, neither of which are necessarily Apple’s fault or responsibility. Apple should be ensuring that automakers implement CarPlay in usable manners, but that doesn’t mean the automakers’ engineers actually care about making it work.

As for your gripes with Apple specifically, these are all well-acknowledged issues that are in no way resolved by simply removing the option for drivers to use CarPlay. Siri (which I presume is what you mean when you reference “Alexa”) is still better at handling spoken requests than any automaker’s proprietary voice-command system has ever been. The continual updates are important, and Apple is right to force automakers to implement them—automakers should be making software updates easier and less costly for the customer, and pressure from Apple is one way this can be encouraged. Apple is powerful enough to get results in a way that consumers are not.

I would much rather continue to work with CarPlay’s foibles than depend on automakers to make their proprietary systems more usable. While individual experiences vary, the overall experience across the entire userbase clearly indicates that proprietary systems are inferior to CarPlay and Android Auto in almost every way. Your hope that other automakers follow GM’s lead is throwing the baby out with the bathwater in the worst way.

Jason Snell has written about this at more length at Six Colors.

I agree…a vehicle specific system merely serves to provide the builder an opportunity to charge subscription fees to make things work…and allows them to sell your data. And…let’s just acknowledge that a out 99.999% of the people in American that can afford a new car have either an iPhone or an Android phone…so as long as the car’s system supports both of those there’s no real problem…and let’s not even get into the almost non existent software updates that car maker systems get.

Who cares if Apple tech is a closed system…for that matter Android is essentially a closed system albeit it with a lot more people participating in it…but to Apple users it’s just as much a closed system as iOS is to Android users. Every user gets to pick their own preferred platform…and each of them has a good reason for choosing what they do. For some…it’s the admittedly better overall security, better app ecosystem, commitment of the company to privacy, and ease of use. For some…they want multiple hardware vendors and the ability to change both the launching system for apps and default apps. Neither choice is wrong…and given the generally putrid UI, performance, and downright user unfriendliness of most car systems…they should stay out of that business. For instance…my wife’s 2017 Mazda CX5has a touch screen for entering navigation info, etc…but my 2021 Mazda 3 which is a more expensive model and I have the high end one with all the options…does not have a touch screen any more and doesn’t have a keyboard either…just an alphabet (or numbers and symbols) in a circle and one must spin the dial to type something in. Saying Siri, directions to Longhorn Steak House or whatever…is just simpler and better.

Yes, CarPlay (and Google Play or whatever they call it the single time I used it on somebody else’s phone and car…have some oddities…but even on their worst days they’re far, far superior to the car builder’s UI.

When entering directions into the iPhone, especially by voice or using Alexa more often than not the directions are not transmitted to the vehicles navigation apps

This has not been my experience. Siri (not sure why you’d be using Alexa on an iPhone), works very well for me (and I use it a lot), as one would expect for a hands-free app such as CarPlay.

GM shareholders don’t care about Apple unless they have AAPL in their portfolios (which I doubt).
(GM must be bleeding out to think ANYTHING exclusive with Google is best for the company…hope they got a way out of that contract)

All I care about is that I can play my itunes (can port all my songs to an SDHC or USB stick) and play in pretty much every rental car and vehicle I’ve owned. Do I agree with GM? Nope. Do I think Apple is any better? Nope. But, we still have a choice. Garmin has GPS devices to mount on a dash or such if needed. But integrated audio, while convenient, was supposed to kill off in-dash stereos. Until Bose, JBL, ELS (Panasonic) Sonos (in Audi), AKG, Burmester, and B&W, licensed and designed audiophile quality integrated systems…the driver only cares how their podcasts and music sound. Except for some Hoons and “ricers” that want choice in car audio components/head units, no one really cares that Car Audio Installers are gone like Pager/Fax Machine stores.

Just remember that when its time to rent/loaner vehicle and its a GM product: Might have to spend a bit for Enterprise ‘premium’ plan w/Satellite/Navigation/Carplay option.

BTW, I’ve a 2017 Mazda and I was lucky the stealership threw in $350 Carplay option. While other automakers include it now, a time did pass that it was an option. (a cable, a module, and installation that made the stealership money… I bet stealerships cried to Mazda that they would lose money if not so). After a few years, I find the Carplay great when it works, and not so great when it doesn’t (50/50 lately). Yes, I need Infotainment updates, and no, I don’t use bluetooth - its a silly long Apple Oem cord from the iphone to the armrest port (dumb location, Mazda).
My next car will have Carplay AND some some USB alternative. And perhaps, Qi chargers for copilot and I. But I can promise you, it won’t be a GM.

