For many smartphone owners, Apple is The medium on the internet. Since 2022, Apple has made it clear that it also wants to be the same for many drivers. That’s when the company announced “next-generation” CarPlay 2, which is set to extend CarPlay’s convenient phone mirroring technology beyond the vehicle’s central infotainment screen to additional dash screens, including gauge clusters and dashboards .
That is, if the car makers allow it. On Monday, another Apple event came and did not say when, exactly, this new CarPlay could appear, despite the fact that Apple said on its website that the first car models with the feature will of their debut in 2024—a year with just three months left in it.
Since Apple unveiled its vision for the next generation of the service two years ago, many automakers have made it clear they are uncomfortable handing control over the design of their screens to Apple Inc. Weeks after the Mercedes-Benz logo was included in Apple’s initial CarPlay 2 presentation in 2022, the car company seems to have been stunned. “To give the entire cockpit head unit—in our case, a passenger screen and all—to someone else?” Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius said The Verge in 2022. “The answer is no.”
Two automakers, Porsche and Aston Martin, have pledged to partner with Apple for next-generation CarPlay. A spokesman for Porsche, Calvin Kim, said the automaker has no updates on when the new CarPlay will arrive. A spokesperson for Aston Martin declined to comment and referred WIRED to Apple for CarPlay news. An Apple spokesperson did not immediately respond to WIRED’s questions about when the next CarPlay will be launched.
However, it appears that Apple has heard at least some of the automakers’ concerns. At Apple’s WWDC conference last summer, the tech giant posted two new CarPlay videos that made it clear that automakers will gain control over the architecture and design of the interfaces that appear in their cars, using what Apple calls which is “punch-through. UI.” This would allow an automaker to, for example, display a specific visualization of the driver assistance or backup camera even though CarPlay is “in control” of its vehicle’s visuals.
From a technical point of view, the new CarPlay interacts more closely with the vehicles software than the previous version. While the first version only provided a video screen in a car, CarPlay will need to communicate with the vehicle’s software to provide car-specific information including tire pressure and climate in its own user interface.
At least one automaker has said it definitely won’t play along with Apple CarPlay, or even its competitor, Android Auto. General Motors announced last year that its vehicles would rely on its own GM-built operating system.
