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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 https:

by valgaze 3mo 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 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.

echelon 3mo 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 3mo ago
  What do you want the regulators to do to Apple in this case? What have they done wrong?
- dgacmu 3mo 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.
  - al_borland 3mo ago
    Not just that, but car makers have proven they can’t be trusted with our data. My phone has all my appointments and addresses in it. I’d much rather use the nav on the phone where the data already is, then sync it with my car so they can do god knows what with it.
- rufius 3mo ago
  Android Auto is in the vast majority of cars that also have CarPlay. What’s your point?
- Jtsummers 3mo 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48755473
  - echelon 3mo ago
    These are the companies that undersigned the Orwellian "protect the kids" act. These trillion dollar companies are the problem. They're moving into other healthy industries and crushing them. They're sucking the oxygen out of every market. Stop cheerleading this. They need vibrant competition. We need a de-ossifying forest fire. We need lots of nimble smaller companies. Instead the giants place a ceiling on the growth of every other industry, then when they need more growth, they start to creep in and dump on healthy markets unrelated to their original enterprise. Look at Amazon giving away Lord of the Rings, running a $200M ad campaign for free on its Rivian trucks, printed boxes, website, app, etc., buying up MGM... How do actual companies in these spaces compete with the dumping? How do businesses keep Apple and Google from strong-arming them? Rivian doesn't want to be Apple's bitch. You guys are cheerleading it and telling Rivian to bend over. Google and Apple are the companies that want to track you and turn the internet into a land of device attestation and mandatory ID sign in. They're both actively building "age assurance" into their platforms, and it won't be long before they start gating internet use via these tendrils. Google and Apple are not good companies. You're all building this Orwellian hellscape. STOP.
    - CamperBob2 3mo ago
      You know the reason why companies like GM don't like CarPlay is because they think they should be the ones who get to track you, sell you various subscriptions, and sell the resulting data to third parties. Right? You'll note that it wasn't Apple who sold out their own customers, it was GM. [1] False-equivalence arguments are both pointless and, in this case, unnecessary. There is a lesser and greater evil here, and the lesser one in this case happens to be Apple. 1: https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/gm-pay-12-75m-selling-212500136.html https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/gm-pay...
- majormajor 3mo 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.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - numpad0 3mo ago
    What regulators and the industry should have done was to devise a touch-over-HDMI protocol, so that CarPlay can be deprecated and its successor sectioned off as they like. That was IMO the root cause of this problem.
    - thorbutt 3mo ago
      This wouldn't be a solution to the argument in the article: Rivian and Tesla don't want to support phones projecting to infotainment As it is, CarPlay is implemented as a h264 video stream which receives touch, microphone, and metadata from the vehicle, the protocol is fine albeit proprietary
      - bluGill 3mo ago
        As a owner of a GM without android auto, never again. Everything is on my phone but I can't safely access it while driving. Also can't legally because my state makes using the phone while driving illegal (for good reason. I suspect most states don't allow it)
- stephen_g 3mo 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.
  - greentea23 3mo ago
    It makes perfect sense. Android Auto is not libre. You need an attested Google device to use Android Auto and an attested Apple device to use CarPlay, so both options are anti-user at their core, forcing you into being non-anonymous and tracked in a myriad of ways that you can only bypass if you run a custom ROM.
    - stephen_g 3mo ago
      That’s nothing to do with the OP’s comment, and ignores the second part which I pointed out too (that nobody is forcing you to use this optional feature that most people want), so swing and a miss on two points… The OP’s argument is that lots of people wanting CarPlay is evidence some kind of monopolistic anti-competitive behaviour by Apple, which is nonsense. Nothing in your comment relates addresses the argument or the rebuttal!
