CarPlay Is Additive

https://www.caseyliss.com/2026/7/2/carplay-is-additive-you-dolts

by sprawl_ • 20 days ago

584 725 20 days ago

tedd4u• 20 days ago

I hesitate to propose ulterior motives, but given there have been several seemingly obtuse objections to projection from Rivian, perhaps the CEO is concerned that, if Rivian supports projection, it will harm the perception of the value of their software stack? Related, I think they licensed their stack to VW.

cyberax• 20 days ago

They want software subscription income. It's as simple as that.

MBCook23• 20 days ago

Yep. Subscriptions and incentives.

Every car I have purchased has satellite radio factory installed. And each time SiriusXM will not shut up about trying to get me to sign up. Over and over. It takes years before they give up.

I don’t want it. So why is it in the car? Because they pay Ford and Honda and everyone else to put it there.

Why did they both have Spotify? And iHeartRadio? Who even uses that? All sorts of other things. There’s a kickback for every one.

But unlike satellite none of them work without a cell connection. And they won’t use your phone. You have to pay the car maker for their overpriced connectivity. That’s what they want you to do.

Money money everywhere. But if I use CarPlay or android auto guess who doesn’t get a cut.

“People will think our software is bad.” It is, that’s why I want CarPlay.

al_borland8• 20 days ago

And your data. Auto makers love selling user data.

altairprime2• 20 days ago

I think Rivian is disguising a hidden factor: CarPlay prohibits vehicle manufacturers from collecting metrics and selling anonymized or identified user activity data, and this loss of telematics data / income stream is unacceptable to manufacturers (for example, GM*) who see the smart TV business making billions on that precise data.

The correct route for someone with interview access to Rivian to clarify whether this scenario applies would be to review their legal terms for owners and then point-blank ask in a recorded interview ‘whether Rivian’s vehicles are reporting to Rivian what music their buyers play in Rivian vehicles’. This is a nuanced sentence: whether is yes/no; information is too broad to weasel out of; ‘on what music’ focuses on a private aspect of car ownership and is a callback to the VHS rental rulings; ‘in their vehicles’ is not only restricted to what’s connected to the headunit by usb or Bluetooth or radio, but also covers the headunit-connected microphones in the vehicle as well. If they say yes, the questions become obvious. If they say no, the followup should be to ask if Rivian contractually guarantees that they will not someday issue a software update that begins doing so. Either it does not, or it does. Two questions max to either confirm or refute a suspicion.

GM cited ‘the ability to improve cars’ as why it’s refusing CarPlay, but as the OP article clearly shows, GM could simply continue to improve the cars and the screen surrounding the CarPlay dedicated window, while continuing to improve their own built-in functions using the data from those who do not use it for the benefit of those same users. GM’s justifications last year in this regard are just as obtuse as Rivian’s this year. Given that similarity, I suspect you’re right: Rivian does indeed seem to be trying not to appear desperately in need of cash by reselling user data for subscription revenue profit: ‘buy our three-ton six-figure vehicle so that we can make $1/year off of you to keep our business afloat’ is horrendous optics and would lead to open mockery of their business.

* The GM/FTC 2026 case only prevents GM from selling data associated with vehicle driving. Headunit usage cannot be readily assumed to be ‘driving’ data in the case context of vehicle insurers, and so continued sale of radio usage data to (for imaginary example) Nielsen would be unaffected by the specific, narrow, and temporary 2026 ruling.

drnick12• 20 days ago

I think Rivian is disguising a hidden factor: CarPlay prohibits vehicle manufacturers from collecting metrics and selling anonymized or identified user activity data, and this loss of telematics data / income stream is unacceptable to manufacturers (for example, GM*) who see the smart TV business making billions on that precise data.

The car's own cellular connection can still report large amounts of telemetry, such as the car's location in real time, how many people are in it, etc. And if modern cars are anything like smart TVs, send "content recognition" screenshots home to infer what drivers use the onboard screen for.

I refuse to drive a car without first unplugging the cell modem; this is more or less easy depending on the make and model, so do your research.

wvenable5• 20 days ago

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" -- Upton Sinclair

This is the CEO of Rivian's software arm -- his job is to create and sell software that runs in the car. Carplay and Android Auto effectively make him unnecessary.

If you listen to the interview, he has bold ideas about how the car should somehow be the center of one's computing ecosystem. It's ridiculous because the smartphone is already the center! And people like that! And it just makes sense! They're fighting this dumb battle because they have to. But ultimately every car manufacturer wants to get away from Carplay so they can own that tiny fraction of computing that happens on the drive to and from work.

bombcar7• 20 days ago

The car industry got "mogged" as the kids say by Apple - cars went from status items (see any 60s/70s movie) to "an iPhone accessory" overnight and they've still not recovered.

bombcar7• 20 days ago

I don't think I can honestly say I've seen a car UI done so well I'd forego CarPlay on the same vehicle.

MAYBE in the rare case it has wireless CarPlay only, but can play music over USB from my phone. Maybe.

valgaze• 20 days ago

Author says "I literally will not buy a car that does not support CarPlay."

From July 2022: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/22/apple-carplay-could-be-a-tro...

  Apple engineering manager Emily Schubert said 98% of new cars in the U.S. come 
  with CarPlay installed. She delivered a shocking stat: 79% of U.S. buyers would 
  only buy a car if it supported CarPlay.

  “It’s a must-have feature when shopping for a new vehicle,” Schubert said 
  during a presentation of the new features.

echelon3• 20 days ago

Sounds like the Apple monopoly has made yet another industry its bitch.

These companies are giving up sovereignty of their primary product to a company that can steer away customer loyalty and disrupt any hope these companies have of increasing their already scant margins.

Any car should be able to interface with a phone without Apple or Google's legally binding terms and NDAs. The direction of control should be on the side of the customer first, and the automotive company second.

Where the hell are the regulators? This is not okay.

pertymcpert• 20 days ago

What do you want the regulators to do to Apple in this case? What have they done wrong?

dgacmu• 20 days ago

Consumers having a preference is not ok?

I feel the same way about Android auto. I refuse to be locked into some terrible, never updated or expensive subscription vendor nav unit. I have a phone. I want to be able to use it.

rufius• 20 days ago

Android Auto is in the vast majority of cars that also have CarPlay.

What’s your point?

Jtsummers• 20 days ago

Where the hell are the regulators? This is not okay.

To quote a wise man:

> We need to stop this helicopter civilization bullshit.
>We're building 1984 to protect from god knows what imaginary harms.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48755473

majormajor• 20 days ago

Seems like, if anything, the right action for regulators would be to enforce car manufacturers to not refuse to support existing consumer connectivity protocols... or at least not unless they can come up with something at least as good. And definitely something that isn't "pay us a data subscription so we can track you too while you use a crappier re-implementation of what your phone can already do."

Or "we're gonna cut off our older models to force people towards new cars instead of older ones." That's a bad pattern to let people selling $30,000+ devices get access to.

stephen_g2• 20 days ago

That doesn’t make any sense… The comment you’re replying to is about people’s desire for a particular feature, but pretty much any car that supports CarPlay also supports the Android equivalent, as well as still having media playback and often some kind of navigation without either!

Your comment would only make sense in a hypothetical situation where the car infotainment only worked if you had an iPhone or if there was some kind of exclusivity agreements to preclude it working with Android, but that isn’t the case in any circumstance I’m aware of.

asveikau• 20 days ago

Android Auto is also a thing.

aetch4• 20 days ago

Do you understand how headunits work and have you ever sat in a car? It doesn’t sound like it since you think cars are forced to use CarPlay.

Telaneo33• 20 days ago

The customers want to be able to control the infotainment system, by functionally replacing it with something completely different, since the defaults are garbage across the industry. Both Apple and Google have outdone every single carmaker in what is supposedly their own game (or at least their own arena). Can't blame them for that.

stalfosknight• 19 days ago

What monopoly?

parl_match2• 20 days ago

I have a vehicle that's basically a BMW, which has excellent navigation integration with a HUD. Recently, they announced that my vehicle would receive map and software updates, for basically as long as the included modem was functional.

My vehicle doesn't support the carplay to hud stuff, but that's okay. The thing is... when my car stops getting map and traffic updates, I will still be able to switch to carplay for at least the command screen presenting information. I intend on keeping this vehicle for a long time, so that's important to me.

On top of that, carplay offers better bitrate than bluetooth.

For people that wish to keep a vehicle for a long time, carplay/android auto isn't just a convenience anymore. With the increased integration of headunits, aftermarket becomes a tougher sell.

fragmede2• 20 days ago

I have a vehicle that's basically a BMW

Why not just name the brand?

throwaway_7274• 20 days ago

I literally will not buy a car that has a microprocessor in it

(I will, apparently, never buy a car)

danielheath• 20 days ago

I mean, "no microprocessor" means no engine designed in the past 30 years, because the fuel pump needs one.

"No antenna/modem I can't readily remove" might be _slightly_ more achievable.

donkey_brains• 20 days ago

That’s a very hard line

AnotherGoodName• 20 days ago

TPMS (tire pressure monitoring system) is a coin battery powered computer inside each tyre of your car. They’ve been around for a couple of decades now. Even the lowest end cars have TPMS in each wheel. If you change wheels you need to go to a wheel shop and have them re pair (as in re pair wifi) the wheel with your car. I had to do this recently with my 2014 ford focus.

Anyway those are just four of hundreds of computers in your car these days.

LeoPanthera• 20 days ago

The 1977 Oldsmobile Toronado is generally considered to be the first car to have microprocessor control.

But Ford's EEC was built around Toshiba's TLCS-12, the world's first 12-bit microprocessor, developed specifically for engine control, and might have been in cars produced prior to 77, but documentation is spotty.

So do you only drive cars built prior to the late 70s? Because sacrificing the enormous safety improvements just for a bizarre feeling of moral superiority is a really awful hill to die on. And literal death is a real possibility

Or do you not drive and never planned to buy any kind of car and thus your claim is meaningless?

Telaneo33• 20 days ago

I don't think this is a useful stance to take for more or less any reason (any reason you can point to will have a different underlying issue). Cars functionally have to have microprocessors, if nothing else but to control emissions, and that's a good thing. I don't want society to smell of exhaust, so that's an obvious and gigantic benefit. There are many other good reasons to have them, like rear cameras, tire pressure sensors, infotainment, the lot.

There are downsides, but many boil down to 'manufacturers are knobheads' (data collection, pushing subscriptions) and lessened control (tuning computers can be easier than tuning mechanics, you just aren't given control, so this to is arguably a case of 'manufacturers are knobheads', or sometimes liability issues).

MBCook23• 20 days ago

Since then GM has dropped CarPlay. Rivian has appeared following Tesla and refusing to support it. And I thought there were some other existing manufacturer who was either getting rid of it or thinking about it.

Basically despite the popularity the market seems to be moving against it slowly. And the more those cars succeed the more other auto makers will be willing to follow.

bhhaskin2• 20 days ago

It's not that the market is moving away, but more like car companies realized if they want to sell monthly subscriptions in the future, they need to own the software.

jghn2• 20 days ago

I'm in this camp: I will not buy a car without CarPlay. And I put so few miles on my car that while I'd like a new one, if the vendors make this impossible then no one gets my money.

chris222• 20 days ago

Tesla might support it.

https://www.teslarati.com/apple-developing-missing-link-tesl...

SirMaster2• 20 days ago

GM has not dropped CarPlay. I just checked out some 2026 GM vehicles (Chevy) and they list CarPlay.

jnaina2• 20 days ago

Same here. CarPlay is in the top 10 features for my next Car. Even for my older 911 which I bought second hand, the first investment was a Pioneer head unit with CarPlay.

_fizz_buzz_• 20 days ago

Tesla might actually support car play soonish: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-13/tesla-is-...

Reason077• 20 days ago

”Rivian … following Tesla and refusing to support it.”

Actually, Tesla is apparently planning to add CarPlay support via a software update.

It hasn’t happened yet, as apparently it’s been waiting on a new feature from Apple which will allow navigation data to be shared/synced between CarPlay and the car’s self-driving system.

This Route Sharing feature was announced at WWDC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykwG0I8UGjg&t=771s

Spooky23• 19 days ago

Tesla and I think Rivian goes deep into the computer as a control surface. They save $10 not having a handle for the glovebox or whatever.

GM just wants to extract a pound of flesh. All are companies making dumb decisions by ignoring what customers want.

It will cost them customers. My company buys like 10k cars a year and we make CarPlay a requirement. We see it as a safety and productivity issue. We want employees using maps to navigate and avoid hazards, but don’t want them operating our vehicles unsafely.

Personally, it would be a long shot for me to buy any GM product due to high depreciation. The CarPlay/Android Auto thing disqualifies them.

bdavbdav6• 20 days ago

Not only does it irritate me not having it in a practical sense, it’s also an arrogance on behalf of the manufacturer. “We can do it better than iOS/Android”, or “We have a better reason to do it”. No, and No.

_factor2• 20 days ago

That’s just a line. More like, “We can collect our own data”, or “We can lock them in and collect subscription fees.”

hamburglar3• 20 days ago

They all think they can do better, and it is sheer arrogance, because even the best of them is utter garbage compared to software that is actually built with fast iteration, UX research, and real user testing. No car manufacturers do a good job of this, and they all bake their atrocious UX into a $50k piece of hardware you keep for decades and which *never* gets a significant software update. The fact that they don’t see how impossible it is for them to win at this game is why they will never win. Sorry Rivian. Your vehicle is great but you’re handicapping yourself with software hubris.

bingo-bongo• 20 days ago

I’ve had ~15 cars over the past 25 years, different make and models, some really cheap, some fairly expensive. One thing they all have in common: their terrible infotainment UI.

I’m sure they are trying and it has gotten slightly better lately - but it’s still not great imho. If they really want to do it better than Apple etc., they seriously need to up their game - and I really wish they would, but I don’t see that happening, the cost is too high.

bluGill11• 19 days ago

They can do it better than your phone but only if you are a professional driver in your car for at least four hours a day. The typical person spending half an hour going to work or going to get groceries has everything on their phone and the hassle of setting up their card just how they want it isn't worth it. The typical person also is more likely to be thinking the address I need to go is in my calendar system and that's going to be more hassle getting into the car then the open in maps function from the phone.

delecti• 19 days ago

I worked at a car company. It's not arrogance, it's greed. They do want their own proprietary infotainment to be good, but it's more that they don't want to abdicate control, both out of a possessive feeling over what you're looking at, and over the potential for selling you access to their own stuff on that screen.

cyberrock• 19 days ago

From a non-(voluntary-)user perspective, that kind of arrogance and frankly abuse is what got Apple diehard fans, so it wouldn't surprise me if Rivian is also aiming for that.

dyauspitr3• 19 days ago

I mean they can’t have no option and rely completely on CarPlay and if they do that they can’t half ass their own system. There’s no excuse for not supporting CarPlay though.

mmcconnell1618• 19 days ago

Even if they could "do it better" it is still locked into a single device/vehicle and can't match the eco-system that Apple and Google have developed across a family of devices and services. In order to really compete, they would need to enter markets already dominated by big tech companies.

bikelang• 19 days ago

I would love to buy a Rivian R2 but I will absolutely not drop that kind of money until they support CarPlay. To me - a refusal to support CarPlay is an extremely user-hostile decision.

Zak• 19 days ago

She delivered a shocking stat: 79% of U.S. buyers would only buy a car if it supported CarPlay.

I would be shocked by the number being that high because while iOS has a slim majority of the market share, it's nowhere near 79%.

monitorlizard2• 19 days ago

A household might have three or four mobile phones, but only one or two cars. Many cars also can and do support both Android Auto and Carplay. If my wife and I used Android and my teenage son used Apple, I'd definitely want our car to support both.

not_the_fda• 19 days ago

It might be new cars. I could see new car buyers having an iphone bias vs android.

conk• 19 days ago

I’m one of these buyers. I had a reservation for a Rivian, then this interview shut the door on possible CarPlay. I canceled my reservation and bought an EV9 which I love and it has CarPlay!