Project Titan, Apple’s not so secret electric car project, has probably become a big bug up GM’s derrière. Though the release date keeps getting pushed back for Apple Car, I keep reading about Apple hiring high end automotive talent, patenting innovations. And Apple has a history of delivering products that “change the world,” to quote Steve Jobs.

Here’s some recent examples of whenApple Car is expected to hit the road:

https://www.motortrend.com/news/project-titans-apple-car-delayed-2026/

https://www.motortrend.com/news/apple-car-sunroof-patent/

My solution to no CarPlay in my 2012 Lexus RX, a dashboard holder that supports an iPad, works perfectly. I haven’t activated the cell service and just use my cell as a hotspot. Bigger display than CarPlay in most vehicles

GM can do what they please but I don’t think removal of choice is wise.

Our family has 4 cars and all use CarPlay - I can drive any of them and feel entirely comfortable with the entertainment, phone or navigation. I would hate the idea of having different systems in each car making each one different.

Lack of CarPlay has always been an impediment to me considering a Tesla and it would be the same for any car manufacturer which doesn’t offer it as an option. By all means make your own system but don’t ‘cut off your nose to spite your face’.

My current vehicle has its own navigation and voice integration but they’re far inferior to my phone. Ironically, my current car is a GM vehicle and I would not have purchased it without Carplay. I think GM are making a serious mistake but if they do, it just means they join Tesla on the list of cars I wouldn’t consider.

Surprisingly enough, not as much as you might think. With all the issues in the automotive market over the last few years, older vehicles are being kept longer than ever before—and if your car is more than ten years old, you probably don’t have any significant original-equipment infotainment system. (My 2007 Dodge Caliber has CD, satellite radio, and an aux input—and that was an “upgrade” option when it was new.)

There’s still a good market for replacing old in-dash systems with aftermarket touchscreens and CarPlay-equipped systems. It’s nowhere near the size the market used to be, but the good retailers still make decent money. (Also, the speaker-heads spend huge amounts of money on their tricked-out rides, more than enough to offset the reduced general market.)

Recently saw a BMW ad that was targeted at women and featured their degree of connectivity to CarPlay and Android, so they obviously think it is a seller in the higher end of the market. When a company makes changes to their products they usually conduct a lot of research, usually based around cost versus benefit. As it seems that the cost of CarPlay is minimal, just involving maintaining the software integration, it is hard to see why it isn’t worth it. Maybe their market thinks it is woke and refuses to buy a car with it. A few years ago that would be a joke, but I’m not certain anymore.

You’re talking about an auto manufacturer. When they finish designing a car and start selling it, they don’t want to have to constantly maintain its software. And they typically don’t - the only software upgrades you usually get are part of safety recalls.

But CarPlay means Apple will be issuing periodic updates. And I’m sure the license terms forces the car/radio manufacturer to provide a mechanism to upgrade vehicles when those updates are released. Or perhaps a connected phone can push updates into the car (so you don’t need to bring it to a dealer for each update).

I think this may be what GM finds unacceptable. Historically, if you have a problem with the radio (especially after the warranty period expires), the answer to any support problem is “get bent - buy another car if you want a new radio”. An attitude that Apple would definitely find unacceptable.

Of course, I’d really prefer it if car manufacturers would go back to a standard DIN-mounted radio that I could replace on my own, since all factory radios are garbage. But they’ve “integrated” the radio so deeply with the rest of the car’s electronics that it isn’t possible anymore.

Apple gives Car Play to automotive manufacturers for free. Car Play is a big plus for people who own iPhones, and could be an incentive for an Android user to switch. And Car Play is available and popular in countries around the world. Here is the number of Car manufacturers that use Car Play:

https://www.apple.com/ios/carplay/available-fmodels/

And Apple is going full speed ahead on testing its not so secret self driving car. And I still think Apple Car is why GM is P.OD.

Absolutely this is a terrible idea. Not only do you get what ever tunes/podcasts you want (including favorite radio stations when you are out of range), the setup is minimal. I happen to use Carplay for navigation. Saved a ton of money not buying the manufacture’s nav system. And the maps get updated regularly. Plus I have my choice of nav apps - Google, Apple, Waze. While Carplay was not a motivating factor when I bought my current car 5 years ago, after having it I would not buy a car that didn’t support it.

My current car (a 2012 Honda) doesn’t have CarPlay. I simply use my phone’s display, putting it on the dash with either a sticky pad mount or a vent mount. I use the phone’s own speaker for navigation and hands-free phone calls. I use a USB charger connected to the 12v power outlet for keeping it charged.

I get my music via an iPod Touch, connected to the car’s built-in USB port. Or via the car’s analog “aux” input (my wife’s car has a flaky USB interface).

If my next car doesn’t have CarPlay, I’ll just keep on doing the same. There’s no way I’m paying extra (like hundreds of dollars every year to keep its navigation maps up to date) for an inferior experience.