- Rekindle8090 3mo ago
  [dead]
- asveikau 3mo ago
  Android Auto is also a thing.
- aetch 3mo 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.
- tryagainian 3mo ago
  [flagged]
- Telaneo 3mo 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 3mo ago
  What monopoly?
parl_match 3mo 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.
- fragmede 3mo ago
  > I have a vehicle that's basically a BMW Why not just name the brand?
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - AsmaraHolding 3mo ago
    I assume it's a Toyota Supra
    - simondotau 3mo ago
      It could also be a Rolls Royce or a Mini.
      - OptionOfT 3mo ago
        Or a Grenadier.
        tryagainian 3mo ago
        [flagged]
throwaway_7274 3mo ago
I literally will not buy a car that has a microprocessor in it (I will, apparently, never buy a car)
- danielheath 3mo 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.
  - MBCook 3mo ago
    50, as another commenter pointed out.
    - xstas1 3mo ago
      That was the first such car. Even though the automatic transmission was invented a long time ago, new cars are still made with manual ones
  - ahepp 3mo ago
    I'm guessing you mean fuel injector? The pump that pushes or pulls fuel up from your tank is not very sophisticated, afaik. Fuel injector timing and quantity, along with ignition timing, is generally computer controlled, certainly on any modern vehicle.
- donkey_brains 3mo ago
  That’s a very hard line
- AnotherGoodName 3mo 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.
MBCook 3mo 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.
- bhhaskin 3mo 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.
  - my_username_is_ 3mo ago
    This is crazy to me because the primary value proposition of Rivian's Connect+, as I see it, is enabling the hotspot while you're in the car and being able to monitor Gear Guard while you're away from the car. These are entirely separate from supporting CarPlay/Android Auto. If Rivian et al. truly want to sell a premium product, their software needs to be premium. And frankly it's just not there. The other day I was trying to listen to an upcoming album that has a few singles released. On my phone I can do that no problem. On the Rivian Spotify app, the album just didn't show up. It wasn't possible to play those songs in order without searching for the songs one by one. There are a ton of things that I love about my R1T, but as more time passes, the gap between what they offer and what other manufacturers offer becomes more and more apparent
  - bitmasher9 3mo ago
    The car companies need to stay in their lanes on this one. You’re risking selling a >$40k piece of hardware that requires professional service every six months in order to sell me $240/yr in software subscriptions.
    - orthogonal_cube 3mo ago
      $240/yr in software subscriptions but likely far more than that by selling the extra metadata they can extract from the service
bdavbdav 3mo 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.
- _factor 3mo ago
  That’s just a line. More like, “We can collect our own data”, or “We can lock them in and collect subscription fees.”
  - grumbelbart2 3mo ago
    Mostly the second point. They already collect and track you, even with car play. I strongly recommend this CCC talk, where they hacked a Volkswagen database that contained unfiltered, high-accuracy, timestamped locations of a large majority of electric cars from VW group. Based on that they were, for example, able to identify cars owned by members of Germany's security apparatus: where they work, where they live, where they drop off their children each morning. Who visited brothels. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGzoXbbth0s&t=30m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGzoXbbth0s&t=30m
    - bdavbdav 3mo ago
      The frustrating thing is I bet they’re still tracking and collecting this when you stop paying for the tracking / telematics.
      - DaSHacka 3mo ago
        They do, you just then don't benefit from the service. At least, that's been confirmed to be the case with Subaru from other security researchers looking at the telematics system.
    - vincnetas 3mo ago
      good thing that brothels are legal in germany.
bikelang 3mo 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 3mo 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%.
- monitorlizard 3mo 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 3mo ago
  It might be new cars. I could see new car buyers having an iphone bias vs android.
conk 3mo 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.