Rivian is turning away potential lifetime customers because they want to force customers to pay for another cellular data plan and get their cut.

echelon3• 20 days ago

Let me help you, [Rivian Chief Software Officer] Wassym

Casey Liss, let me help you:

Apple and Google are monopolies.

You are boot licking an invasive species trillion dollar company.

These two megacorps are trying to put their greedy tendrils into the automotive industry and extract even more money from an industry that is not healthy and very difficult to succeed at.

It's high time the governments of the world told Google and Apple to fuck off and leave both consumers and other industries alone. Told the both of them that it's time for their platforms to become an open standard.

That phones themselves must be an open standards. With open web installs without scare walls and deeply hidden settings.

The inversion of control needs to make Apple and Google the bitch here. Not the automotive industry that can't even dream of the insane margins the tech industry has.

Cars should be able to interface with any phone without having to subjugate themselves to Google and Apple. Because this is a perverted inversion of control.

People own cars. Not two tech titans.

tonypapousek• 20 days ago

Geez, did Apple CarPlay burn down your house and kill your livestock or something?

frollogaston7• 20 days ago

No, that was the original Ford SYNC for Windows Phone

canthonytucci• 20 days ago

Cars should be able to interface with any phone without having to subjugate themselves to Google and Apple. Because this is a perverted inversion of control.

Bluetooth?

frollogaston7• 20 days ago

Um, my favorite feature of CarPlay is that I can just not use it.

cebert• 20 days ago

They want to hold you captive to subscription plans. If they allow CarPlay, it gives consumers more options for cellular connectivity, music, navigation, and other apps.

symfoniq2• 20 days ago

That's one of the reasons CarPlay is non-negotiable for me: It limits the automaker's ability to enshittify the ownership experience.

alex_suzuki• 20 days ago

Nothing prevents them from removing CarPlay in an update, though? Unless you make sure to never connect the car to the internet. Some garages will update FW for you unasked I hear.

drnick12• 20 days ago

Cellular connectivity is something I would rather cars not have.

ExoticPearTree4• 19 days ago

E911 is mandatory in cars in a lot of countries. So you have it or not, even if it not used for data transfers.

mayoff• 20 days ago

I’m with Casey on this: I will not buy a car without CarPlay. Of course, I haven’t bought a car since 2013. That one is a Tesla Model S and I think its UI is pretty decent for maps and playing audio, but I have rented enough cars since then to know that I would much prefer CarPlay support. If I had to replace my car today, I’d probably buy a Volvo EX90, which is the electric version of the XC90 Casey talks about.

bluGill11• 20 days ago

Rentals it is more important. Your own car doing the one time setup every few years is no problem but when it is a rental you don't want to take that time.

bombcar7• 20 days ago

I love the "pick your own off the line" rentals because I can snoop the cars for CarPlay.

mikeryan• 20 days ago

When I bought a Rivian I missed CarPlay. There were a few things that really stood out.

1. Proper Voice Texting

2. Google maps for routing with (good) traffic data.

The Voice Texting just a release or two ago - its okay so far but not as good as CarPlay. Google traffic landed a while back (in Rivian's map which I prefer over Google Maps)

I'll take the voice texting for what is otherwise a very elegant and well designed UI - that keeps getting better.

Full disclosure. Even when I have a rental with CarPlay I just use Spotify and google maps. Both of which are integrated into the Rivian UI. So YMMV

MBCook23• 20 days ago

And that’s the thing isn’t it? Often the same app is better on CarPlay/android auto than it is in the native UI for the vast majority of cars.

symfoniq2• 20 days ago

I agree with the author: CarPlay is table stakes for me. Whenever an automaker says a car won't support CarPlay, I mentally cross it off my list. Which is fine, because there are plenty of other viable options.

emmelaich• 20 days ago

I love Android Auto but I don't miss it when driving my Tesla because the Tesla has all things I want anyway.

etothet• 20 days ago

I owned a Model Y for several years, but, at least in my city, I always felt Tesla’s navigation had pretty poor route selection during busy times of the day - like dorecting me to streets that were notoriously stop and go during rush our when the highway alternative was known to be much quicker.

reddalo• 20 days ago

Tesla is more of a technology company than a car company, that's why they managed to make a good UX.

Classic car makers are not able to make decent UIs. Plus, each car would be different. So I prefer Android Auto: it's always my Android Auto, regardless of which car I'm driving.

HolyLampshade2• 20 days ago

I think what’s become more interesting/impactful for me is why they elect not to support it.

Most firms moving away from it (or who never implemented it) seem determined to either sell additional subscription services to their user base (connectivity) or sell their user base to a third-party (either as data, or eyeballs). And for a product at this price point I find myself very annoyed at the attempted payment extraction.

Either way, I’m with you. Lots of vehicle manufacturers out there that will support it.

jrmg3• 20 days ago

We bought a Honda Prologue last year and didn’t even test drive the built-on-the-same-platform GM cars (e.g. the almost-identical Chevy Blazer EV) because they didn’t have CarPlay.

People like us have got to be affecting GM’s sales by some measurable amount, right?

DangitBobby2• 19 days ago

They'll just say it's because people don't want EVs

cloin• 20 days ago

I’m not even that old, but I’d really love to argue to simplify the entire auto infotainment stack. I don’t even need a screen. I just bring my own by magnetically attaching my phone that I’ll use to navigate and Bluetooth music or podcasts. If CarPlay becomes the standard that allows me to not pay for whatever crappy tablet UI automakers are pushing, fine. But that doesn’t make CarPlay a necessity, it just makes it the least bad option.

crooked-v• 20 days ago

It sounds like you want a Slate: https://www.slate.auto/en The closest it gets to an infotainment system is a tablet mount.

artisinal10• 20 days ago

Many European EVs work like that. Fiat, Opel, Citroen have models without even a radio.

Telaneo33• 20 days ago

A rear camera is mandatory on new cars in the US these days, and it's honestly a good idea to have them either way. This makes a screen a necessity more or less no matter what (I can't see it being implemented with a bring-your-own tablet solution).

That doesn't mean they have to ship most of the infotainment system though. They could just leave that hole there for Carplay to fill. But that would be admiring defeat, and we can't have that.

hparadiz4• 20 days ago

The rear and mirror cameras being active is one reason I don't like it when my phone is connected to it because they overlay what Carplay/Android Auto is trying to show. It's sort of like downgrading from dual screen to one.

NetMageSCW16• 17 days ago

Slate handles that by replacing the dash gauges with the rear view while reversing.

wackget2• 20 days ago

It's difficult for me to admit - because I really dislike Apple, Google, and the other predatory monopolies - but I wouldn't buy a car without CarPlay either.

Like I said, it's not because I'm a fan of Apple. Honestly, fuck Apple. Fuck their stupid walled garden and their $99/yr developer fee and their planned obsolesence and their lack of a headphone jack and everything else. But fuck Google too. And especially fuck all the car makers with their crappy infotainment software.

The truth is, I put up with an iPhone and with CarPlay simply because it is slightly less shitty than all the other shitty options.

wackget2• 20 days ago

As a disclaimer, the three iPhones I've ever purchased have all been used. I keep them for as long as possible. I don't use iCloud. I don't buy apps. In fact, I don't give Apple any money as far as I know.

I wish a Linux phone was a viable option but they are years away from being truly usable and decades away from any hope of mass integration with cars.

jitl3• 20 days ago

android isn't linux-y enough to be able to use android auto on a more typical linux kernel?

flax• 20 days ago

I don't particularly care about Android Auto (I generally prefer standard bluetooth for audio, and directly setting the phone up for navigation), but if a manufacturer supports CarPlay and not Android Auto, they can get lost. I hate how Apple stuff is an assumed default.

MBCook23• 20 days ago

Effectively no one does that. I think there might be one or two ultra luxury cars that do, but in general no one does. Because they don’t wanna cut off any of their audience.

And at this point it seems like 80% of car manufacturers just ship android automotive anyway. You really think they’re gonna do that and turn off android auto support?

appden6• 20 days ago

I’m fully bought into the Apple ecosystem, and I’ve had Teslas for 8 years and we currently also have car that supports CarPlay. The CarPlay interface is overall far inferior, especially with navigation. First of all, searching for destinations is terrible on CarPlay compared to Tesla! Even worse, Apple didn’t even add multi-touch support to CarPlay until iOS 26, and the vast majority of cars (including ours) don’t support it, so you have to hunt for and tap the zoom controls, which is pretty barbaric compared to the fluid pinch and zoom gestures that work on Tesla and our other devices. Also on our CarPlay car, it never seems to know the direction the car is facing until it starts moving, which becomes incredibly frustrating navigating out of a parking lot. The final major downside is having to switch apps out of navigation to control music then switch back, whereas on Tesla (and Rivian) you can choose and control music while keeping navigation on your screen.

MBCook23• 20 days ago

OK you don’t like it. How is that an argument against allowing people to choose?

appden6• 20 days ago

Quite the contrary, I’ve long thought Tesla should add support for CarPlay to alleviate the concerns of many buyers over it not being supported. I think it would have been starkly worse than Tesla’s interface before they supported multi-touch this past year, but nonetheless they should have supported it by now. Better late than never that they’re finally adding support for it, it’ll especially make Rivian look kinda silly for continuing to be so stubborn about it. I think only a small fraction will actually use CarPlay on their Teslas, but it’s still pretty dumb to let that missing feature hurt their sales.

jitl3• 20 days ago

I have a boring Mercedes mid-size SUV. Carplay works. I can skip/repeat tracks using the standard control on the steering wheel; the instrument cluster shows the current track the same way it's done with connected phones forever. On the center console screen, we use the Carplay view with 3 splits - one for Spotify, two for navigation (map & next direction). Google Maps and Apple Maps are both reliable where I drive (Miami).

Tesla is a great car below the from the headlights down, I love driving my dad's Y performance to the grocery store when I'm visiting home. But no way I'm going to get a car where I can't point the vent at my armpit without using a touch screen. No way I'm going to get a car where I can't talk to whatever agent I want while stuck in traffic. I much rather have a boring car that doesn't tick me off.

If Tesla (or Rivian) add Carplay, they'll really move up the my list (still want physical vent control tho). Would you stop driving your Tesla if an update added Carplay tomorrow?

appden6• 20 days ago

See my comment below. I think they should add CarPlay support but I personally don’t see myself ever using it.

simondotau5• 20 days ago

Personally I find the feeling of air blowing on me, no matter how pleasant initially, to quickly become grating. In most cars I adjust the air to blow where I am not, and compensate with a notch higher fan speed.

Having the ability for the air stream continually moving is more valuable to me than constantly moving it by hand.

Being able to pre-cool the car before entering it is more valuable to me than sitting in a hot car and pointing the MAX A/C directly on my face.

arcticfox• 20 days ago

I wouldn't stop driving my Tesla if they swapped the UI for Carplay but I'd be incredibly disappointed at the downgrade

lolpython• 20 days ago

Can’t you do split screen navigation via the home screen (Dashboard View)? At least on cars I’ve rented I could have navigation on one side and music on the other in CarPlay.

appden6• 20 days ago

Split screen can be finicky and kinda sucks on the small screen we have. Also, I don’t think I can browse music with split screen…

vachina• 20 days ago

Like the author said, if your built in is good, then great you don’t need CarPlay. Literally nobody is asking you to switch.

rootusrootus6• 20 days ago

I have a Tesla and a Lightning.

One of them lets me send iMessages to groups as well as non-phone recipients like my kids. The other is my Tesla.

I’m glad for you, but if Tesla supported CarPlay I could get what I wanted and you would not be affected at all. I’m baffled why people like you even bother to share your opinion. Nobody is suggesting that you be forced to use CarPlay. See also the entire topic of this discussion.

appden6• 20 days ago

I’m baffled you think sharing a well-sourced opinion on a discussion thread is a bad thing, or that you think I believe Tesla adding support for CarPlay would somehow force me to use it. As I said in other replies, I’ve long thought Tesla should add support for it, but that few people would actually use it much.

QuiEgo• 20 days ago

Second all these points! No multitouch is such a bad experience on maps!

firesteelrain• 20 days ago

You can control music and still navigate while in CarPlay. I do it all the time.

dhosek4• 20 days ago

When I first started using CarPlay, the screen that has the music and map showing simultaneously was not obvious and it wasn’t until well into my third long trip with CarPlay that I finally discovered it. I had thought the only display options were app full screen and app list. I think there was a change sometime in the last 3 years that made that the default starting display (or maybe I’m just a little less dumb now).

throwaway274484• 20 days ago

Curiously, being herded onto tesla's software is the number one reason I won't buy one. I don't like the navigation or media software and the rest would feel better as a physical control or just seems useless in a car.

madaxe_again• 20 days ago

I find the media stuff all works just fine - gotta say I control it all almost exclusively by voice, and it Just Works - but the navigation… sucks donkey ass. I hate that it only treats superchargers as possible charging stops - where I live they are few and far between, yet other high speed chargers are common. The routing is often abysmal. It’ll be like “heavy traffic ahead. Taking you into it.” The traffic camera database is incomplete. The behaviour between the mobile and in car app is wildly inconsistent.

You know, I don’t care so much about having CarPlay as I care about having Waze or ABRP or just any routing app other than Tesla’s.

mynameisvlad2• 20 days ago

The final major downside is having to switch apps out of navigation to control music then switch back,

But... you don't. Tapping on the home button once more or swiping to the right on the app page reveals the home screen which has navigation and music together:

https://devimages-cdn.apple.com/wwdc-services/images/D35E0E8...

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/wgH6RZrtKkuAQkJUjfWW8V.jpg

It even adapts to vertical screens:

https://i.redd.it/n7e0st8ebyh81.jpg

appden6• 20 days ago

Our CarPlay car has a small screen, so I prefer to keep navigation full screen most of the time. In split mode, it’s way too tiny for me, but I occasionally leave it there if I know my way around anyways. It’s definitely not a well designed experience.

aetch4• 20 days ago

The main dashboard screen of CarPlay lets you navigate, manage music, and view the calendar and take calls all at once. Have you used that before?

thorbutt2• 20 days ago

Most OEM infotainment sucks, and it's taken a while for things to improve. I'd be willing to say your older car has a resistive touchscreen and physically couldn't support multitouch

CarPlay is definitely an improvement if you're comparing it to something like Ford Sync for example

bdavbdav6• 20 days ago

My car supports multitouch in factory nav but not CarPlay (24 plate VAG).

sitharus• 20 days ago

I have a Polestar 2, 2022 model even so it's not fresh off the lot.

CarPlay navigation shows on the instrument cluster. The speed, state of charge, etc all move to the side so the map is right in the middle for quick viewing. Then the infotainment screen can show music or the tiled music/navigation view that CarPlay supports.

Basic music controls are on the steering wheel of course, readily accessible.

The lack of multitouch is slightly annoying, but it's not something I ever use. If I ever can't see what I need on the navigation I simply look outside for the road signs, which still exist.

Der_Einzige3• 20 days ago

All of this nonsense critique is massively outweighed by 1. having a HUD (your tesla will never get one because Elon is an idiot) and 2. having carplay/android auto sync your turn-by-turn directions into that HUD.

pclark• 20 days ago

I honestly cannot believe how bad CarPlay is — I can't believe how many rave reviews it gets, I think it's absolutely awful compared to Rivian or Tesla software.

kalleboo• 20 days ago

“Searching for destinations on CarPlay”

I think this is the difference for me - I’ve decided where I’m going before I get in the car. Either I’ve planned a route (on my phone) or got a destination through a message from a friend on LINE. Either way I already have a plan.. on my phone. So having to somehow get that into the car navigation is always going to be worse than just using my phone

garyrob• 20 days ago

"The final major downside is having to switch apps out of navigation to control music then switch back". That's no longer true for CarPlay. It now has a mode where you see Maps and Music at the same time.