Perhaps GM’s announement was revenge for this:

I remember it being announced at last year’s WWDC. At the time, I was wondering what car company would be crazy enough to let Apple take over the wholde dashboard.

Revenge is perhaps the wrong word, but yes, I think this has more to do with CarPlay 2.0 being a whole-car experience that GM doesn’t want to implement, plus, of course, their admitted quest for more subscription income from services that CarPlay 2 will not allow them to do.

It looks like GM’s decision to dump Car Play is proving to be quite unpopular:

And there’s good quotes from Walt Mossberg in the article.

I have waited a bit to reply to allow all the replies to settle down. First of all I do use Alexa in my car as Amazon has now released its upgraded version of the Echo Auto which can be user installed in any car that supports a mobile for around $50 USA. My comments on GM and CarPlay are based on my own personal experiences in my 2019 Acura RDX which was initially equipped with CarPlay only. So I feel it is fair to assume it was designed with CarPlay in mind and should have undergone rigorous testing to insure it properly worked, which after 4 years, it still does not but instead often leads into distracted driving,

The other issue I have is that Apple seems to have the philosophy that a users vehicle should be an accessory to their products as opposed to the phone being a vehicle accessory. I find this to be a conceited narcissist paradigm, but then again it is something that Apple is frequently know and criticized for. Personally I find it outrageous that Apple should expect a user to have to purchase a new vehicle in order to utilize a CarPlay upgrade. That said I also find it likely that those that accuse GM of abandoning CarPlay in favor of a built in features so they can charge for it make a valid point. However I should also note that GM said nothing about abandoning Android, assuming that like other vehicle manufacturers, GM also supports Android. I feel it is also important to note that that Google, who owns Android is also invested in AI, of which adding it to Android navigation could prove to be highly beneficial while so far I have seen nothing related to this rapidly emerging technology from Apple and seems to be totally lacking in Siri.

Ideally what I would like to see is an IEEE standard set up and adopted for connecting mobile devices into vehicles. While it happened with the cigarette lighter socket, excuse me, now vehicle accessory socket, I agree with the naysayers that say that this is not likely to happen anytime soon if ever.

One can always hope that the NHTSA will acquire some gonads and insist on proper testing and reliability of mobile device integration into vehicle, approaching aviation standards, in order to insure safe driving practices with a minimum of distraction when using such devices so that lives will not be lost over these issue and injuries will be minimized.

The reports I’ve read indicate that GM is dropping support for third-party devices interfacing with their system, whether through CarPlay or Android Auto. The new system will be Android-app-compatible, but the apps must be installed from a specific subset in a special GM-approved Google Play store. Nothing has been said about any changes to Bluetooth connectivity, but the probability is high that it will be comparable to that of existing non-CarPlay/Android Auto infotainment systems, meaning you can do calls and play on-device music (not streaming), and maybe do texts, and that’s about it for what you can do with your phone through the system.

So it likely has less to do with “abandoning Apple” than with wanting complete control over the infotainment system. If it were just about sticking it to Apple, they wouldn’t have partnered directly with Google to bypass other Android phone manufacturers. They want to take the third-party devices out of the equation.

Again, you are basing your opinions on what works on experiences with a single vehicle. Your experience may or may not be typical, but it is a sample size of exactly one. You don’t appear to even know if this problem is replicable in other 2019 Acura RDXs, let alone other Acuras. The symptoms you’ve described can be caused by a hardware issue and thus could be specific to your vehicle alone, and not typical of Acura’s implementation in general or even of that specific model and year.

As for Google’s AI, if it gets applied to navigation apps, it will surely be available in Google Maps on all compatible devices and thus would be available to iPhone users as well as Android users—and Google Maps works just fine in CarPlay. Unless GM pays them a ridiculous amount of money to have exclusive use of it, Google has zero reason to restrict it from other platforms. And I doubt that GM could afford to pay Google enough to get them to do that, considering the vast difference in magnitude of the GM user market compared to the Android-and-iPhone user market.

Standards maintained by a regulatory or independent third party are a great idea, but given the state of the US government and business in general right now, there’s little hope of that happening unless lack of standards leads to a massive safety issue resulting in large numbers of incidents involving injury and/or death. I think we can all agree that we don’t want that to have to happen.

Your whole issue about whether the vehicle is an accessory to the phone or vice versa seems odd to me. Which do you use more, your phone or your car? Which is useful in more situations? I don’t want my car to be the central device in my life—my phone has all my stuff in it and can be used in a lot of places where I have no need of my car at all. I think most smartphone users would agree that it makes more sense for the car to accommodate the phone than the other way around. And do you think you’ll be able to transfer data from one GM car to another? It’s doubtful. It’s far more likely that you’ll have to re-enter all settings and information separately for every vehicle. Doesn’t sound like an improvement to me.

