The old cliche about automotive writers is that they used to complain when a car wasn’t a brown, manual, diesel station wagon. That’s the old cliche. The new one is that we won’t stop kvetching about the lack of Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Honestly, yeah, accurate. If a car doesn’t have CarPlay, it’s hard for me to imagine owning it.
Lately, there are only three major carmakers that have shunned CarPlay, and all have done so for electric cars. The first is Tesla, which has long had its own, fairly robust user interface (UI). Rivian, following in Tesla’s footsteps, has long integrated a lot of the features one might get from CarPlay or Android Auto. General Motors started with its electric cars, but is planning to roll out the, uh, absence of CarPlay across the board as it resists outside forces creeping into its infotainment.
People famously do not like this and want CarPlay for their vehicles. While automakers may have some reasonable complaints, including handing over power over their own cars to a company like Apple, they’re also ignoring what consumers use. CarPlay and Android Auto are simply the easiest and most predictable experiences for using your phone in your car. With Google getting Supercharger data, it only makes sense to allow Apple to integrate CarPlay, right?
It’s also well-timed, given that Tesla sales have been weaker this year, leading the company to try all sorts of new programs, including renting its cars out directly. What’s amusing here, at least to me, is that Tesla CEO Elon Musk has had a longstanding beef with Apple and has insisted Tesla didn’t need the product, as Bloomberg points out in its reporting:
Adding CarPlay would mark a stunning reversal for Tesla and Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, who long ignored pleas to implement the popular feature. Musk has criticized Apple for years, particularly its App Store policies, and was angered by the company’s poaching of his engineers when it set out to build its own car.
Pride goeth before a fall, so perhaps Tesla is willing to swallow some in order to move some more cars. From the report, it sounds like this would work in a separate screen and not integrate with other features of the car, like FSD or Autopilot. So this is a baby step towards giving consumers what they want.
This should, I hope, be a wake-up call to other automakers hoping to kick Apple out of their cars. If you can make a truly seamless experience that’s awesome, but no one has yet, and even super-tech-forward Tesla is reportedly considering just giving in to CarPlay. The last non-CarPlay-equipped GM product I had was not intuitive, and even something as simple as navigating through a podcast was unnecessarily hard.
Top photo: Tesla
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