SomeUserName432• 20 days ago

I’m fully bought into the Apple ecosystem, and I’ve had Teslas for 8 years and we currently also have car that supports CarPlay. The CarPlay interface is overall far inferior, especially with navigation. First of all, searching for destinations is terrible on CarPlay compared to Tesla

Tesla and surprisingly Hyundai are outliers, the vast majority of cars have terrible infotainment systems, and them deciding to suddenly focus on it does not assure me at all.

stetrain• 20 days ago

I find Tesla’s interface to be inferior as soon as you want to use an app they haven’t built. Like my podcasts app. Or receiving / replying to a WhatsApp message. Even the built-in text message support can’t handle replying to a group text.

Personally I’d stick with Tesla’s nav and use CarPlay for media and messaging, and that’s the optionality and user choice I think this post is trying to get at.

tlogan• 20 days ago

Over 90% of new vehicles sold in the U.S. already support Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.

So it is kinda expected to be there: if it is not there then a car needs to be something special. So I think buyers don’t even ask for it because they assume it will be there (and absence becomes much more noticeable than its presence).

MBCook23• 20 days ago

That was the statistic, with GM‘s move to ditch it is that still true? Wasn’t there also some other legacy auto maker that was planning to?

yostrovs• 20 days ago

There are a bunch of CarPlay devices on Amazon, for example, with all kinds of screens, designed for Tesla and other cars that don't support it, that cost about $200 for a nice one. Why not just buy one of those and who cares if it's natively supported?

rootusrootus6• 20 days ago

In most cases it puts the CarPlay screen in a more difficult to reach location than the OE screen.

The one that interests me now is the one that selectively takes over the Tesla screen.

MBCook23• 20 days ago

Plus it’s not going to integrate with your steering wheel controls, navigation system, or anything else.

Those are a great solution for a car that doesn’t have an infotainment screen.

But Teslas, Rivians, and GMs all do. So why should anyone have to do that?

Telaneo33• 20 days ago

Why buy a car where you need to do this and get a more janky experience, when you can buy one with it integrated, with no downsides?

numpad04• 20 days ago

There exists a flavor of CarPlay — CarPlay Ultra — that does take over every screen of the car.

I wish software leaning Internet people stop framing that center console tablet as "the car". It's worse than people pointing at display monitors and calling it computers. They're just cheap complimentary tablets attached to the car. If we were to fully embrace the line of thinking that frame the touchscreen being the car, the Slate Truck cannot exist, since it lacks the car of the car. In reality it does exist, because that thing is just a tiny add-on unit of a car.

The reason why there's been zero cars with CarPlay Ultra is because those cheap tablets remote controlling features of the actual car that hosts it, like speedometer, is weird, and way too complicated, and plain unworkable, on top of being too controlling.

I'm not defending car brands, I find conversations with misunderstandings like this less than ideally productive. The 5.25" DVD drive unit is not the computer.

rogerrogerr• 20 days ago

Huh? Your own quote literally does not frame the center screen as "the car":

that does take over every screen of the car.

numpad04• 20 days ago

The author clearly thinks that the dash and and the nav are connected to the same thing in the back, when in reality the nav is a self contained unit that runs on the power from the car. That only happens when people frame the nav as the car.

msy• 20 days ago

I imagine the Venn Diagram of Rivian buyers and Apple users is basically a circle (or one small circle inside a much larger one), this seems like a wildly obtuse position for them to take.

MBCook23• 20 days ago

Tesla was similar. There was a report years ago about how Apple parking lots were just full of the things. And yet Tesla wouldn’t play ball.

october8140• 20 days ago

CarPlay is bad for the car manufacturer and is far worse than the modern car software. People who complain about loosing CarPlay are not using the new software but reacting in fear thinking the old car software will come back.

The author acts like manufacturers get CarPlay for free when it has a high cost, high constraints, and gives over most or all of the dash over to another company.

greyface-• 20 days ago

gives over most or all of the dash over to another company

The dash isn't the manufacturer's property. It's the car owner's.

rootusrootus6• 20 days ago

I have a Tesla and want CarPlay. What car has this better, newer software that you say I’m unaware of?

al_borland8• 20 days ago

gives over most or all of the dash over to another company.

This was covered in the article, that’s just CarPlay Ultra, which is still fairly new and hardly any companies have implemented it. That’s not what’s being asked for.

fear thinking the old car software will come back.

Why would this not be a concern? Condition forces higher quality. If these car companies are competing against Apple and Google, they need to stop phoning it in. If they block them out, they can ship more junk and drivers are just stuck with it.

If they believe it what they ship, they shouldn’t be afraid to also build in CarPlay/Android Auto support. Have the sales people go over the built in system so people give it a chance. Impress the customers with it. Advertise how good it is. Eliminating the competition and claiming it’s for the best, does not inspire confidence.

MBCook23• 20 days ago

This was covered in the article, that’s just CarPlay Ultra

And Apple doesn’t just take it over. It requires a per-model design package the OEM makes with Apple’s help. So they can keep all their logos and design elements they care about.

They still don’t do it, as you pointed out. But it’s not like using an AppleTV to avoid the terrible built in smart TV interface. The OEM is still there.

mikeocool• 20 days ago

I drive a 2026 Toyota, how do I enable this new good native infotainment system of which you speak?

The one in my car sucks, and to use the most basic features (navigation, music) that cost nothing on CarPlay (beyond my phone bill) cost $15-25/month from Toyota.

wvenable5• 20 days ago

CarPlay is bad for the car manufacturer and is far worse than the modern car software.

I have a new car with actually pretty decent modern car software; far better than the decades of crap software I put up with my last car. Carplay is still better. And in another decade, Carplay will be even better and my decent car software will be the same.

(And the car software and Carplay actually play very nicely together -- it is not all or nothing)

Telaneo33• 20 days ago

CarPlay [...] is far worse than the modern car software.

This is satire. I refuse to believe anything else.

josh-wrale• 20 days ago

Don't like Siri but want CarPlay? oops, nope.

initramfs2• 20 days ago

"You can read Wassym’s full answer at the episode link, but here’s the part that stuck out to me:

The challenge with screen mirroring solutions is that they take over every single pixel in the car, and that’s not the way we see ourselves interacting with our users."

I kept reading past this part thinking I didn't misread the title, because as he explained, a mirroring solution that takes up every pixel could potentially be addictive, and it made sense that he didn't want the UX to fundamentally change when people drive Rivian's cars. And for that, kudos.

But now I realize your case is that CarPlay is additive. Ok, great! I do wish I could use Android on my car, which is newer than your 2017 one but only features Bluetooth, music and Phone, pairing, rather than a full OS mirror.

Do I wish it had more? Yes. But am I less distracted on the road? Yes. So I would buy a Rivian.

commandersaki2• 20 days ago

I don't know about Rivian, but I'm generally less distracted on the road with CarPlay due to Siri & Voice Control. I wish I could extend it to my native car controls such as climate control etc.

initramfs2• 20 days ago

Yeah, I actually use a cell phone mount for navigation since my car doesn't have one. It's far from ideal, and I think more cars should have an easier and more secure way to attach/clamp a phone/tablet rather than require the driver to use their infotainment system, Although that can sometimes be fine. Having a flimsy car mount can be worse/more dangerous than a limited or poorly updated in-car navigation system. https://github.com/hatonthecat/Open-Source-Car/blob/main/ssr...

artisinal10• 20 days ago

I'm generally less distracted on the road

You should be not distracted at all.

spaqin• 20 days ago

As someone who only had 20+ year old cars and motorcycles, I don't see what's CarPlay supposed to solve? All I need is a Bluetooth-capable radio and a phone holder to display the navigation, so I can listen to my music and focus on driving. Phone doesn't need to be touched unless changing destinations. Do people seriously need to be constantly entertained while driving?

varenc• 20 days ago

Carplay isn't about entertainment for me. It's just a vastly superior and convenient way to view the same map you can see on your iPhone.

intrasight3• 20 days ago

I do see the maps - on my phone. What does seeing them somewhere else add? It seems completely redundant to me.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 20 days ago

I have a beater subie (2018). It has CarPlay (fairly basic variant). It also has very few touchscreens, which I like.

I could easily afford better, but have little interest in doing so. It’s low miles, paid for, handles well in the snow, and is in decent shape. A car gets me from Point A to Point B, and I want it to do so reliably and safely. I couldn’t care any less, what people think of me. Life’s too short.

I also write iOS apps; ones that make a lot of use of navigation stuff.

I like being able to use my app to determine a destination, plug it into CarPlay, and immediately get a map to where I want. Point A, meet Point B.

I’m sure that some of the systems fancier cars use, may be fine for this kind of thing, but CarPlay does it very smoothly.

I’m with the author. No CarPlay, no sale.

I really don’t think any manufacturer is concerned about what I think, though. There’s a lot of fish in the sea.

artisinal10• 20 days ago

I’m not a big fan of the dumbed down interface. Using the Music app on CarPlay is frustrating. I prefer operating the music app on my phone with a phone mount. Same goes for navigation apps. Finding a restaurant with pictures and reviews is so much faster on my phone.

Aniket-N• 20 days ago

I use to think this until i got a car with carplay. Now I can’t live without it. In fact wireless carplay was a game changer. You have to experience the convenience to know what it’s like.

mianos• 19 days ago

I have a 15 year old Mercedes. I got the old integrated CD player and radio pulled out and Alpine makes a nice dash surround and canbus support module for the steering wheel controls. It has a 7" display where the old stuff was and wireless Android Auto.

It's pretty much like any new car as far as entertainment and maps. Plus, it's got physical buttons for everything else. I think recent cars may well be coming back to what I have on my old car.

ps. not mentioned, Anrdoid auto and Carplay are H264, later H265, video players with touch control and buttons in a return channel. The phones render the display internally and project it as video to the display. That's all. This is why much older generation displays with at least reasonable SOCs can run them near perfectly. They are not running Anrdoid themselves. In fact some of them are operating system-less SOCs that have nearly no firmware but a video player and the support for the touchscreen and buttons. Much like that crappy video player built into old TVs ten years ago.

I have them on my motorcycles too. It's way better than a phone, in that the user interface is designed to be less interactive and more focusses with larger buttons.

3lpsy• 20 days ago

Maybe it’s cause I’ve never actually used it, but I really only care about a stable / well supported Bluetooth connection.

I have a holder for my phone for when I use GPS and basically never interact with it directly after it’s set. Only real interactions are media controls via the steering wheel.

The only use cases I can see car play helping with are those who take a lot of calls/texts in their car while driving and those who listen to music and want to listen to specific songs.

ryukoposting2• 20 days ago

I was super bought into carplay and android auto until I actually owned a car that had it. Oh great, it requires USB. Well my phone is 4 years old and the port is toast, so that doesn't work for me. Okay, wireless then. Car doesn't support that. Lovely. Bluetooth implementation is half-assed and the pairing process is Byzantine. Terrific stuff.

That car ended up sucking in other ways too. I quickly sold it and went back to buying old Lexuses. Wireless charging phone holder, and off you go. The siren call of infotainment is powerful, but actually living with it is just more fiddly bullshit I don't need in my life.

russdill• 20 days ago

It doesn't negate the problems you are pointing out, but there are several devices that bridge the USB wireless gap. (Aawireless, etc)

NetMageSCW16• 17 days ago

That take is stupid - I tried to use a feature with broken equipment so it must be the feature’s fault it didn’t work.

cavisne• 20 days ago

For me it’s about the waste. Engineers have taken the time to build a screen into the car with a good viewing angle, that works well with glare, doesn’t obstruct the drivers view.

Then the software side just makes the whole thing useless with a terrible UX that will never be updated.

CarPlay is a great solution because the non safety critical stuff (music, navigation) gets offloaded to a competent software company.

MBCook23• 20 days ago

Plus it improves every year.

On my previous car it never changed from the day I bought it, other than navigation getting more and more out of date.

On my current car I get software updates occasionally. I’m not sure that function ever changed though.

Meanwhile my iPhone gets better every year. And if I buy a new phone? CarPlay can get faster. My car never will even if I wanted to pay them.

jrmg3• 20 days ago

So, I fully recognize this is dumb, but humans (like me!) are dumb and lazy.

The ability to just get in your car and have the phone-powered interface right there without having to take your phone out of your pocket and mount it in the holder is something I didn’t ‘niceness’ of before experiencing it.

mvdtnz3• 20 days ago

I literally will not buy a car that does not support CarPlay.

This is silly. I have installed Android Auto head units into each of my last three cars. It costs a few hundred bucks and takes an afternoon.

I simply will not buy a car that won't easily accept a double DIN head unit.

wvenable5• 20 days ago

I think that ship has sailed, my friend.

My last car could accept a double DIN head unit but I never put one in because then I'd lose any way to control all the settings in the car. And that was a car from 2014! The integration is even tighter now.

mvdtnz3• 20 days ago

As long as used cars exist the ship will never have sailed.

duskwuff• 20 days ago

I simply will not buy a car that won't easily accept a double DIN head unit.

Are those even a thing anymore? The vast majority of new cars have some sort of custom all-in-one dashboard display.

mvdtnz3• 20 days ago

I don't know or care if "it's a thing anymore", there's an inexhaustible supply of existing cars with double DIN. My Subaru from 2017 has double DIN and I don't see any reason to own a more modern car than that.

frollogaston7• 20 days ago

This is the reason our car with the best entertainment system is ironically my old piece of junk clunker.

LJGNYC• 20 days ago

Can anyone recommend a good aftermarket CarPlay unit manufacturer (or stand alone unit that I can mount on dash? Wary of cheating out and getting an overheating cpu or bad touch screen

simondotau5• 20 days ago

I got a cheap generic one (aphqua brand) and it's fine. The touch screen is fine. The aux out is fine. It doesn't seem to get hot. It's not amazing, but for the price it's functionally perfect.

qsxfthnkp23223• 20 days ago

Rivian should buy overcast.

That way they can silence people being too vocal about what they want. The tech way.

In all seriousness though, Tesla can’t include CarPlay fast enough to make companies like rivian take a moment and actually consider carplay.

Also atp is one of the best podcasts out there

frollogaston7• 20 days ago

I've never seen CarPlay work properly. 2026 and they still can't make a car play music without jittering like a CD. Every car brand I've rented, every iPhone I've owned, gotta turn that junk off every time.

monkpit3• 20 days ago

(n=1)

jhhh• 20 days ago

Just like the article and every other opinion in this thread...

frollogaston7• 20 days ago

This isn't like Linux where the combo of motherboard, kernel version, and day of the week affects your Bluetooth audio, but ok cause n=1. Apple stuff is supposed to just work. Most of it does, but not this.

MBCook23• 20 days ago

That’s very odd. I’ve used my phones with 3 different cars regularly using CarPlay every single time I drive for literally a decade without ever experiencing that.

Plus various rental cars!

frollogaston7• 20 days ago

So I own a new Honda and have either borrowed or rented GM, Chrysler, Toyota, Nissan. If you've only driven say Ford, BMW, Hyundai, Mercedes, VW, I didn't test those.

Der_Einzige3• 20 days ago

Problem is between steering wheel and car seat.

frollogaston7• 20 days ago

Sorry, next time I'll make sure to use it without being in the car?

Loudergood• 20 days ago

There should be a standard. (Yes I know the XKCD) Apple and Android each having their own is ridiculous and actively prevents smaller competitors(one can dream)

MBCook23• 20 days ago

For what it’s worth I’ve heard they’re basically identical. It’s just some two-way data and an h264 video stream. There’s a reason basically everyone supports both. Seems to be really easy.

I don’t know whether the auto makers actually forced them to be compatible or it was a choice in Google’s part to get into cars that already had CarPlay.

But it really doesn’t seem like it’s a big hassle. Most of it is probably just certification testing to be allowed to use the names/logos.

bux932• 20 days ago

My car has wired carplay/android auto, but I have a nifty little USB dongle that receives carplay/android auto wirelessly and passes it to the car via USB. Sometimes called an AI box, I think.