And it’s not Apple that’s expecting you to buy a new car to get a CarPlay upgrade—it’s the automakers. They could provide these updates via their dealer networks if they thought it was in their best interests to do so. They instead choose to make it difficult to upgrade software and impossible to upgrade hardware without buying a new vehicle. Until Apple has their car out in the market (if it ever happens), they gain nothing by making you buy a newer car. Now, it is true that they haven’t put much if any pressure on automakers to provide upgrades in existing vehicles, but given that their intent is to make CarPlay a universal feature, I can understand them not wanting to drive automakers away from offering the platform by being too heavy-handed about such things.

I’m still baffled as to why you expect GM’s “new” system to solve even a single one of your problems when every indication is that it will at best be a feature-limited replication of the Android Auto experience with less integration with the device that already has all the information in it.

I’m not trying to be an apologist for Apple here. I just don’t understand why you’re placing all the blame for these issues on them while treating automakers as though they’re infinitely better corporate citizens than Apple, despite their long histories demonstrating just how horrible they can be.

As for my car; until 3 months ago my vehicle has been dealer serviced; all updates to the electronics and navigation have been applied; I have spoken to Honda/Acura and Apple Support, all to no avail. This aspect of the vehicle operation has always been flaky since I purchased the vehicle new. When you consider the price of a vehicle as compared to a phone I feel it is ridiculous to consider that a vehicle is an accessory to a phone and that every time you have a phone update you may need to purchase a new vehicle to take advantage of the new features. That said, aside from the basic hardware connection which enables information to travel between the two devices, CarPlay is software, i.e. computer code with a GUI interface. If there are communication issues between the two devices than software updates should be able to fix it, abet Acura firmware updates or App IOS updates. That has not happened in 4 years. Additionally aside from basic display settings, user information utilized by CarPlay is likely stored in the phone, not in the vehicle so users should be able to utilize this same information when connected to a different vehicle using CarPlay. Frankly I do not expect GM to solve any of my issues aside from the fact I have never owned a GM vehicle or any US manufactured brand vehicle, abet most if not all my vehicles have been made in American plants. As far as being corporate citizens, both seem equally bad to me as the Apple today no longer, in my opinion, has the moral compass, values as did the Apple I worked for around 13 years starting in 1982. That Apple was focused on the customer experience. Today’s Apple is focused on maximizing profits for its stockholders and executive leadership. If you don’t believe me, just try to escalate a support issue to Apple Customer Relations or Executive Offices like you used to be able to do. All this being said the functionality of my Acura is infinitely better than the Lexus RX350 I purchased in 2015 and was so frustrated by its technology and distracted driving resulting from it, that I traded it in in late 2018 for my current Acura as I found it to be totally unsafe to drive given the driver distraction that resulted from attempting to use its technology. It is not that I wish to be picky or unreasonable as I simply want the included functionality of a vehicle to work as advertised, reliably and consistently, and if it fails to do so, that the manufacturer takes the proper steps to fix it in a reasonable amount of time. Is that asking too much?

Any bluetooth source including streaming should work in most systems. Many radio stations have apps which work fine over bluetooth. One that I enjoy is the WIXY 1260 station. Your phone should remember the last source used so it’s easy to access and I use the built-in car system for music using Apple Lossless for the best sound.

My main issue in all of this discussion is distractions. I know many love CarPlay or Android Auto but using some of the features in a moving car is not only distracting but dangerous. I choose to simply listen to music and let it shuffle so as not to be distracted with calls, texts etc. which I check in a parked vehicle. There is too much distracted driving as it is.

CarPlay or Android Auto seem to work well in some vehicles and not so well in others as you implied. There are posts all over the internet and some are wired systems and others are wireless. I use the built-in system in my car so the lack of future CarPlay or similar is not an issue. As long as the system can use my own audio files, I’m fine with that and having bluetooth for calls as necessary. GM infotainment system are supposedly based on Android anyway so the only new thing here is the Google connection and subscription services which GM already makes money on such as OnStar and data plans that can only work with their apps.

Agree. That’s exactly what I do (well, I generally listen to podcasts.) However, these systems (CarPlay and Android Auto) are almost always better for navigation than stock automotive navigation systems when you’re going someplace you haven’t been. Though, to be fair, my Toyota stock system will not allow you to enter a destination while the car is moving - even if there is a passenger who can do so. That’s not such a bad idea really.

GM wants the money. And it’s not just the US advertising and subscription revenue, they are dumping Apple and Google infotainment across the globe:

“ Edward Kummer, GM’s chief digital officer, admitted to the newswire, “We do believe there are https:/
subscription revenue opportunities for us”.

