The new CarPlay would take over all car information and entertainment functions — image credit: Apple
Back in 2022, Apple loudly talked up its next-generation CarPlay before quietly committing to it being released in 2024 — and now it’s saying nothing about having missed that deadline.
Apple has always had a reputation for refusing to announce or even admit to something it was working on, until it was ready to ship. Yet when it gave what it called a sneak peek at the new CarPlay in 2022, it sounded as if it were ready.
“Automakers from around the world are excited to bring this new vision of CarPlay to customers,” said Emily Schubert, Apple’s Senior Manager of Car Experience Engineering at WWDC 2022. “Vehicles will start to be announced late next year, and we can’t wait to show you more further down the road.”
What Apple showed was nothing less than the complete takeover of a car’s entire dashboard by CarPlay. Instead of being confined to a square-ish screen that shows a few apps, the new CarPlay runs everything.
The speed display, the rev counter, the trip counter, whether the car was in Drive or Park, everything. The new CarPlay would use every screen in the car — and be adapted so that “no matter what type of unique screen shapes or layouts you may have, this next generation of CarPlay feels like it was made specifically for your car.”
Schubert is a 20-year veteran of Apple, and in October 2023, she was promoted to Director, Car Experience. But while she is presumably plugging away at the new CarPlay, those excited automakers don’t appear to be.
Apple showed a slide featuring 14 car manufacturers, from Audi to Volvo, and none of them have released a car featuring the new CarPlay.
To be fair to Schubert, her three-minute WWDC speech only committed Apple to how cars would start to be announced in 2023, and she wasn’t wrong. In 2023, both Porsche and Aston Martin showed off what were basically concept designs.
However, they did so simultaneously on December 20, 2023 — and neither has actually released a car. Aston Martin committed to a 2024 launch, but Porsche wouldn’t be drawn on any date.
And if Apple’s WWDC announcement was also carefully-worded, Apple’s website announcement was not. “First models arrive in 2024,” it said.
The key phrase is at the bottom — “First models arrive in 2024” — image credit: Apple
At time of writing, it still says that.
Money doesn’t solve everything
It’s easy to say that Apple has so much money that it can throw at any problem, but there are limits to even its resources. There are limits when you’re working with any outside firms, let alone 14 of them, for which your CarPlay project may not be a priority.
Then it’s surely not an easy task to have an iPhone communicate “with your vehicle’s real-time systems in an on-device, privacy-friendly way, showing all of your driving information, like speed, RPMs, fuel level, temperature, and more,” as Schubert said.
It’s just unusual that Apple would either announce a major release early, or that it would fail to correctly assess how long the project would take. There was speculation in 2022 that the announcement was really made because car manufacturers appeared to be abandoning support for CarPlay.
Schubert also said in her speech that “79% of US buyers would only consider a car that works with CarPlay,” which did definitely sound like a shot across the bows of car makers thinking of leaving.
Some still did, though it’s not been a great or popular move for those manufacturers.
There was also speculation that this new CarPlay was actually a sneak peek at the Apple Car — but the car project was then abandoned.
Maybe CarPlay has been abandoned too, although there have been signs of its life in regulatory databases.
We’ve been here before, on a smaller scale
Or maybe it’s just a larger-scale version of what happened with Apple Music over its classical music app. Apple specifically promised that Apple Music Classical would be released in 2022, after the company acquired classical streamer Primephonic in 2021.
While it missed its 2022 deadline, Apple Music Classical was also constantly rumored to be about to launch. There was also evidence, too, in the form of code in iOS.
In the end, Apple Music Classical came out as practically a surprise, a few months into 2023. It’s still been a long rollout to different Apple devices, although most recently it was made available — on CarPlay.
The new CarPlay could go the same way. But unlike Apple Music Classical, its fate is not entirely within Apple’s control.
Instead, it depends on Apple and at least 14 major car manufacturers.