These things contain a whole System-on-a-Chip board. I presume what it's acting like a middle box; pretending to be the headunit to the phone, and then sending the phone's output to the headunit, pretending to be a phone.

Since they need a quite beefy CPU to do that, I'm guessing they don't just pass along packets, but actually speak the protocol on both ends, and perhaps transcode the a/v stream.

faitswulff2• 20 days ago

Surprised no one's mentioned it so far, but CarPlay / Android Auto aren't just features, they're consistency. Across makes, models, years. I know what I'm getting when I connect my phone - and if anyone uses my car with their own device, they get their own dashboard, as well. One interesting use case I saw was a couple where one used a left-to-right interface and the other a right-to-left UI. CarPlay makes this easy, because the interface is linked to your own personal device.

hsbauauvhabzb• 20 days ago

I would prefer knobs and buttons over a screen flow in either direction, but no modern car caters to this anymore.

jackvalentine• 20 days ago

I bought a BYD that is as close to that as I could.

https://esv6hz7yeij.exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/b...

doug_durham• 20 days ago

My Hyundai Ioniq 5 has Car Play and knobs and buttons. It's not either or.

stronglikedan• 20 days ago

Some still have knobs. My mom's caddy has knobs in front of the armrest that control everything, so the touchscreen is optional but works just as well for those that want it.

aetch4• 20 days ago

Mazda has knobs and buttons that can even control carplay

bluescrn• 20 days ago

All the effort put in to stopping drivers distracting themselves with phones while driving, then we get big distracting touchscreens with apps front+centre in many new cars, and apparently that's OK.

izacus6• 20 days ago

My Mazda controls Auto/CarPlay with a physical controller so it's not either/or.

hnlmorg• 20 days ago

Lots of modern cars cater for this. It’s actually a marketing point with manufacturers like the VW group publicising how they’re bringing back tactile interfaces. And some ranges of cars never took that away (for example Jaguar).

benjymo2• 20 days ago

VW is bringing back physical buttons in their newer models, e.g. ID.3 Neo and Polo. Skoda never did away with them.

It's also part of the safety rating of Euro NCAP, and AFAIK China mandated physical buttons for important functions as well.

brookst4• 20 days ago

Jeep may not be modern, but all of the windows, climate, etc, are physical buttons.

dlcarrier2• 20 days ago

Even physical controls can be a downgrade if poorly implemented.

R.I.P. Anton Yelchin, who brought us joy with his portrayal of Chekov in the Star Trek films, before losing his life at only 27, from a switch poorly masquerading as a brake lever.

rbanffy3• 20 days ago

I use CarPlay all the time and I almost never use the touchscreen - as you shouldn't while driving. The car has buttons and knobs, on the dash and on the wheel, to call up all sorts of options in the UI. The only time I need to touch the screen is if I want a full screen map (instead of the three-panel usual view).

Scubabear68• 19 days ago

My 2023 Mazda CX-5 uses knobs to control car play, it basically acts like using Tab key to walk through selectable UI elements.

Tagbert2• 19 days ago

The things that CarPlay does are not the things that are controlled with buttons. Navigation, music, audiobooks, notifications work best with a screen. The driving and vehicle features like heat, blinkers, etc are where you want dedicated physical buttons.

rjrjrjrj2• 20 days ago

Agreed. Extremely important on rental cars.

izacus6• 20 days ago

Yeah, this!

Getting all my information - calendar, maps history, music, contacts, etc. on a rental car without syncing that info to it is absolutely great.

jwr• 20 days ago

Exactly! I can't stop wondering: are these executives just not thinking, or are they blindly repeating what they were told to? If I get into a rental car, do they seriously think I want to spend the next 30 minutes logging into Spotify, mapping apps, Overcast and anything else that I want to use but that needs to know me? And then worry about logging out of all that stuff once I return the rental?

vincefutr23• 20 days ago

How could you say something so brave yet so true

Poacher5• 20 days ago

This is huge for me - I'm in rental cars every other week or so 'cause I fly a lot for work and getting to factories in the boonies isn't really doable on public transport. I used to spend 20 minutes in the europcar car park every single time and then have to log out of everything when I dropped the car off. Now I just hook up Android Auto and I'm back into the same podcast I had on the flight, my itinerary is planned in already and I can head straight to my hotel. Still have the old problem with smart TV's though. Can't usually be fucked to login for two nights so I just watch TV on my laptop.

alias_neo3• 19 days ago

Can't usually be fucked to login for two nights so I just watch TV on my laptop

I recently had the idea of taking the FireStick 4K Max that I bought ~1year ago for the living room smart OLED TV which is getting a little older, I had gotten ready to take it on a few trips I'm doing this year, thought I was being clever, unfortunately it died a literal week after the warranty, boot looping constantly.

I won't buy another Firestick again, it was atrociously add-riddled and often showing things inappropriate for the kids in the middle of the day, but if generic Android TV stick like that was available with good performance and all the necessary DRM levels, I'd probably use that.

For now, I will just carry an HDMI cable and use my laptop.

0x4575• 19 days ago

Surprised no one's mentioned it so far, but CarPlay / Android Auto aren't just features, they're consistency.

No, they are not. When you press "Home" button on your car where does it go? In some cars it goes to CarPlay main screen, in others it goes to car's built-in system main screen. When you press back what happens? When you press Nav/Maps button where does it go? Again, some cars will launch built-in navigation while others will go in whatever last nav app you used in car play. Mazda disables touch screen when car play is enabled (which is good and I like it)

One interesting use case I saw was a couple where one used a left-to-right interface and the other a right-to-left UI.

That depends on if car was originally made for left-hand or right-hand traffic, some cars allow you to change that (in my BMW it required messing with obd port)

vtbassmatt• 19 days ago

What vehicle did Mazda screw this up so badly in? Neither of my Mazdas with CarPlay disable the touchscreen in CarPlay. The ‘21 Miata disables it while in motion (which sucks badly, and I just learned there’s a hack to fix). The ‘24 CX-5 doesn’t ever disable the touchscreen.

faitswulff2• 18 days ago

That depends on if car was originally made for left-hand or right-hand traffic

I was referring to i.e. Arabic vs English

ProAm• 20 days ago

The author is in a podcast that I classify as Apple apologist. They feel because they have used Apple products for 8+ years the world should bend to their knee. And anytime new non-apple tech comes up on the podcast they do not give any opportunity to acclimate to new tech, because they drink the apple kool-aid. Which is fine, but just admit some products are not for you then if you want the Apple ecosphere, where they dont respect their customers, their developers or their partners.

outside12342• 20 days ago

I am also in this camp. As soon as GM announced they weren’t going to support CarPlay, I scratched GM off of the list.

Ford Mach E it was then.

bluGill11• 20 days ago

I thought I would be okay and bought a GM. I regret it because of the lack of android auto.

al_borland8• 20 days ago

I hope you made your dissatisfaction known. Otherwise I’m sure they see your purchase as a success, validating your decision. Make sure they know you’ll never by another GM car.

Der_Einzige3• 20 days ago

GM objectively makes the best American cars and it's not even close, even despite this.

C8 corvette has been car of the year since 2020 and will remain that way until the C9.

outside12342• 19 days ago

I agree, I want one. But not without CarPlay. Ford it is until then.

stego-tech• 20 days ago

I’m with OP, here: CarPlay is additive to the experience, but also is something that provides me a degree of consistency across my automotive experiences - when vendors bother to implement it properly.

I have an old Honda Fit that I installed one of Pioneer’s “app radio” units into, which included replacing the dash facia. I use CarPlay on it almost exclusively, but if I want Pioneer’s incredibly mediocre UI/UX, it’s a single button-tap away - either on the left side of the radio via a capacitance button, or on the first page of CarPlay’s app icons.

When I rented a car to drive to visit family, it had CarPlay. The infotainment experience was familiar, so I could focus more on the road ahead instead of fussing with some newfangled vendor-specific infotainment shitshow.

When I rented Nissan in Canada, it too had CarPlay - but with a nasty bug where using voice commands or making a call would crash the whole unit. I figured out very quickly not to do that, and the rest of CarPlay worked a treat for the trip - a far cry better from Nissan’s UI/UX.

This is why I didn’t hop on board infotainment systems until CarPlay and Android Auto were mature options, opting to stick with my phone over USB for audio/iPod controls instead: none of the major manufacturers except maybe Panasonic actually give a shit about the UI/UX. They don’t build intuitive systems that can be operated without looking, and they scoop up far too much superfluous data to enable simple features. I refuse to buy the vehicle maker excuse of “superior experience” anymore when time after time, the reality is these car companies think the infotainment data is some sort of goldmine of revenue and letting Apple or Google have any say over the experience is tantamount to leaving money on the table.

If I cannot have CarPlay, and your EV or vehicle won’t let me swap the infotainment unit for an aftermarket one that does, then I am not buying your fucking spyware on wheels. I don’t think anyone else should tolerate that bullshit either, especially on what averages to be a $70k+ purchase nowadays.

jesterson• 20 days ago

Quite interesting, particularly with statistics shared in comments. Personally I hate CarPlay because of it's limitations - oh you can't respond to messages, oh you can't watch videos and sorts. Much easier to have a tablet there free of these "safety" limitations.

alex00152• 20 days ago

It's a strange feeling reading these comments because not only have I never used carplay or android auto, I don't think I've ever noticed anyone else using it in a car someone's driven me in. Everyone I know just has their phone in a dash mount. I don't think it's that small a sample size either! I drive a 2014 Accord and it auto connects to my android with Bluetooth when I turn on the car. It's hard to really imagine the experience of maps or music being improved by seeing it on my dashboard screen compared to right next to it on the phone.

I imagine everyone who is fully involved with the carplay ecosystem feels equally as strongly in the other direction and has for a long time.

qmarchi• 20 days ago

CarPlay and Android Auto only really started seeing adoption in post 2017 Model Year vehicles.

Anyone I know that has one, will immediately either plugin or connect whenever they go live.

There's other benefits like (in the aforementioned article), CarPlay Ultra being able to send data to multiple screens like the front dash. Where having my directions right next to me speed means I don't have to check two screens.

alex00152• 19 days ago

Oh, that's really cool. For about two years the car I drove and the phone I had lined up such that I could kind of wedge it in the front dash next to the speedometer, and that was for sure a better location than the dash mount I have now. I'd forgotten about that.

Ancapistani• 20 days ago

I’m not a huge fan of it, but I do find it more convenient than BlueTooth alone.

For context, I drive a ‘91 GMC pickup, so neither cars nor car audio are super important to me. I still bought a CarPlay-enabled Android head unit because it’s less of a hassle to use.

fluidcruft2• 20 days ago

I use Android Auto a lot when traveling in rental cars. The alternative is annoying. With Android Auto, I at least know how to navigate and play audio with minimal effort. Otherwise I just use my phone and in a rental I typically don't have a mount so it's annoying because my phone discovers new and unexpected places to hide. First world problems, I know.

wvenable5• 20 days ago

I only got a car with Carplay this year... before that, phone in a dash mount.

But just getting into you car and having it project your phone interface instantly from your pocket on a screen that is part of the car is really nice. I don't even have a super large screen (10.5 inches, widescreen) but it's significantly better than looking at my phone. It even integrates with the heads up display.

It's hard to really imagine the experience of maps or music being improved by seeing it on my dashboard screen compared to right next to it on the phone.

It might be hard to imagine but it shouldn't be. I would find it very hard to go back to fiddling with my phone rather than have it nicely integrated into all the buttons and dials on my car. Never taking my phone out of my pocket and forgetting it in the car -- I did that a lot. The audio integration across the radio, phone apps, and navigation is perfect -- Bluetooth doesn't come close and was always a frustration. It's just better in every way, that's why people like it.

Telaneo33• 20 days ago

I drive a 2014 Accord and it auto connects to my android with Bluetooth when I turn on the car. It's hard to really imagine the experience of maps or music being improved by seeing it on my dashboard screen compared to right next to it on the phone.

How about instead of your phone? You don't need your phone dash mount if you have Carplay.

hparadiz4• 20 days ago

I personally only need the map up sometimes so I find the whole thing kind of patronizing. The last time I tried it I didn't like that I couldn't switch between different music apps without exiting the entire system. Maybe it's different now but I'm pretty content not using it. Also the Carplay / Android port on my car is old and doesn't support fast charging.

wxw• 20 days ago

CarPlay is great. Generally much better than the interface offered by traditional manufacturers.

But Tesla and Rivian both have excellent UIs. I don’t find myself missing CarPlay in a Tesla.

oaiey• 20 days ago

The amount of confusive naming of CarPlay vs CarPlay Ultra and Android Auto vs Android Automotive brings into this conversation is amazing.

slashdave• 20 days ago

Rivian sees Apple (CarPlay) as competition. So what is surprising?

InTheArena• 20 days ago

The interesting thing is that there is a lot of evidence that Tesla is about to embed Carplay. Rivian has taken over the privileged insanely expensive EV car market, as the Model Y is the closest thing to the old Honda/Toyota dominance, just in the EV space.

bombcar7• 20 days ago

Tesla at least somewhat busted ass in the whole "iPad screen in the car" movement, and CarPlay was more invasive in some ways then than it is now.

earth-tattoo• 20 days ago

Slightly off topic. Is it just me, or do others also feel it's horrendously difficult to read these AI written articles?

IgorPartola3• 20 days ago

I am clearly in the minority here but I have driven cars with and without CarPlay and honestly do not care whether a car has it. I use my phone for navigation and mount it such that when I look at it I am not taking my eyes off the road. I find this to be far better than having to look down at the center of my dashboard but CarPlay navigation UI via Google Maps or Waze also works fine so it’s not a huge difference.

Realistically the only navigation UI have seen that was better was a 2012 or 2013 BMW 5 series which had a HUD that projected my location, speed, heading and turn by turn navigation (with lane info!) onto the windshield. That system rocked because of how the projected UI had your eyes focus farther out so you had a very easy time perceiving the road ahead while getting the next direction info.

I assume my next car will have it and I might even upgrade the radio in my current car to have it but it is to me entirely optional.

ipdashc• 20 days ago

I am clearly in the minority here but I have driven cars with and without CarPlay and honestly do not care whether a car has it.

I'm in the same boat, though with Android Auto or whatever. I'm honestly surprised how many people seem to need CarPlay; a comment or two down there's a stat claiming 79% of buyers wouldn't buy a car without it. Is it that different from the Android implementation? Is there something special about it?

I don't get it. It's a nice to have for sure, but honestly not that special, and gets annoying at times (when Android Auto connects on my phone, it tends to stop me from using the maps app on the phone, plus a few other minor grievances). And it's not much easier than just plugging in an aux cord.

shawabawa3• 20 days ago

I'm one of the people that wouldn't buy a card without android auto and carplay support

Car UIs are just universally awful. Even if somehow you find one with a decent UI, it will never get updated and within 5 years it will suck

KingMachiavelli• 20 days ago

In some states you no longer can interact with a phone at all unless mounted. Phone mounts kind of suck or you’ll be in a rental without your nice mount. A 15” screen is easier to read than a small phone bouncing on a mount.

If I’m spending $10K on something, I want the Android/iOS experience to be first-class instead of some shitty UI designed be people who I presume don’t drive cars.

Cars are otherwise fungible between brands. If one has CarPlay/Android Auto there is little reason to pick a brand that lacks support.

yoavm• 20 days ago

I use Android and having Android Auto is absolutely a must have for me.

AUX cord? It's been a few years since I've seen a phone with a headphone jack, or a car with an AUX input. I also don't miss the time where my phone had to be connected on one side to USB for charging, on the other side to the sounds system, and my navigation was done using a a 6" screen that kept falling between the chairs. Android Auto/CarPlay let's you connect one thing (or not at all), have your phone charged, your navigation clear, and your music playing smoothly and controlled with the physical car knobs.

geocar3• 20 days ago

CarPlay is better than android auto in that it works with my iPhone; as to why it is currently in _my_ requirements, it’s simple: I rent cars when I travel, I’m too lazy to memorise so many maps, and I don’t have a good mount I can bring with me.