“GM CEO Mary Barra has previously stated the automaker is aiming to make between US$20 billion to US$25 billion ($30 billion to $37 billion) per year from digital subscriptions by 2030.”

Interesting. None of the cars I’ve used Bluetooth music on recognized streaming apps, only on-device music. They didn’t support arbitrarily relaying all audio, like a Bluetooth speaker, under the “Bluetooth music” features. (By comparison, the AirFly Pro I use in my '07 Caliber, which has zero Bluetooth or touchscreen features of its own, relays all audio like any other Bluetooth audio device.) I wonder if that’s something that’s hidden in a setting somewhere.

Of course, I’m still annoyed that when Waze added in-app audio controls, they added them only for a few specific streaming apps, not as a general audio control. Those controls, last I checked, didn’t even support on-device music. Stupid.

My experience is only with GM vehicles so I can’t say about other brands. I still use an iPhone 7 Plus and the bluetooth functions work well. I don’t recall changing any settings to allow a streaming app to work so I think it’s automatic depending on the vehicle’s capabilities.

I’m still not clear on what the actual issues are that you’re having with CarPlay, so it’s hard to know whether it’s a bad fit for your use or something not working as intended.

I don’t know what this means, because this isn’t what Apple expects or what’s necessary. CarPlay essentially ‘projects’ a UI into your car’s screen. CarPlay gets updated (sometimes in minor ways) with each iOS update. And when that happens, the updated CarPlay just works in existing cars with CarPlay support. I have seen this happen. So I’m not sure what you’re referring to with the statements about Apple requiring a new car to use a CarPlay upgrade.

As with most others who have posted, I’m not aware of any incompatibilities between even the most recentest version of CarPlay and any CarPlay-compatible console systems. Basically any CarPlay-capable automobile I’ve ever been in fully supports whatever version of CarPlay my iDevice uses. At the moment, this includes a 2020 Toyota Prius and a 2023 Subaru Forester (most emphatically not a “gas-guzzler”).

Re: wanting to view more than one app at a time. This is entirely possible, and is my default! To view both navigation (whether Apple Maps, Google Maps, or Waze, all of which I’ve experimented with — or, presumably, other nav apps) and “Now playing” at the same time on even small infotainment displays, your CarPlay display should offer a three-way toggle, with icons much like the following; you’ll want the third option:

• ▢ — one app
• 􀮟 — list of apps
• 􀱧 — one main app (the nav app) and two or three others (including “Now Playing”)

After years of using the mount-the-iPhone-on-the-dash for navigation and plug-it-in-to-use-USB-for-audio, I will never again go back to that! CarPlay is not flawless (particularly via Bluetooth, when more than one iPhone enters the car), but it’s much easier to use (and view!) than that jury-rigged approach.

And I’ll never go back to an auto-maker’s nav system, that’s out-of-date before you even buy the car and costs $$$ to update. No matter whether you prefer Apple Maps, Google Maps, Waze, or something else — it’s always far more up-to-date than whatever the auto-maker provides.

I’d have loved to have bought another GM car — all our cars when I was growing up were GM. From the ’90s through the ’10s, I’ve avoided them because they’ve required far more maintenance (time and $$$) than Toyotas, Hondas, and Subarus, and because they’ve generally gotten significantly worse gas mileage. I’d been hoping that they’d turn themselves around with their new EV push, but no CarPlay will mean that they’re a complete non-starter for our household.

When Apple demoed Carplay 2.0, it showed Carplay taking over all the car’s dashboard displays. Obviously, doing so would require Carplay to have more access to the car’s control system than Caplay 1.x has. I think the original poster is worried that when CaPlay 2.0 is introduced, it will require automakers to support this integration level to run. Since I doubt few automakers will cede this level of control, I’m pretty sure that some version of Carplay would continue to run with the current level of integration.

Ah, thanks that hadn’t occurred to me. I don’t think we should be criticising Apple for something they haven’t introduced or given details of yet. Like you I can’t imagine the original CarPlay being dropped when an expanded version is introduced.

With some of latest updates to CarPlay Apple added some new and advanced features to the software. However in order to access these features you will need to purchase a new vehicle as the features are not available to most current vehicles and only less than a handful of some of the latest luxury level vehicles are the new features available.

As to actual issues, only if I connect the phone using a very specific order of steps does CarPlay connect with my Acura RDX. If I miss a step and do it later, redo it, without taking steps to turn off all the technology such as shutting off the engine and temporary leaving the car, will it connect again. Even with using the correcting procedure it sometimes fails to connect. Luckly I have found an undocumented method of resetting the vehicle technology from the console which is only documented for dealer service as it also runs dealer diagnostics.