That being said I think there are a few things that make my carplay experience _worse_ than my friends’ android auto experience: for example today I am annoyed by google maps spam me with notifications trying to get me to use googles maps instead of waze which is so fucking stupid since it’s also google and it just makes me more annoyed with google instead of being the sort of thing that would convince me to switch to android. But I have to admit the google maps and waze integration on android is better.

ExoticPearTree4• 20 days ago

Is it that different from the Android implementation? Is there something special about it?

It just works and it is, like others before me said, consistent. I can connect my iPhone to any car I drive that has CatPlay and the dashboard looks like I like it. And Spotify starts right from where it left off in the other car.

Can't speak for the Android experience.

square_usual• 19 days ago

when Android Auto connects on my phone, it tends to stop me from using the maps app on the phone

This is on Google Maps. Nothing about Auto/CarPlay prevents this. Google just chose to do this.

artisinal10• 20 days ago

I use CarPlay as an extended screen but still do everything on my phone that is mounted on the dashboard. Works good for me.

namdnay• 20 days ago

having to look down at the center of my dashboard

that's why more recent models move the screen higher up. it sometimes looks a bit silly (like they glued an ipad on top of the dashboard), but it's a lot more usable

HUD that projected my location, speed, heading and turn by turn navigation (with lane info!) onto the windshield

the latest carplay implementations are compatible with the inbuilt navigation aids, so turn signals from waze/maps/whatever will feed into the HUD

cmovq• 20 days ago

I wish everyone would just have an option to see the navigation the the gauge cluster.

mschuster912• 20 days ago

it sometimes looks a bit silly (like they glued an ipad on top of the dashboard), but it's a lot more usable

... until there's some child walking right into that visual "dead space".

felixg3• 20 days ago

It works with Apple Maps and Google Maps, Waze doesn’t pass this information to the car.

nutjob2• 20 days ago

that's why more recent models move the screen higher up.

That's far from optimal, that would be where I have my phone, at eye level just to the left of my head, right in front of the pillar. It's perfect in every way, especially since I'm longsighted.

Slate has the right idea, car makers should get out of the user software/interface business and prioritize choice. The instrument cluster is fine, as are basic controls, but they just tend to screw things up and add complexity.

geocar3• 20 days ago

Having my phone mounted is fine but it’s been hard for me to find a good mount that works with random rental car I get. Any suggestions?

I don’t hate carplay but some things annoy me like I can’t Shazam what I’m listening to in the car because CarPlay pauses the cars audio. I would be willing to try to make it optional until CarPlay works better.

xxs2• 20 days ago

that works with random rental car I get. Any suggestions?

Clip based ones, worst case you can mount them on the aircon vents. They are not great in general but they are cheap and you can fit them pretty much anywhere

IgorPartola3• 18 days ago

I ride motorcycles so I use Quad Lock. It’s an expensive ecosystem and you must use their specific case but it works incredibly well and has every kind of mount and various extenders that let you modify it to be just right.

iainmerrick• 20 days ago

How do you mount your phone in a rental car? Do you bring your own phone holder with you?

cromka5• 20 days ago

You pay 50 USD extra for the holder, duh!

benhurmarcel• 20 days ago

When I plan to use a rental car I usually pack a phone holder that fits on air vents. You never know if you’ll be able to connect your phone to the car so that’s a small backup.

King-Aaron• 20 days ago

I'm going to jump in and say I mostly agree.

It's no big issue for me one way or another to have a car with the technology from factory, and I do like having the wireless connectivity - music from the phone etc is really nice - but visual maps and visual UI add no value to me personally.

The setup I have for my project car is ideal for me - a small bluetooth receiving amplifier that feeds the speakers directly. It's all hidden behind the dash, has no visible UI, but I get in the car and the phone takes over, it's in a cradle and becomes the head unit.

I never need to see a map on screen (Maybe because I grew up doing orienteering, or can just listen to the verbal directions, I'm not sure) so that doesn't bother me. And siri can handle hands-off interaction with the device when needed.

I did upgrade the head unit in my family/daily car to support carplay etc, but the primary motivator there was finding a unit that could support a reversing camera. It certainly made the interior feel more modern, but again I don't think it adds much value to me personally.

pipe2devnull• 20 days ago

When I put in directions on my phone it gives me turn by turn directions in the gauge cluster so I don’t have to look at the center screen as often

glitchc• 20 days ago

I love how people are pushing for Android Auto and CarPlay on the basis of consistency and ubiquity and control, yet fail to realize that their advocacy will reduce what is currently a thriving marketplace filled with unique options to a duopoly.

Once that happens we all know what comes next: enshittification.

Telaneo33• 20 days ago

a thriving marketplace filled with unique options to a duopoly.

If the car infotainment market is what counts as 'thriving' with 'unique options', then I don't want a thriving market, because that's apparently a bad thing. Sure, there are plenty of unique options. Outside of Carplay, Android Auto and Tesla (and maybe a few other very recent models), they're all shit.

I don't want hundreds of bad options. I want one (at least, more is preferable) good option.

addozhang• 20 days ago

If the cainfotainment system is good enough, I don't use CarPlay - at most I just connect Bluetooth to make calls.

The reason CarPlay and Android Auto exist is that car infotainment systems used to suck.

Telaneo33• 20 days ago

They still suck (modulo Tesla and maybe a few other very recent models).

bdavbdav6• 20 days ago

I use CarPlay all the time in my car and love it.

I rent quite a lot of cars. I’d rather CarPlay was taken from my car and left in all the rental cars than the other way around.

The car manufacturers are awful with their interface design, and being able to get into a new car at 9pm in the dark, and have a familiar interface while navigating some unknown city is invaluable. Consistency is safety and comfort in this situation.

shermantanktop2• 20 days ago

This is familiar to me from an adjacent industry…smart TVs. The reason Samsung, LG, et al develop their own UIs is not because they are good at it. It’s because if they give up and let their device become a dumb host for apps, they lose their relationships with customers (i.e. ad revenue) and accelerate their race to the bottom as commodity hardware vendors.

Customers don’t want this stuff. They want to launch Netflix or Prime Video or Disney and watch. But the premium hardware brands need to fight to stay alive, and giving customers what they want is a death sentence.

someonebaggy• 20 days ago

Are there really no customers who want the TV to have Netflix built in? At a streaming company I worked at, we put quite a lot of effort into working around all the smart TV firmware quirks so that you didn't need to buy a separate box if you had a supported TV.

bombcar7• 20 days ago

A surprisingly large number of customers DO want the smart TV to "just work" and play their Netflix.

Like car infotainment, they figure out how to use it, bitch about it, and some connect an Apple device and use that instead.

shermantanktop2• 19 days ago

Yes, they want the Netflix app to run on the tv. What they don’t want is Samsung’s “launcher” app which tries to create personalized recommendations, direct the customer to some other service that signed a deal with Samsung, and try to jump in and collect the user’s credit card to bill on their behalf.

voidUpdate• 20 days ago

Just give me a head unit with an aux in and a cd player and I'll be happy

stevoski2• 20 days ago

I have a chapter in my book Kill the HiPPO titled “Cupholders vs CarPlay”.

The premise of the chapter is that some features in software are like CarPlay when looking for a new car - they become an important must-have for the buying decision - as opposed to “cupholder” features, those features which are a mere minor improvement for existing users.

https://killthehippo.com/

senordevnyc2• 20 days ago

Congrats on writing a book, big accomplishment!

I'm confused about the cupholder example though: I'd MUCH rather skip CarPlay (which I love) than cupholders in a car, but I wouldn't shop for a car based on whether it has cupholders because surely they all do, right? It seems like shopping based on whether the car has A/C or something.

stevoski2• 19 days ago

Congrats on writing a book, big accomplishment!

Thank you!

The point is that you must make sure your product has the “CarPlay” type of features in order to get new customers for whom those features are must-haves.

Beware of spending your time only on adding new “cupholder” style features, which make existing customers slightly happier but don’t attract new customers.

Especially be aware that when you launched your product X years ago, some of today’s “CarPlay”-style features didn’t even exist. Your current customers are not asking for them, because they are mostly happy with your product as it is.

If you only listen to what existing customers are asking for, you might not even realise that these new “CarPlay” features are stopping you from getting certain new customers.

Groxx• 20 days ago

Every time I've used CarPlay or Android Auto, I just remember how much better the experience was with a tablet velcro'd over the main display. Immediately obviously better in every single way, and dramatically cheaper and easier to replace if desired.

I get the goal, and I'm glad there's at least some semblance of a standard. But it's still bad.

rootsudo• 20 days ago

Wonder how GM is doing it

63stack• 20 days ago

The challenge with screen mirroring solutions is that they take over every single pixel in the car, and that’s not the way we see ourselves interacting with our users.

Wassym Bensaid sounds like an incompetent person to be a chief software officer working on cars if he does not understand this is not how carplay works. It's either this, or he's just weaseling out of saying "we want to capture all our users data, and we want to put in rent seeking subscriptions into our cars, which is going to be hard if we enable carplay".

Do not buy cars from companies like this.

physhster2• 20 days ago

At this point it's very easy: no CarPlay, no buy. So no Tesla (obv), no Rivian.

mattrighetti• 20 days ago

Opinionated, but Tesla's interface seems better than any CarPlay?

The thing with CarPlay that I hate the most is that it is laggy. I have it on a Series 5 BMW and Spotify has a delay of at least 4s when you select a song and when it actually starts playing. Same thing when you rapidly skip tracks - the interface changes but the speakers (or any other non-CarPlay interface) can't really keep up. It really is a joke, especially on that kind of vehicle.

Telaneo33• 20 days ago

Yikes. That doesn't sound right. It works fine in my Kia, so this sounds like BMW's implementation is really bad (how did they even do that‽).

physhster2• 16 days ago

Sounds like Wireless CarPlay lag. I've experienced it a few times. They should really fix it. Wired CarPlay is great!

benrutter3• 20 days ago

There's so many comments on the lines of "I would never buy a car without android auto/car play support". I 100% used to be on this camp, "A car without android auto, what am I, a caveman!?".

Anyway, separately to anything car related, I got fed up of some of google's treatment of android and switched to Murena's /e/os which is a de-googled spin of android. It doesn't support android auto, and that held me back from switching for ages.

Long story short, I don't miss android auto at all. Bluetooth is absolutely fine for playing media from my phone etc.

(my car does already have functionality like google maps built in though, so I might feel differently if it didn't)

Telaneo33• 20 days ago

(my car does already have functionality like google maps built in though, so I might feel differently if it didn't)

See if you care in 5 years when the maps are out of date.

benrutter3• 19 days ago

No, I meant literally the car has google maps built in - it's an up to date android app.

linzhangrun6• 20 days ago

For pure interaction, CarPlay as a generic solution is very hard to beat infotainment systems that are deeply integrated with the vehicle itself. Its advantages are mainly these:

- Consistency. You get into a new car, all you need to figure out is how to open CarPlay, no need to learning a completely different and often complicated infotainment system.

- "It's on your phone". You can decide what playlist to play or where to navigate before you even get into the car.

- Stays up to date over the long term. Just look at cars from five years ago. Most built-in infotainment systems are still stuck in that era, no matter how smart they once looked. CarPlay uses your phone as the main computing platform, and the car's infotainment system only needs to act as a thin client for I/O, it keeps updating with iOS.

brookst4• 20 days ago

You missed the biggest one: continuity. Start listening to music at home, take it to the car. Start a podcast in the car, finish it in the gym.

CarPlay is user-centric, which is why users like it. All these attempts to force people into a device-centric experience make no sense. I spent an hour or two a day, at most, in my car. My phone is within Bluetooth distance every waking moment. Why in the world would I want my car to be a disjointed experience?

Mashimo2• 20 days ago

You missed the biggest one: continuity. Start listening to music at home, take it to the car. Start a podcast in the car, finish it in the gym.

That would still work, as you can use Bluetooth.

IanCal2• 20 days ago

I think this is in the same vein as continuity and user centric and what you were describing but it’s a different part - more than one person drives my car. I want my things and my wife wants hers. Having accounts or something extra on a new shared device is annoying.

linzhangrun6• 20 days ago

That's right, my 2 point wasn't complete enough

darkwater• 20 days ago

That can be achieved if you are app-centric as well (i.e. Spotify app in al lthe places), but your point still stand nonetheless.

zelos• 20 days ago

Locations as well. Carplay picks up locations from calendar appointments, messages etc, so very often you just plug it in and click "Go".

mlrtime2• 20 days ago

That still works with apps though. Spotify app in a car would do the same thing.

But I get the point.

ninkendo• 19 days ago

To continue your point, one use case where I’m always glad I have CarPlay is when I searched for the hours of some business on my phone via Maps, then seeing they’re still open, get in my car, and the same business’s address is pre-loaded on the CarPlay maps screen ready for me to tap “go”. Ditto any Calendar event that’s coming up where I have the location field already filled in. Just tap Go.

My car’s integrated nav is… fine. But having to re-enter addresses drops the convenience considerably.

0x4575• 19 days ago

You picked a bad example. You get any music/podcast/any-other-audio continuity with just Bluetooth. Likewise, you even get controls for music and audio metadata displayed.

What you don't (usually) get from car's regular infotainment:

- Maps that don't suck

- Maps that get updated often

- Navigation that is aware of more than just what HD Radio tells about highways

- Helpful notification when you get into the car that starts navigating to whatever is next on your calendar

- A choice between what navigation software to use

- Ability to switch between audio sources (i.e. go from audiobook to spotify)

IMO Android Auto and CarPlay generally implemented pretty poorly in pretty much anything, but Mazda.

IanCal2• 20 days ago

Also speed and connectivity. My car needs a screen and some low power chips. It’s ten years old and the maps and everything are snappy (low quality touch screen aside, but that’s not too bad) because it’s all running on my nice fast device I already own that’s much newer than the car.

linzhangrun6• 20 days ago

That is what my 3 point covers: the in-vehicle system is just a thin client handling I/O :)

rkangel2• 20 days ago

The big thing for me is that the lifetime of a car is a lot longer than the technology development lifecycle.

I just bought a 10 year old Toyota estate (station wagon). It's got a reasonable screen and Bluetooth implementation etc. But I'm never going to want to use the built in navigation because it's just not as good as what my phone will do. And the audio integration isn't as sophisticated as it might be - I have to choose the app on my phone.

Whereas CarPlay/AndroidAuto is generic from the car point of view, and as phone features and software improve your car capability evolves too.

titanomachy• 20 days ago

I’m sure the car manufacturers would much prefer if you updated your car as often as you do your phone.

maxdo4• 19 days ago

Well, not every car brand suck at that. My 6 y.o tesla still delivers me updates, and new features.

darrylb42• 19 days ago

I added a new head unit to my 13 year old Santa Fe, it is like a new car now, wireless Android Auto. Connects quick, bigger nicer screen. Should allow me to keep the car for another 10 years assuming I don't blow up another engine, only the first one is free.

doxeddaily• 19 days ago

This is a good point. It's a form of future proofing. Hopefully Apple doesn't drop the ball too hard on backward compatibility.

For me I just want a set of consistent things from car to car. I have a few different vehicles I might switch between on any given day. Carplay works in all of them.

dlcarrier2• 20 days ago

I think that last one is a negative. I remember where the controls are in any given car, and would rather all of the controls in that care stay in the same place, even if that car is a decade old. Learning a different radio interface in each car isn't a big deal, because there's many more much more dramatic differences from car to car, so I have to learn that car anyway.

sedawkgrep2• 20 days ago

Auto manufacturers aren’t likely to provide updates over the long term.