Still with all of this done properly, most of the time it fails to upload navigation information to the chosen vehicle map on the vehicle display but instead telling me to find a notification on my phone and select it. This notification can appear, often with significant delay at various locations on the phone, such as the phone notification screen, Alexa, or the map app which requires me to search through various screens on my phone till I find it thus leading to severe distracted, and illegal driving. Neither Apple Support or Acura/Honda Support will address these issues and fix them.

Wow. I’m surprised you bother at all. With problems like that, I’d just give up and go back to a vent-mount and AUX input for music. I don’t have time to jump through all those hoops every time I get in the car to go somewhere.

Not surprising. My 2012 Civic has had problems with iPod support since I bought the car. Although it is mostly reliable with my iPod Touch, my Classic would frequently crash after 30-90 minutes of playback, forcing me to hard-reset it. (This crash only happens when paying audio via USB to a car).

Apple didn’t care - said it was Honda’s problem, even though it was the iPod that crashes. (This was even before they stopped selling the iPod Classic). Honda didn’t care - said they just install the software Apple gives them and have no ability to change anything. So the problem never got fixed, and never will.

Same problem (but even worse crashing) on my father’s car (a recent generation Chevrolet Impala).

Ironically, my wife’s Kia Sedona (both the 2018 we’re driving now and the 2012 it replaced) have great iPhone/iPod integration. But the USB port itself is physically flaky, so devices randomly disconnect, making it useless - so we’re back to USB audio and AUX input there too. (Kia can’t find anything wrong with the port, of course, and they want an insane amount of money to replace it.)

Re:David C. At this time I rarely use CarPlay around town but only for longer distance driving or driving during commute hours so I can be aware of congestion and find detours. When I works it works great. The issue is getting it to initially work. That said when I first purchased the car Acura support was outstanding. Now it is essentially garbage.

I hadn’t heard about these new features, but presumably they require hardware that’s not present in existing cars. I don’t blame Apple for this – at some point they’ll want to add features that aren’t possible with existing hardware. CarPlay is almost a decade old, and the current version runs on the first car that ever supported it. It doesn’t feel to me that Apple considers the car an accessory they expect you to upgrade every time there’s a new version of CarPlay.

(As a side note, do you know what these new and advanced features are that require a new vehicle?)

As far as the issues with your car, they do sound like a real pain, and would severely dent the attractiveness of CarPlay for me if I had them. From the description it sounds more like a problem with the car rather than CarPlay, but that’s not much comfort (and disappointing that Honda support aren’t taking it seriously). All I can say is whenever I use a car it’s a car club or rental, so I’ve used dozens of makes and models with CarPlay, and it’s worked reliably in all of them. Not to diminish how real the issue is for you, but to suggest that it might not be widespread amongst cars generally.

The OP might be referring to the 2.0 version of CarPlay which would more or less take over the whole dash:

I would think that GM as well as some other brands are not going to let that happen but maybe some will still provide the current CarPlay functions.

Thank you for your understanding. I feel you are partially correct. I believe it is a combination of issues. One is most certainly the vehicle when I comes to connectivity as demonstrated that when I reset the vehicle technology CarPlay reconnects. But the other issue is CarPlay itself on the phone as the lack of consistent operation when setting destinations with CarPlay and transmitting that information to the vehicle display via the chosen map app. Sometimes it works and sometimes it does not. When it does not, notifications are supposed to be present on the phone. Some times they are and sometimes they are not or are significantly delayed when they finally do. Additionally the location of the notification varies as sometimes they appear in the phone notification screen and sometimes in the map app. This seems to be totally inconsistent. When I add Alex Car Echo to the mix which involves the Alexa app, they sometimes appear in the Alexa app and nowhere else. So when the information is not properly transmitted to the vehicle display it becomes the game of hide and seek as to where the notification is so you can click on it to migrate the information to the vehicle display - i.e. severe distracted driving.

You are correct about Car Play 2.0. this is the upgrade that requires you to purchase a new luxury level vehicle to use it of which less than a handful of vehicles currently support it.

First of all I do not believe it is “an evil plot” but a strategy to maximize profits and income for senior executives and dividends for shareholders of which I am one of them. I have not heard of such profit gains being shared among the run of the mill employees. As for a warning I was an Apple employee starting in 1982 and still have an employee number assigned to me under 5000. I owned my first Apple computer, an Apple //e, starting around 1980 where I received it as a prize at the IEEE trade show, WESCON, for being the 1 millionth visitor. This was before Lisa, and Macintosh and Windows. At that time the only competitor OS for individual users was DOS and the Microsoft infant was making hardware, a Z80 card that plugged into the Apple // to run DOS. I purchased that card for my machine directly from Bill Gates himself at an AppleFest convention. As such the contention that “I was warned” I feel is totally incorrect. Additionally what seems to be often forgotten is that Apple only currently exists due to Bill Gates generosity. In those days Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy. It was Bill Gates that gave Steve Jobs the loan that allowed Apple to continue to exist.