Imagine if your ten year old car hasn’t seen an infotainment update in four+ years. Or if you want to buy used.

Personally I’d much prefer my phone. It’s baked into Apple/Google ‘s business model to keep it up to date.

Also I only need my phone’s subscription, not an additional one with the auto manufacturer.

alerighi• 20 days ago

I appreciate my 2011 vehicle that only has a car radio with FM tuner and CDs, and yes, I know that I could easily swap it but I didn't on purpose, let me explain why:

- all the controls that I need, that are basically volume, radio station or CD track, are easily accessible trough physical buttons and knobs, that I can use without taking my eyes off the street

- I get in the car, insert the key and the radio turns on instantly and start playing music, no things that have to boot, no things that have to connect, etc. I usually listen to the radio and I stay up to date with news, listen to programs, listen to music without the need to create a playlist, or not and always listen to the same songs, or worse paying a subscription to just listen to music

- if I want to listen something different I can just put in a CD, and considering it supports mp3 CDs a CD can contain up to 100 songs without a noticeable loss in quality

- the UI of the radio in general is well designed, no useless functions, everything is easy to reach, no distractions. The radio is well integrated into the car dashboard, the design has something to say, not like a boring 10' tablet

- no distractions, notifications from my phone stay on my phone, calls don't pop up, simply when I arrive at destination I recall saying I was driving, or respond to the message

- finally, the sound quality is good, much better than most of integrated infotainment in modern cars that have 2000 useless functions, a shitty touchscreen, and a very poor sound quality. If I turn the volume all way up it shakes the car, the quality of analog FM radio is much better than modern digital radio that have the quality of a low bitrate MP3, and we are talking about the stock radio of a VW Golf 6, a normal car (when I bought it in 2011), not something fancy.

MikeDods• 20 days ago

who asked?

RealityVoid2• 20 days ago

On the other hand, you are limited by having CD's which compared to streaming stuff from Spotify is much much less convenient, take up space and you need to create/buy them, your playlist don't synch up with your other devices. CD experience is much less streamlined than a smartphone. Perhaps nostalgia makes them seem cooler for you, but I am not sold.

skydhash3• 20 days ago

the radio turns on instantly and start playing music, no things that have to boot

Currently my bane with the smart TV I have. Takes so long to boot and to wake from sleep that I’d press the power button, go to make my coffee and then get back to it. Otherwise I’d be halfway through my breakfast when all I wanted to do is watch a few videos on Youtube.

kenjackson2• 20 days ago

Your use case sounds like exactly the opposite of what I’d prefer.

And, I personally find the quality of YouTube Music Premium (256kbps AAC) superior to FM radio.

lilhenry• 19 days ago

I’m in a similar situation, my car does have Bluetooth, but I mostly use cd’s and radio, the one thing I wish I had was a map in a convenient spot, I have to have my phone set up in some awkward holder to view it, I’m dependent on using the maps app on my phone

zeeZ• 20 days ago

Consistency would be nice. YT music on Android Auto moved the buttons around again recently. You can still see where the thumbs up button used to be from my fingerprints. It's not smaller and on the other side.

makeitdouble• 20 days ago

To voice an alternative that isn't touched much in this discussion:

- "It's on your phone"

Straight use your phone.

There is no need for the car to adapt, no updates, no back deal by the car manufacturer, nothing is tied to the car except Bluetooth.

Current screens are IMHO big enough, moving to a tablet or foldables is also an option

Mounting/unmounting is a solved problem since magsafe (or Peak Design like stronger updates), which also handles charging.

Voice commands will be enough for most operations and you're guaranteed to have physical buttons for volume up/down and screen off.

You're also 100% efficient with the interface.

rafram• 20 days ago

CarPlay enables a car-friendly interface with big buttons, shortcuts to navigation/music/communication, and minimal distractions. I don’t know of any way to get that on the phone’s own display.

lan321• 20 days ago

I do that on the bike but the car screen integration is nice for navigation. Usually your phone goes in a worse position than the gauge cluster. Even on the bike, the couple cm farther down are the difference between looking down and it being in peripheral vision. The passenger can also fuck around with the music without changing connected phone or giving them the phone itself. And playing around with the phone directly is illegal while the tablet is fine (for me very minor, never been caught).

RHSeeger• 19 days ago

Literally everything you said is not true for me

- My phone's screen is nowhere near big enough for me to "glance" at it while driving (to see if my turn is coming up, etc)

- I'm not carrying around a tablet with me - my phone fits in my pocket

- Mounting is _not_ a solved problem. It just... isn't. This is a whole topic on it's own, but mounting a phone in a good position, where it will stay without moving/falling/bugging (especially in 100+ degree heat) and not be in the way of _other_ car things is a pain

- I already have physical buttons (that interact with car play, where needed) for all those things in my car

- Interacting with the screen of my phone while driving is 100% not something I'm proficient with; nor would I want to be. It's not designed for interacting with it while not paying attention to it. CarPlay is

thek3nger• 20 days ago

Another advantage of the "it's on your phone" aspect is that it follows you when you switch cars. If I use my friend's car, I still have MY system. If I rent a car for a trip, I still have MY system.

dataengineer56• 20 days ago

Another advantage of the "it's on your phone" aspect is Consistency. You get into a new car, all you need to figure out is how to open CarPlay, no need to learning a completely different and often complicated infotainment system.

bheadmaster• 20 days ago

I can get the same thing with an aux cable

jon-wood• 20 days ago

No. No you can't. The specific example of preparing a playlist sure, but Carplay goes way beyond that. You can preload the navigation route, tweak it a bit, then when you sit down and plug your phone into the car its on the navigation screen. You can make phone calls using the microphones in the car. In a sufficiently integrated car you can have turn by turn directions pop up on the dashboard or a heads up display rather than having to look down into the center console while trying to work out which lane you should be in.

DriverDaily• 19 days ago

Aux cables were ubiquitous when cars were rolling speakers. I wouldn’t buy a car without an aux input, I didn’t care how many cds it could hold.

Now that cars are rolling screens, I wouldn’t buy a car without screen mirroring for the same reason.

thih9• 19 days ago

“Stays up to date over the long term” is in the “cons” list in my book - I’d prefer to have as few changes and rely on muscle memory as much as possible; and I find updates risky in this context.

I don’t mind a built in infotainment system stuck in a previous era, as long as it works.

xp8414• 19 days ago

Just wanting to point out that yours is a valid preference, but as Casey points out: Go right ahead and don’t use CarPlay. No one has ever been forced to use it on any car because it’s optional. If you want to plug an iPhone in for music or charging, you can tap “No” to CarPlay once and never be asked again.

rjrjrjrj2• 19 days ago

I'd definitely mind being be stuck in the previous era of maps/driving directions.

s3p• 19 days ago

For pure interaction, CarPlay as a generic solution is very hard to beat infotainment systems that are deeply integrated with the vehicle itself

I can't find one instance of a car UI being as good or easier to interact with than CarPlay.

dreamcompiler• 19 days ago

The Tesla UI is pretty good. It's the only built-in car software I consider good enough to use for navigation. In any other car I use my phone.

But Tesla also understands that good software engineers need to be paid Silicon Valley wages. The other car companies hire B- and C-level software engineers and then wonder why their customers prefer to navigate with their phones.

josefresco3• 19 days ago

My daughter's very ordinary 10+ year old Kia Soul has a very nice navigation and media UI. It's not the base model but it's a joy to use because it's incredibly responsive and very well integrated with the car's physical buttons. The SiriusXM radio even has a built-in DAR!

owlbite• 19 days ago

I'm still astounded my Ford's infotainment system takes 5-10 seconds after opening the radio "app" to present me with the station selection UI. Most of that seems to be some sort of startup delay. The mind boggles.

josefresco3• 19 days ago

I'm frankly amazed at the speed at which the Ford and Chevy native UIs will take over from CarPlay for functions like reverse camera, lane camera etc. You'd expect some delay/lag but it's pretty responsive which obviously is essential for safety.

duxup• 19 days ago

Agreed, my car is a tool for going places, consistency is a big attraction and I’ve zero interest in some new UI with every vehicle or vehicle software update.

Sure I would like the vehicle to have some style but trying to navigate with maps or something I want it to work / look consistently.

nlawalker• 19 days ago

Honest question, what are the advantages of an integrated system? These three things are kind of the whole game for me, but I also don't have a very sophisticated taste when it comes to cars.

linzhangrun6• 18 days ago

1. Native car OS can be deeply integrated with the car's own design, both UI and physical controls. eg.

- Nio Firefly and the Smart # series are good examples where the UI is strongly tied to the exterior/interior design language.

-Xiaomi car system is not only connected with the phone, but also with a whole set of Xiaomi smart home devices, from PCs and TVs to robot vacuums, light bulbs and smart plugs and so much more. They literally made almost all the home appliances, which all can connected with the car.

2. More importantly, it can access lower-level vehicle information and control. For example, different navigation routes can influence different driving styles, and even the basic LLM voice assistant can actually control parts of the car.

Some examples from the biggest Chinese EV makers, all with at least hundreds of thousands of annual sales:

- Nio can use road data collected by previous cars to predict bumps and adjust the active suspension in advance: https://www.nio.cn/app-articles/532868

  It can also navigate to a battery swap station, automatically book the swap, and then use assisted driving / automated parking to complete most of the process:
  https://www.nio.cn/app-articles/527488

- Li Auto can use the car itself as a physical feedback device when playing games on the in-car screen. For example in a racing game, it can combine the by-wire chassis and active suspension to tilt the body and give a real 4D feeling.Setting aside who really plays racing games this way, but it is basically using the whole car as an expensive moving racing simulator: https://www.lixiang.com/news/159.html

- AITO(Huawei) cars can link the cabin environment with current air quality, sunlight and other sensor data, then automatically adjust the AC, air purifier, electric sunshade and so on: https://aito.auto/model/m9-new/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

And many more.

Chinese EV makers are doing software in a very deep and sometimes strange way. Compared with them, even Tesla feels very simple and crude.

BatteryMountain• 19 days ago

But how will they surveil you if you bring your own device...

jebarker2• 20 days ago

As an R1S owner I feel like the elephant in the room is that the Rivian developed infotainment software is just not very good. For example, the Spotify app has weird scrolling issues and the interface for offline downloads is clunky and unreliable. The maps/route planning is fine but not really any better than Apple/Google Maps (or ABRP). So I find it hard to give much credit to their argument against CarPlay when they’re not providing a better experience via their native apps.

aswegs8• 20 days ago

In the end they treat a podcast like this as PR. "We're great". Elaborate rationalizations of their decisions.

fsniper• 20 days ago

Car manufacturer build infotainment never is.

HolyLampshade2• 20 days ago

One of those silly little issues with inbuilt software that drives me insane is the number of times I’ve had to log back into Apple Music or Spotify (or one of the video services to occupy the kiddo while parked for extended duration).

That’s another one that phones have just solved with the integrated password manager. The friction of providing credentials on my other devices has been reduced, but all of a sudden I need to go hunting through that pwd manager, and hunting and pecking on the infotainment keyboard, to enter a 20+ char unique pwd that modern “best practices” has established. It got bad enough for a bit (swver changes resulting in needing to re-log in) that I stopped using all of these apps for 2-3yr on our Model Y because I got tired of having to do it.

neogodless5• 19 days ago

How well does Pandora work for music?

jebarker2• 19 days ago

As far as I’m aware there is no native Pandora app, just TuneIn for internet radio. Do for Pandora you’d have to stream from a phone via Bluetooth.

qsxfthnkp23223• 19 days ago

It’s interesting one of the most sold accessories for a rivian vehicle is a phone mount that goes next to the huge main center screen.

I completely agree with you

afandian3• 20 days ago

Am I the only person who hates plugging their iPhone into their car to charge and completely losing control of it?

When I plug it into the USB socket, my Peugeot 207 starts playing a random podcast track on my phone. No way of stopping it. If I stop it, it starts again. I can't select a different audio output, e.g. the phone speaker. There are plenty of people complaining about this on the forums.

Yes, it's a bug in either the iPhone or the car. Yes the bug shouldn't be there, but it is. I should be able to disable it.

I'm in the habit of bringing a spare battery with me so I can use phone sat-nav.

Telaneo33• 20 days ago

Your car is broken, and was apparently sold as such. I'd return the car for that, or just never buy it in the first place if I noticed it during research or a test drive.

afandian3• 20 days ago

It's a quite old, third-hand car. But there are plenty of people reporting the same thing.

But why can't my iPhone let me set permissions for the thing I plug it into? It's unreasonable to prevent me from changing the audio output.

Examples:

- https://www.peugeotforums.com/threads/mp3-ipod-random-play-p...

- https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254051162?sortBy=rank

camgunz• 20 days ago

Car manufacturers don't want this because it gives Apple/Google leverage over their products. The alternative is some kind of open standard, but that undercuts the ability of manufacturers to hard fuck you on trim options.

One of the more irritating parts of late stage capitalism is the complete inability of its scions (CEOs, etc.) to say any of this. The gaslighting is insufferable.

kleiba22• 20 days ago

And here I am, ideally not wanting any screen in my car, but just the good ole buttons and knobs of yesteryear... sigh...

Telaneo33• 20 days ago

You can have a screen and buttons. If anything, a rear view camera is really useful, and you kind of have to have a screen for that to be of any use.

kleiba22• 19 days ago

True, everything is better than a pure touchscreen cockpit.

prmoustache• 20 days ago

Why do people want so much to be distracted from and while driving? Is there still a single responsible driver left on the road?

trashb• 20 days ago

but what do people actually use carplay for? Navigation, music and calls?

I suspect that 90% of the people that "need" carplay are actually just using it as a bluetooth speaker and would be fine with a good phoneholder and bluetooth/aux connection.

I always feel strange connecting to someone else their carlpay or to a rental car.

Telaneo33• 20 days ago

just using it as a bluetooth speaker and would be fine with a good phoneholder and bluetooth/aux connection.

Is it unreasonable to have this functionality built in to the car? I can't see any good reasons not to have it from the consumer's point of view. Carplay doesn't even have a licence fee, so it's basically free to implement.

And it's not like there's a shortage of options. Removing the cars that don't have it of your shortlist is an easy way to filter off the options that don't even pretend to respect you as a user.

mystifyingpoi• 19 days ago

I always feel strange connecting to someone else their carlpay or to a rental car.

Honest question, why? It is literally remote desktop + some pipes for audio and screen touches. It's no different than connecting an external touchscreen to a smartphone, lapdock-style.

SilverBirch• 20 days ago

If Rivian’s native UI is so great, then their customers… won’t use CarPlay. It’s that simple.

I kind of disagree with this. Airpods are purely additive, customers can just choose to use different headphones with their iPhone if they want. But they don't want, because Apple lets Airpods interact with the iPhone in a way that other manufacturers can't.

So no, carplay wouldn't be mandatory but it's likely that Apple's leverage will kill their in house offering.

NetMageSCW16• 17 days ago

It’s up to them if they stop working on their in house offering. If it is inferior, people won’t use it. Apple doesn’t have any leverage over what they develop.

pi-victor• 20 days ago

Carplay is a convenient - FREE solution to car infotainment that car makers cannot control. They cannot sell you subscription based services for in-car stuff if you can get that from another app, and that's not in their interest. The CEO here knows well what he's saying is BS. We are lucky if something like Carplay will survive in the car subscription based era. They might charge you for the use of Carplay in the future, or free access to their infotainment that is complemented by subscritions. Car makers sell cars with thin margins so they need to find ways to increase them.

Telaneo33• 20 days ago

I've never seen a normal car infotainment system I liked (at least beyond 'put in a CD, then use next and previous track'), and Carplay is such a massive improvement over that. It's good, it's consistent, it's the same everywhere, it's up to date, it uses data from my phone. There's nothing to not like. The rest of the infotainment system could literally not exist[1] (beyond integrating buttons to actually control Carplay), and I wouldn't care. The car's infotainment system could just be a Carplay runtime and I'd be good.