This is not correct - nothing is ‘required’. As has been stated earlier, it is highly unlikely Apple would stop support of CarPlay 1 - in the same way it doesn’t halt support for older machines when it updates MacOS. They continue to run happily on the older systems. This is the same as phones, cameras, fridges or any other tech - no-one is ‘forced’ to buy anything new.

Your opinion on GM’s move is valued but you seem to be fabricating arguments about Apple with little foundation.

This is exactly my argument for why CarPlay is so good - I get absolute consistency when moving between my 4 cars. I don’t have to learn each cars foibles, copy anything over or log into anything on the vehicle. I plug in the phone, play my music, read and respond to messages, make calls and navigate to my destination.

I’m sorry your car doesn’t play well with CarPlay, but until you confirm it’s Apple’s fault it’s a moot point. I’m not suggesting CarPlay is perfect, but saying it should be removed from an entire range of vehicles because of your experience isn’t a reasonable conclusion to draw.

Zero vehicles currently support it - Apple hasn’t released it yet. They are announcing the first cars that will support it later this year. iOS - CarPlay - Apple

As others have said, the current CarPlay will continue to work and be supported after 2.0 is released.

According to what I read when the announcement came out there were less than a half dozen vehicles that were designed to support it. One of the brands was BMW but I honestly do not remember what other brands were listed. It was also my understanding that it was to be included in the next major release of IOS which given the time span is the current version. However I have no way of confirming that and that given other comments on the subject it may have been delayed. One thing that was made clear some time after was that other than the listed brands and new models at the time, which was late 2022, all other vehicles that were currently in or had ceased production will not support the update but will be stuck with the older or seemingly current version. So in order to utilize the upgrade users will need to purchase a new vehicle of the ones listed or perhaps a later brand and model that is configured to support the upgrade.

The basic issue here is that while in seems as though, from the comments, that it may work properly in some vehicles, but there are vehicles that it does not properly work. This is a matter of safety. I am of the opinion that the CarPlay should be recalled until either it works properly in all vehicles that are designed to support it, or that it should include code to disable it in vehicles in which it does not function properly or reliably. Distracted driving is a prescription for collisions, injury and death. Such unreliable operation is not allowed in aircraft and it should not be allowed in motor vehicles.

What vehicles will support CarPlay 2.0 isn’t decided by Apple. It’s decided by the automakers. Apple tells them what the hardware requirements will be, and the automakers decide whether they want to include them in their vehicles.

Yes, it’s going to initially appear in only high-end vehicles. That how virtually all new features appear in cars: the top-tier models, the luxury lines, get the cool stuff first. Then, if it proves popular, it works its way down to lower models. That’s how CarPlay 1.0 was initially, too. Good or bad, that’s how automakers do things.

But here’s the thing that bothers me about your arguments here: you are acting as though CarPlay 2.0 being initially available in only high-end vehicles is taking something away from you. It’s not. Your existing use of CarPlay will not be affected at all by the release of CarPlay 2.0 if you don’t have a vehicle that supports it. Existing CarPlay features will continue to work the same as they always have. Apple is not dropping support for CarPlay 1.0, nor are any automakers other than GM—and even GM isn’t removing it from vehicles that already have it; they’re just not going to include it in future vehicles.

Of course it would be great if all cars from all manufacturers added all the latest and greatest features right away. If automakers thought it would be in their best interests, they’d offer upgrades all the way down the line. But they don’t think that way. This is not Apple’s fault.

Maybe it’s time to wind this down. It feels like we’re going in circles.

That’s akin to saying Apple shouldn’t be able to sell computers whilst Adobe InDesign has bugs. Neither you or I can definitively say whether Apple or the vehicle makers are at fault but if you believe GM (or any other car maker) is going to be better at software/hardware integration than Apple I think you need to reconsider your position.

On one hand you are correct. Tech advances. But on the other hand what this implies, is that Apple has sun setted CarPlay 1.0 and that it seems unlikely that existing bugs will be addressed and fixed. What I believe should have been done was to release CarPlay 2.0 with unsupported features disabled for older vehicles and the bugs or issues being addressed and fixed. So the lucky users that have it working properly will have no issue with continuing with 1.0 until they are ready to purchase a new vehicle because they either want one or the maintenance costs and age of their older vehicle dictates it is time to purchase a new one, and not because Apple has decided to consider their vehicle as an iPhone accessory and in order to get a working properly they need to purchase a new vehicle.

That said I plan to file a formal complaint with the NHTSA requesting that they issue a recall order to recall and disable Apple CarPlay 1.0 until they can provide evidence that it works properly in all vehicles designed to use it or that it be modified to exclude its use on vehicles on which it does not reliably function. This is not a vendetta against Apple but an interest is vehicle safety. When Apple CarPlay fails to work reliably in a vehicle it can result in significant driver distraction with a significant statistical outcome of damage injury or death, not only to the drive and their passengers but to innocent victims of other involved vehicles or pedestrians.

Just ask your self: How would you feel if if a friend, family or other loved one was run over, injured or killed, where the cause of the collision was determined to be the result of driver distraction due to the driver fumbling with a flaky CarPlay when attempting to get directions to a destination?

You’re talking as though 2.0 has already been released. It hasn’t been yet.

There are two devices that need to support a feature in CarPlay 2.0 for it to be available: the phone and the car. If either one doesn’t support it, then it won’t be available. This is how all hardware-dependent features currently work on Apple devices.

Vehicles not equipped with the CarPlay 2.0 software will continue to operate under CarPlay 1.0. Phones not able to run the necessary iOS version to support CarPlay 2.0 will continue to operate using the CarPlay 1.0 feature set.

I don’t understand why you think it won’t work exactly this way. If CarPlay 1.0 works just fine for you, and you’re not buying a vehicle equipped with CarPlay 2.0, nothing changes for you.

Do you realize how absurd this sounds? You are essentially arguing that, because it doesn’t work perfectly in some vehicles, it shouldn’t be allowed to be used in vehicles in which it works without issue. That’s not how safety recalls work. Only vehicles in which issues are identified as occurring get recalled. I’m not sure the NHTSA even has the authority to issue a recall over third-party software.

The same as I’d feel if it happened because of any of the ten million other potential distractions available to drivers. It is the driver’s responsibility to focus on driving. A navigation system is not a safety feature; it is a bonus, an add-on, a convenience. If you need to fumble with the nav system, you should pull off the road or let a passenger do it. If you don’t, and you cause an accident, neither the automaker nor the company that produced the nav system is liable: you are. Because, again, a navigation system is a nonessential feature.

Look, I get that you are frustrated with your experiences with CarPlay. I sympathize. I really do. But your assertions and expected remedies are veering away from reason and moving towards yelling at clouds. You’re arguing that a mid-level inconvenience is a ticking bomb.

If CarPlay doesn’t work for you, you don’t have to use it. You can get almost the same experience by adding a mount for your iPhone and plugging the audio into an aux input. It’s just on your phone screen instead of on the car’s screen. Yes, it’s a little less convenient. Yes, it’s less elegant. But it’s not an unreasonable option.

What is unreasonable is insisting that no one should be able to use CarPlay unless it works perfectly for everyone all the time.

I’m done with this thread. Multiple people have pointed out to you where your assertions are inaccurate or based on misconceptions, and you keep returning with the same arguments and assertions. This discussion no longer seems to be serving any useful purpose or creating any value for anyone.

CarPlay 2.0 hasn’t been released yet and this is exactly what I would expect to see.

I’m not sure whether to respond as I think you could now be trolling. This is clearly a nonsense. Driver distractions are a fact of life. Do we ban kids from being in a car because they might distract the driver. Do we ban radios, CDs, windscreen wipers, smoking, NAVMANs, cruise-control?

Have you filed a complaint against Tesla because their self-driving vehicles actually do crash and kill people?

I suspect safety is the precise reason the much-discussed Apple Car is so long coming. They want to get it right. I’m guessing when you and Apple parted ways it wasn’t amicable. You sure seem to have it in for them.

I agree with whoever said this discussion should be closed. I’m a pretty chill kind of guy but some of the discussions are driving me to distraction (pardon the pun).

You probably don’t even have to do that. In my car with CarPlay it still supports playing Bluetooth or USB audio using the stock, non-CarPlay audio system (the same you use to play AM, FM, or SiriusXM radio.) It also has a stock navigation system.

Alright, I’m shutting this topic down. There’s no question that CarPlay is not perfect, but no technology is, and anything that requires coordination between a third-party manufacturer and Apple’s code will have even more room for problems to crop up. But CarPlay is something that a lot of people appreciate greatly.

What’s being described here as “CarPlay 2.0” exists only as a technology demo from WWDC 2022, when Apple said that cars supporting it wouldn’t even start appearing on the market until the end of this year. Given how long it took CarPlay to gain widespread adoption among car manufacturers, I wouldn’t expect to see it in mainstream vehicles for another year or two at best. And that if it ever shows up, given that manufacturers are clearly leery of giving Apple too much control. Regardless, existing versions of CarPlay won’t stop working then, though current cars likely won’t be able to upgrade to the next-generation version because they’ll lack the necessary hardware. As others have said, this is standard practice.