[1] There are probably some features I'm forgetting that probably count as part of the infotainment, but which Carplay doesn't touch, like AC and battery info and management. The AC in my own car is completely separate from the infotainment system, but that probably doesn't apply to all cars. But even in those cases, it'd be better if integrated into Carplay, or just left out of what's happening on screen, and instead be given seperate manual controls.

jojobas• 20 days ago

It boils down to "who owns the field". Facebook and Apple killed Flash because they wanted control. Rivian is trying to say "we will own the users eyes, their phones be damned".

zaep• 20 days ago

I don't own a car, and I found the article mildly interesting, but I can't get over the sentence

Our last three cars, the eldest of which was from the 2017 model year [...].

Is it common to buy three cars in let's say 10 years? That seems like a large amount of spend (afaik cars depreciate in value rather quick?) and -- barring accidents -- a really short time to have to replace something as sturdy as a car; If I get less than three years out of a phone it feels like a waste and it feels like the main barrier for phone longevity (besides batteries, which are replaceable) is security updates.

IDK, since I don't see any comments on it, it must not be that strange, it just struck me as odd.

_diyar• 20 days ago

I happen to listen to ATP, a tech podcast of which Casey is a co-host.

I believe his family owns 2 cars, but had to replace one of them recently when a pebble caused a freak accident, essentially totaling the engine in one of the cars. Hence 3 cars purchased in 10 years.

Edit: Episode #592, at the very end: https://overcast.fm/+ABQnv4mYCFc/1:40:38

bombcar7• 20 days ago

In the USA at least, you seem to either be in the "buy/lease new, trade in every 3-5 years" camp, or "buy it and drive it until the wheels fall off."

If you do the first, you end up not being out a terrible amount of money, especially these days with the high value of used.

Merad• 19 days ago

The average car in the US is about 13 years old. Just like with phones, some people upgrade every few years even though it's a poor financial decision. Many frugal or less wealthy people only buy used cars and drive them until they die.

degoldman666• 20 days ago

iPod, aux cable, phone holder for maps.

Anything else can wait until I stop.

andai• 20 days ago

Isn't it dangerous and illegal to do stuff on your phone while driving? In this case it's on a bigger screen so it's okay somehow? (I haven't experienced one of these in person though, so I might be missing something.)

tinco• 20 days ago

I don't know how CarPlay is, but Android Auto restricts the apps and app interactions you can do in the Android Auto user interface. On my phone the only apps that show up are google maps, spotify, and my podcast player and my phone interface I think.

Telaneo33• 20 days ago

You can control Carplay the most relevant parts with buttons. Next-previous track, volume, voice commands, probably more I can't think of.

Not to mention that yes, a bigger screen probably is better. Bigger target = easier to hit. The legality can become a lessened problem, depending on jurisdiction. Using your phone while driving is often specifically illegal, but using your car's infotainment system might not be automatically illegal (it might count as distracted driving or whatever, but the threshold of proof is higher).

netsharc2• 20 days ago

For a blog named with a wordplay on "Less is more", this text sure has a loooooot of unncessary bullshit before getting to the point.

slowmotiony2• 20 days ago

Pretty sure it's an ad for theverge subscriptions

21asdffdsa12• 20 days ago

The car industry is currently in the "rodeo" phase that the telcos where in when it came to the internet. Loosing power- and very soon tamed, because the Chinese competition has no such qualms.

senordevnyc2• 20 days ago

I get where the author is coming from, but it seems to me that the core issue here isn't CarPlay, it's that car manufacturers are absolute dogshit at software. Most Tesla owners don't seem that upset about the lack of CarPlay, I'm assuming because the native Tesla experience is really good. I'm not sure people would care as much if that were the case more often.

And cars are increasingly a software-bound experience that CarPlay can only get you out of so far. I have a Volvo XC40 EV, and even though it's a decent car and I've had multiple Volvos that I've loved, I probably won't buy another one because the software experience is so bad. And that's WITH CarPlay!

nntwozz• 20 days ago

I considered buying a new 2-DIN CarpPlay stereo for my 2003 Suzuki Grand Vitara but went with a simple 12V LENCENT Bluetooth V5.4 FM Transmitter instead that plugs into the cigarette lighter socket.

The reason was that the original stereo has a custom shape that fits the dashboard, it's rounded and the fascia is apparently easy to crack when removing.

I attach my phone with a CD-mount that goes into the CD-player (I hate those vent-mounts) and then I just connect the radio to whatever frequency the FM transmitter is set to.

It works surprisingly well, I was skeptical at first reading some negative reviews but I'm super satisfied.

The signal never cracks but YMMV, I have it set to 87.5 in rural Sweden and it sounds perfectly clear in the domain of 128 kbit MP3.

I'm a sound guy but I think with the poor sound isolation of the car and the OK speakers it sounds perfectly adequate and even a bit nostalgic— it's how I remember car trips in the 90s and early 2000s.

It costs €30-40 and I also get a USB-C PD and a second USB-QC 3.0 on the device.

Simple and keeps everything original in the car.

pluc• 20 days ago

I literally will not buy a car that does not support CarPlay.

I think you mean addictive.

massysett2• 20 days ago

I think CarPlay is evidence of failure.

My aim is device independence. In the old days, to print I had to hook up my printer to a computer. To print from a computer on the network, I needed a print server. I had to administer that. Now the printer itself hooks to the network, which is far superior.

I have an older thermostat which allows me to program vacations directly on the unit. This is superior to the newer thermostat, with which I must use my phone for this.

My dishwasher requires me to use my phone to do a delayed start. This is inferior to what it replaced, which was a model that allowed me to do delayed start from the panel on the dishwasher.

Devices should work on their own. So it’s a failure if the first thing I need to do in the car is tether it to a phone. The car needs nav, it needs radio, etc. It would be better if it has those things built in.

I understand the complaint in this thread, which is that the carmakers are bad at this. I don’t own a Tesla or Rivian, but some folks are saying their interfaces are good. Those carmakers have the right idea. I begrudgingly accept CarPlay. I don’t like it. In this era when computing is as cheap as it is and where even a TV can hook directly to network to play back content, it makes no sense that the solution on a $40,000 car is to plug it in to a phone.

bmicraft• 20 days ago

But it does make sense. You probably looked up where you're going before entering the car on your phone. You probably want to hear the same music or podcasts as on you phone. Do you really want the car to have separate internet connection, and login for every app?

Also you need to connect the phone anyway if you want hands free calling.

macguillicuddy• 20 days ago

I agree that devices should work independently. But I believe the fundamental baseline should be open interoperability. Yes, the dishwasher should allow a delayed start from the machine itself. But it should also have secure yet open interoperability so other authorised systems that care about the dishwasher can interact with it. I think there's ultimately a user experience benefit. I'm familiar with my phone, its UI paradigms etc. If I (or my gran) can use the dishwasher through an interface or voice assistant we're already familiar with then that's a win. Especially if the form factor of the device itself makes it challenging to deliver a great and intuitive interface in-situ.

In this regard CarPlay is evidence of success - a sufficiently interoperable car that allows users to bring their own context and ecosystems.

CarPlay is only evidence of failure if your expectation is that the car should provide a comparable ecosystem to Android or iOS - one that must also somehow follow you in your pocket when you leave the car.

massysett2• 19 days ago

This is a good point, but CarPlay is not open interoperability. Open is DisplayPort. Open is 3.5mm jack. Open is Bluetooth.

The car has two proprietary tie-ins to two dominant mobile operating systems. That’s another reason this feels like failure to me. If the car had some standard way to hook a device to it to use touch screen and output sound, I might like that.

Instead my car (2016 Honda Accord) eliminated the standard 3.5mm jack and added a janky CarPlay implementation that sometimes freezes up entirely, and there’s no way to update it. This is not progress.

flyingshelf• 19 days ago

You're absolutely right, but I don’t think we'll ever get to a point in which what a car ships is better than what Apple ships. This only gets worse over time when you have a new iPhone and a 10-year-old infotainment system, it's just not possible.

Car automakers are not going to support your infotainment system (for free) even just 5 years down the line.

Even just thinking about the integrations gives me a headache (will my music app work on my car? how do I transfer my trip from Google Maps on my phone to my car?)

So the solution for today and tomorrow is to just stream your entire phone to the car.

dyauspitr3• 19 days ago

I kinda disagree. I want the top of the line map system that goes with me everywhere to follow me into the car. I want to carry my computer around with me and don’t want a different computer in each location.

sailfast• 20 days ago

“Stop being so intransigent” / “I will NEVER buy a car that doesn’t support CarPlay” is pretty funny.

That said, I agree with the author. Autos are not software companies and they are only locking us in for their own benefit. Anybody not supporting other common standards is probably not telling the whole truth about the reasoning.

slowmotiony2• 20 days ago

I don't listen to the opinions of people who try to sell me a podcast subscription

neogodless5• 20 days ago

that’s not the way we see ourselves interacting with our users

You lost me right there Rivian. Start picturing yourselves worrying more about how your users picture themselves interacting with THEIR car... and stop worrying about controlling interactions between you and your users. Switch your frame of thinking around.

sorenjan• 19 days ago

This is the problem with so many modern companies. Instead of focusing on building great products that their customers will enjoy using, they're trying to build relationships with users.

Maybe I'm overthinking things, but to me "user" implies a different more subordinate role where you take what you get, there's no "the customer is always right" when it comes to "users".

qsxfthnkp23223• 19 days ago

Rivian has a monthly premium subscription for their infotainment

If they introduced CarPlay they will essentially be taping their wallet shut themselves from their point of view when they need the money

But their current infotainment has a lot to be desired and a bunch of dumb bugs. CarPlay would allow me as a customer to have a better experience of their vehicles to sidestep their shit navigation

I hear the r2 software will help. But CarPlay would be better experience that includes apps I want to use, like overcast. Rj just wants that subscription money and power instead of what a large percent of their users want.

spovzner• 19 days ago

Android Auto has upgraded Google Assistant to Gemini recently. Huge improvement. All the AI conversations are now available with a single button on your steering wheel. You can say "play that song about [something]" and it will get it most of the time.

Preference for Android Auto/Carplay is much more than (subjectively) better navigation/media. It's about all the other apps that Tesla/Rivian don't support like WhatsApp, Waze, etc.

DannyBee• 19 days ago

I used to refuse to buy cars without carplay. For many of the reasons I expect others do.

I have a rivian, and my wife has a car with carplay. I've had rivians for years now. I don't miss carplay when i drive my Rivian.

In truth, I used carplay for 3 main things - navigation that didn't suck, listening to music on the apps i wanted to, and reading text messages out loud.

Rivian has made those things not suck. So i don't miss carplay.

On my wife's car, those things suck, badly, without carplay.

I'm sure there are people out there who heavily depend on carplay for other things, and thus, it really does matter if they have carplay or not.

and maybe a day will come when the features carplay could provide me are as shitty on the Rivian as they are on my wife's car, and i'll start demanding it again.

But at least right now, that's not true, and so I think Rivian's choice is fine.

neogodless5• 19 days ago

My Polestar didn't have Android Auto when I bought it.

Navigation was still Google Maps, and text integration was there.

But no Pandora for music. And that's the problem, in my opinion. Even Android Automotive is way behind Android Auto in app support. That reduces the owner's choices for which software they want to use for their use cases.

mikelikespie• 19 days ago

I’m in a similar spot. I miss CarPlay much less than I expected because the Rivian software is really good. The big thing I really miss from CarPlay is having text messages announced. Google Maps on the phone is a bit better too but I got over that quickly (TTS, features like showing road hazards, and general rendering)

thefourthchime• 19 days ago

I own a Tesla not a Rivian, but I agree with you here. As a software engineer, I find CarPlay to be a tack-on solution. For that, it works well, but only because the base infotainment systems on almost every OEM are utter trash.

Something that I don't believe is discussed enough, especially here, is how bad 90% of software is in general. Software from non-software companies, almost without exception, is just junk. It has stuff tacked garbage from a partner deals, confusing organization that seemed like a product or marketing guy that never used the software. I could go on.

The exceptions, of course, are Rivian and Tesla, who actually make first-class software. On them, I don't miss it, And actually, I would be slightly annoyed if they had it, simply because it breaks up the consistency with infotainment.

NetMageSCW16• 17 days ago

If they had it, you wouldn’t be required to use it.

whh• 19 days ago

I can’t be the only one who thinks we’re going a bit too far with the attention grab of vehicle infotainment.

CarPlay is a fantastic system because it keeps you off your phone.

But some of these new infotainment systems, and the complete lack of physical controls, are starting to feel extremely unsafe.

moolcool• 19 days ago

I admire the restraint the CarPlay designers have in adding features. E.g. in music apps, you can't click-through to an artist page from a song page. Annoying on the surface, but it actually naturally restricts your mucking about in menus. I bet any money that that one choice has saved lives.

xp8414• 19 days ago

Your thesis is right but in this example this is instead one of the “Alan Dye” hidden UI instances where the functionality is intentionally hidden (I presume in the name of aesthetic minimalism rather than safety, because this is what Apple design does outside CarPlay too). At least in Apple Music, I think you tap on the artist name in the now playing screen, and I think you get a menu to go to album or artist from there. If I’m wrong, somebody correct me and I’ll delete, I’m away from my car today and can’t verify.

swiftcoder4• 19 days ago

Luckily the pendulum is about to swing back the other way for most brands, as they have to reintroduce physical controls to comply with the updated EU safety regulations

AceJohnny2• 19 days ago

I've been hearing that for years, and I'm still waiting. Incidentally, my 2020 Ford Escape has buttons, which was a strong selector. I hear it's because it was designed for the European market (as the Ford Kuga)

xattt• 19 days ago

CarPlay is a fantastic system because it keeps you off your phone.

Tinfoil hat time: CarPlay was created as a 4D regulatory chess move, because it enables users to continue interacting with their phones in a legislative environment where said action is otherwise illegal.

It would be hard to argue that it’s illegal to use the phone in a way that’s nearly identical to the way you interact with your vehicle controls.

davidee• 19 days ago

Completely agree with you.

That said, Car Play isn't a panacea for keeping me off my phone though, because some manufacturers have the ability to LIMIT what Car Play can show you.

Example - we have two vehicles for our 3 person household.

One is a 7 year old Kia EV, the other a nearly new Ford.

Ford has somehow limited apps like Music and Podcasts to show or give access to only a tiny subset of playlists and songs when the car is moving - exactly when you absolutely shouldn't pick up your phone.

So you pick up your phone because that thing that works in one car, doesn't work in the other - and it's the newer car and car play implementation that's more limiting.

anticorporate• 19 days ago

Author: I literally will not buy a car that does not support CarPlay.

Me: I literally will not buy a car that does.

fidotron• 19 days ago

Casey is right, but the whole point for the Rivian position is they see themselves as the car software platform of the future. The idea we want primarily phone UIs in our cars is antithetical to their very existence, or why VW invested in them.

The idea customers should have control over the interfaces they use needs to be reinforced. If anything this is why the AI wave has gained so much hype as now people get to bypass so much nonsense masquerading as UX.

2d8a875f-39a2-4• 19 days ago

"My one walled garden won't let my other walled garden in."

nubg• 19 days ago

CarPlay is subtractive for the car manufacturer who wants to track you and sell your data. That's all you need to know about this debate. Of course CarPlay is the far superior UX. It's entertaining to see car manufacturers bend over and come up with ridiculous justifications for why they "cannot" give you the option to just use CarPlay.

fdgwhite• 19 days ago

Maybe someone already said this but my pet peeve is restrictions on wireless CarPlay. We have a top of the line Kia Telluride that only has wired CarPlay. Then we rented a crappy Kia sedan on vacation and it had wireless. Apparently the developer of Telluride’s fancy built in navigation system prohibits wireless CarPlay

NetMageSCW16• 17 days ago

Just get a wireless CarPlay adapter.

andreygrehov• 19 days ago

Personally, I avoid all cars that have CarPlay. This technology has nothing to do with a car. It's just a phone on a bigger screen, pure marketing by Apple that stifles innovation within the car manufacturing industry. I love Apple products, but CarPlay is boring af. And don't get me wrong i do understand why people love CarPlay. Problem is, majority of people don't know why CarPlay is so bad - many haven't used anything better, and they won't, because Apple stifles innovation in this space. It's a loop.

maxdo4• 19 days ago

carPlay is a horrible every time you sit down inside of the car, you need to care about connectivity, if your phone charged etc. It's a neurotic habit.

As a tesla owner, i feel carPlay is such a dumb idea. you buy a car that cost ~$50k+ to rely on every drive on your phone. It's a freedom to be phone free.

And yeah, it's still integrated. My profiles are in sync, if my wife sit down in the car, it adjust the seat height, wheel, temperature , music etc. If I'm listening Spotify using my headphones it switches to car the moment i open the door etc.

maxdo4• 19 days ago

carPlay is Stockholm syndrome on wheels.

people have suffered through its clunky handshake for so long that they've started defending their captor.

My friend's $100k Audi makes him spend five minutes accepting terms of service just to enter a GPS destination. On contrary, he can hop into my Tesla and drive off instantly ...location already sent from my phone, key shared from the phone, but wow, no car play involved. One my friends owns android. No problem at all.

NetMageSCW16• 17 days ago

I hop into my car and CarPlay just automatically puts up the route I already have in my phone and starts working.

A bad implementation doesn’t mean the feature or service is bad. It just means you made a poor choice.

memsom• 19 days ago

Even when CarPlay is full screen, it is possible to have a the manufacturer's UI available. My Ford Sync 3 will let me get back the the car UI via an icon that is the Ford logo - it loos like a regular app, but it's sole purpose is "go back to the car's infotainment." This is useful for controlling the radio and tweaking settings, but not a lot else.

harvie• 19 days ago

All i want is car without infotainment of any kind. And a nice place to mount phone or tablet.

1970-01-012• 19 days ago

So this goes back to the loss of the DIN in vehicles. Vehicle manufacturers shot themselves in the tire decades ago when they stopped caring about DIN space and started forcing themselves to develop and then abandon the lead position on vehicle infotainment. Carplay isn't very special when you consider any 90s and early 2000s vehicle with a DIN slot or two can have all the exact same functionality as Carplay with unlimited upgrades for around $200 in hardware. The OEMs failed to innovate and outright hubris meant they would not roll-back to what worked well for everyone. Apple deserves to eat their lunch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_7736

rubatuga• 19 days ago

All CarPlay is is sending video and audio (like a Moonlight stream) over USB Ethernet. It should be a recognized standard at this point so that you can have a custom device plug in to your car, and have your own UI. But regulations (think watching YouTube while you drive) unfortunately prevent this

1970-01-012• 19 days ago

Rivian refusing to bend the knee to Apple should be met with more respect. You are free to force yourself to never buy a vehicle without Apple software, however you're just adding another shackle between your life and their massive walled garden. Should Rivian continue to innovate as Tesla did, your choice will become hard to maintain. Never is quite a long time.

Pxtl2• 19 days ago

I'm still angry that I can't just run Android Auto directly anymore on my phone when I'm in a vehicle that doesn't have Android Auto support and my phone is just dash-mounted (or handlebar-mounted).

Usedtacould.

enos_feedler• 19 days ago

What the auto industry should have really woken up to is the idea of a singular carplay for both android and ios. I have a 2021 BMW that only supported carplay and was fine for many years. It is wireless even. I love it. But now i have a pixel.

NetMageSCW16• 17 days ago

You could try a wireless adapter that will convert Android Auto to CarPlay.

notglossy• 19 days ago

CarPlay is a nightmare for many because its premise only considers 2 options: use CarPlay, don’t use CarPlay.

If you want to mix and match features across what your car offers and CarPlay offers (e.g. use Podcasts app but stick with native navigation), the UX starts to breakdown very quickly.

TheTon• 19 days ago

No, this scenario works fine. Car audio (and UI) can interleave with CarPlay. I can put podcasts on my center screen, my car manufacturer's navigation in the driver's screen, and the navigation prompts will duck the podcast and interrupt as appropriate. This isn't hypothetical or hard, my car does exactly this today.

gchamonlive• 19 days ago

I prefer my WV Up! infotainment system. It's just a dumb radio/media with a factory phone mount. The actual radio has physical buttons to navigate the config and modes and for everything else you use the phone's touch screen. With 6.8" phone screen it's really good.

A good middle ground would be to have physical buttons to interact with the manufacturer interface and the touch screen to interact exclusively with CarPlay

Utilera• 19 days ago

The strangest part is that this should be an easy win for car makers. If your native system is better, people will use it. If it isn't, forcing them to use it doesn't make it better, it just makes the car feel worse

uni_baconcat• 19 days ago

I’ll buy an accessory display that supports CarPlay/Android Auto and attach it to the dashboard and still won’t use the navigation in the infotainment system.

nickpeterson• 19 days ago

Is the mechanism through which CarPlay/Android Auto works locked down? Could a third party make a competing app for iOS or android that would connect to cars and run on the screen? Or perhaps a special piece of hardware to hook in to older cars?

NetMageSCW16• 17 days ago

Third party wireless adapters are available for CarPlay or Android Auto.

overgard• 19 days ago

Software in cars ages like milk, and car manufacturers are not good at software. I would much rather just have a dumb screen my phone pairs with.

Hackbraten• 19 days ago

I will not buy a car.

josefresco3• 19 days ago

Personally I found CarPlay to be incredibly underwhelming. Very limited app support beyond navigation and music. In addition I frequently have issues switching which phone it's using thanks to terrible iOS BT and of course the ever annoying issue where someone is using the phone that is projecting, and your music suddenly cuts out to play obnoxious audio.

The only advantage over a traditional car media center/nav is the always updated and personalized map/nav.

NetMageSCW16• 17 days ago

App support is up to the app developer as always.

drunken_thor• 19 days ago

CarPlay is also a contract between mobile devs and automakers. It allows for things like displaying "current playing" on the dash, media buttons on the steering wheel that control apps, and turn by turn directions show on dash and HUD. A screen cast may be able to do this but not in a consistent dependable way.

Also no one is mentioning that maybe we should not encourage users to use 1000s of apps in their car? It would be irresponsible to easily allow users to watch youtube while driving. Keeping the set of apps usable through the car is a responsibility in automobiles that are already becoming too distracting as is.

_-_-__-_-_-• 19 days ago

I've had CarPlay on my last two cars, a 2018 VW Golf and a 2024 Ford Maverick. It's fine. Sometimes you plug your phone into the USB port (unlocked) and it refuses to connect for several minutes very frustrating when you want to start navigation and media playback before leaving the driveway. My favourite headunit experience was my aftermarket single DIN Kenwood (https://www.kenwood.com/ca/car/caraudio/receivers/kdc-bt282u...) in my MK4 Golf it was an easy swap. You could plug in any iPod or iPhone and it would play and control the audio directly from the headunit and show title information on the display. Plus, it would take any USB storage device and play music. It was such a simple and efficient experience.

tonymet2• 19 days ago

Imagine if customers demanded MacBooks boot into Android when an android phone was connected .

The cars primary UI is the screen. Car Clay defers the cars experience to Apple .

Customers have been demanding CarPlay because most car UIs are poor. But if done properly, they can exceed CarPlay while being consistent and well integrated

NetMageSCW16• 17 days ago

Imagine a new popular music streaming service (Tidal?) came out tomorrow - when will it be supported on your phone? When will your car support it, if ever?

tonymet2• 9 days ago

you're right. i would rather see this handled using a better authorization protocol like Chromecast did, rather than taking over the UI.

Losing control over the UI for the car, to support media playback isn't even a good engineering approach, let alone being a good user experience.

brucejackson• 19 days ago

Like the author, CarPlay is table stakes for any vehicle purchase. I literally installed a Sony screen receiver in my 2016 F150, that was given to my by my father after he lost his license due to his age. That was a fun weekend with the dash apart reliving my younger days when I did car audio installations. The truck lasted 1 week before I had the dash apart to get CarPlay back. The native Ford infotainment system was so crap.

matt-attack• 19 days ago

As an Apple fanboy I have to say I’ve never been impressed with CarPlay. I’ve used it in rentals quite a bit but have found it generally infuriating.

Primary reason is the map. On the Tesla you have this beautiful map that you can pan around and pinch zoom in and out of.

On the versions of CarPlay that I’ve used, you can this minimal map that can’t be pinch zoomed. Seems like you have to tap the pan buttons by hand to get it to slide around.

It’s just generally unusable. Like I don’t even know why people like this. Oh and then the nanny aspect of your phone becoming a black screen of just enumerated turns with no way to actually see the map yourself (if the car screen is unwilling to work right, my first instinct was to go to my phone but alas no they brick it).

Before I owned a Tesla I remember thinking what a mistake it was that it didn’t have CarPlay because I assumed it was the best. Well it’s not. Not by a long shot.

NetMageSCW16• 17 days ago

You shouldn’t be panning or pinch to zoom, etc while driving. You should be following a route which you can setup with your phone.

Footprint0521• 19 days ago

Won’t buy a car without CarPlay is crazy… lol CarPlay head units are like $200 tops

ml_basics• 19 days ago

Read about half of the article wondering when it was going to explain why carplay is addictive

m4632• 19 days ago

It's simple - carplay is a financial threat to car manufacturers.

- It commoditizes the car

- it eliminates upsell features/subscriptions after the sale.

- it costs money to add carplay

- like car manufacturers don't want interchangable head units, they want to own the infotainment system.

- like wireless carriers didn't want the iphone - they wanted locked-down phones where they were the only ones who could sell you ringtones or music.

reboot81• 19 days ago

I drive a 2025 Kia Ceed and the all the infotainment does is get in my way. Id pay to have it removed. Carplay & Siri helps me stay focused on driving in a safe way.

TooSmugToFail• 19 days ago

Tried clicking the links to the Rivian web page. What a horrible experience.

I have been trying to get some useful info about the cars (e.g. range), and the only option I had was to play a completely useless video which only made me dizzy.

Then, desperate, I tried asking their AI chat what’s the expected range. It told me (great success!) but then it directed me back to the useless page.

How useless.

wilg2• 19 days ago

CarPlay is for cars with shitty software

NetMageSCW16• 17 days ago

So all of them.

wilg2• 17 days ago

All but Tesla and Rivian I think.

exabrial• 19 days ago

My next vehicle will have first-class carplay support. I refuse to buy anything else. Manufacturers will figure this out.

TacticalCoder• 19 days ago

They make the experience of being in the car way way better.
I literally will not buy a car that does not support CarPlay.

I drive more than you, longer distances. I've been to Ibiza by car (with the car on the boat at some point, obviously), to the UK (with the car either on a boat or, later on, inside a train), I've crossed Germany at insane (legal) speeds to go to the end of Poland, I've been to Sweden, to Andorra, Italy, Croatia, etc.

For I hate airplanes and very rarely hop in one (last time was in 2019).

What makes the experience of driving sweet is soundproofing, the quality of the seats, the overall sweetness of the ride.

It's got absolutely nothing to do with how big the screen (that shows you the same thing as your phone) is and zero to do with OS of the car's infotainment (unless the carmaker really fucked up big times and made an unusable system).

The F-segment cars (euro notation) are enjoyable rides and this has nothing to do with Apple or Android CarPlay:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-segment

As a bonus: the soundsystem. People are going to say that listening to music in a car sucks anyway but once you get into high-end luxury cars, suddenly the sound proofing is so good that listening to music while driving is actually enjoyable.

My car runs QNX as the OS for the infotainment. It's got its own memory for songs (I can put either mp3 or FLAC files: I have a mix of both), it's got an audio CD player (which I sometimes use, just because I can) and it's got bluetooth, so I can use Spotify or whatever suits me.

It's mostly "one button / one function": not some distracting touch screen.

It's a sweet sweet ride and I guarantee you that there are very few brand new cars from 2026 that are sweeter rides than my ride from 2013 (which, of course, I bought used --8 years ago now-- and paid less than most brand new cars).

Now my car is 13 years old and has more than 200 000 km (125 000 miles): it's going to be time to change it. I'll sell it for half what I paid it and I'll buy another high-end luxury car, used. Same brand, same model.

This time it'll have CarPlay (because the carmaker moved from QNX to CarPlay): but I guarantee you that it's not what makes that car great not that it's why I'll buy it.

Judging a car, an item that's made for driving, by how easy it is to connect your smartphone to it is just plain face-palming and shows how addicted society is to smartphones.

It's really just freaking sad.

DangitBobby2• 19 days ago

The article's best point is about customer choice. If Rivian were really making its decision to deliver the best experience, they'd confidently ship something that supports CarPlay and let the customer choose the better option. Obviously when the customer sees Rivian's superior vision, they'll make the right choice.

To me, any company that doesn't act this way gives away the game. It's about lock-in, control, subscriptions, selling tracking data. Definitely why GM is doing it, anyway.

icar• 19 days ago

Bluetooth + phone mounted next to the wheel worked nicely (and still does in older models). I wish I had this option still. Better, AUX instead of Bluetooth. It would be so fast to plug&play...

tensility2• 19 days ago

Agreed. CarPlay support is table stakes fo me fir my next vehicle, no matter how good its native UI is.

kbos87• 18 days ago

I currently have a Tesla (no CarPlay) and a Volvo EV with a reasonably good CarPlay implementation. I was in the same position as the writer until I experienced great in-vehicle software that I think only Tesla & Rivian can currently offer.

I don't miss CarPlay one bit, and I think a lot of people are brainwashed into thinking it's the only viable option because they've never been exposed to an auto manufacturer who actually knows how to build software ;) The level of software-hardware integration you experience in a Rivian or Tesla is something that CarPlay just can't compete with.

Personally I also don't want Tesla or Rivian to add CarPlay, because the reality is that it's not only additive. If Tesla & Rivian don't continue to nudge their buyers toward their native in-vehicle software CarPlay will continue to dominate simply because people will default to using what they are comfortable with. That will inevitably drive decisions by Tesla & Rivian about where and how they should invest in the in-vehicle experience.

If you want CarPlay, there are plenty of legacy auto manufacturers out there who can give it to you.

abustamam• 18 days ago

Maybe it's just familiarity, but same. I have a Tesla and I once rented a Toyota BZ whatever that had android auto. It was neat. But I struggled to do basic things. With Tesla I can navigate to the nearest charging station. I could not figure out how to do something as basic as that from the car. I had to use my phone (plug share or whatever) to find a charging station.

I haven't driven a rivian but I've heard their UI is comparable to Tesla.

That said, I don't see why cars need to have bespoke software in the first place. Ideally we have one or two open standards for infotainment systems. Imagine if you used a Dell then you used an HP and then you used an Alienware and they were all different!

the_lucifer• 18 days ago

Personally I also don't want Tesla or Rivian to add CarPlay

Unfortunately for you, Tesla is working on adding CarPlay support to their cars (for what I assume is to boost their value and image to potential buyers).

From earlier this year: https://9to5mac.com/2026/02/02/tesla-still-working-on-carpla...

More recently, Apple and Tesla are collaborating to fill any gaps in APIs to allow for CarPlay on Tesla vehicles: https://9to5mac.com/2026/06/15/this-carplay-change-may-be-th...

Throughout several communications to developers, they have mentioned changes that lend credibility to this rumor, first in WWDC2026[1] and in 27 as well.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/212

schnatterer• 18 days ago

What about privacy? No one here wonders what kind of data your car leaks to Apple/Google?

kelvinjps10• 17 days ago

For me the car infotainment system is okay, except for one thing and it's Google maps having the navigation on the car's screen itself it's way more convenient than on the phone or the bad gps the car has from factory

CarPlay Is Additive

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