by valgaze 3mo ago

echelon 3mo 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 3mo ago
What do you want the regulators to do to Apple in this case? What have they done wrong?
dgacmu 3mo 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.
- al_borland 3mo ago
  Not just that, but car makers have proven they can’t be trusted with our data. My phone has all my appointments and addresses in it. I’d much rather use the nav on the phone where the data already is, then sync it with my car so they can do god knows what with it.
rufius 3mo ago
Android Auto is in the vast majority of cars that also have CarPlay. What’s your point?
Jtsummers 3mo 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48755473
- echelon 3mo ago
  These are the companies that undersigned the Orwellian "protect the kids" act. These trillion dollar companies are the problem. They're moving into other healthy industries and crushing them. They're sucking the oxygen out of every market. Stop cheerleading this. They need vibrant competition. We need a de-ossifying forest fire. We need lots of nimble smaller companies. Instead the giants place a ceiling on the growth of every other industry, then when they need more growth, they start to creep in and dump on healthy markets unrelated to their original enterprise. Look at Amazon giving away Lord of the Rings, running a $200M ad campaign for free on its Rivian trucks, printed boxes, website, app, etc., buying up MGM... How do actual companies in these spaces compete with the dumping? How do businesses keep Apple and Google from strong-arming them? Rivian doesn't want to be Apple's bitch. You guys are cheerleading it and telling Rivian to bend over. Google and Apple are the companies that want to track you and turn the internet into a land of device attestation and mandatory ID sign in. They're both actively building "age assurance" into their platforms, and it won't be long before they start gating internet use via these tendrils. Google and Apple are not good companies. You're all building this Orwellian hellscape. STOP.
  - CamperBob2 3mo ago
    You know the reason why companies like GM don't like CarPlay is because they think they should be the ones who get to track you, sell you various subscriptions, and sell the resulting data to third parties. Right? You'll note that it wasn't Apple who sold out their own customers, it was GM. [1] False-equivalence arguments are both pointless and, in this case, unnecessary. There is a lesser and greater evil here, and the lesser one in this case happens to be Apple. 1: https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/gm-pay-12-75m-selling-212500136.html https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/gm-pay...
majormajor 3mo 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.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- numpad0 3mo ago
  What regulators and the industry should have done was to devise a touch-over-HDMI protocol, so that CarPlay can be deprecated and its successor sectioned off as they like. That was IMO the root cause of this problem.
  - thorbutt 3mo ago
    This wouldn't be a solution to the argument in the article: Rivian and Tesla don't want to support phones projecting to infotainment As it is, CarPlay is implemented as a h264 video stream which receives touch, microphone, and metadata from the vehicle, the protocol is fine albeit proprietary
    - bluGill 3mo ago
      As a owner of a GM without android auto, never again. Everything is on my phone but I can't safely access it while driving. Also can't legally because my state makes using the phone while driving illegal (for good reason. I suspect most states don't allow it)
stephen_g 3mo 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.
- greentea23 3mo ago
  It makes perfect sense. Android Auto is not libre. You need an attested Google device to use Android Auto and an attested Apple device to use CarPlay, so both options are anti-user at their core, forcing you into being non-anonymous and tracked in a myriad of ways that you can only bypass if you run a custom ROM.
  - stephen_g 3mo ago
    That’s nothing to do with the OP’s comment, and ignores the second part which I pointed out too (that nobody is forcing you to use this optional feature that most people want), so swing and a miss on two points… The OP’s argument is that lots of people wanting CarPlay is evidence some kind of monopolistic anti-competitive behaviour by Apple, which is nonsense. Nothing in your comment relates addresses the argument or the rebuttal!
Rekindle8090 3mo ago
[dead]
asveikau 3mo ago
Android Auto is also a thing.
aetch 3mo 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.
tryagainian 3mo ago
[flagged]
Telaneo 3mo 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 3mo ago
What monopoly?

parl_match 3mo 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.

fragmede 3mo ago
> I have a vehicle that's basically a BMW Why not just name the brand?
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- AsmaraHolding 3mo ago
  I assume it's a Toyota Supra
  - simondotau 3mo ago
    It could also be a Rolls Royce or a Mini.
    - OptionOfT 3mo ago
      Or a Grenadier.
      - tryagainian 3mo ago
        [flagged]

throwaway_7274 3mo ago

I literally will not buy a car that has a microprocessor in it (I will, apparently, never buy a car)

danielheath 3mo 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.
- MBCook 3mo ago
  50, as another commenter pointed out.
  - xstas1 3mo ago
    That was the first such car. Even though the automatic transmission was invented a long time ago, new cars are still made with manual ones
- ahepp 3mo ago
  I'm guessing you mean fuel injector? The pump that pushes or pulls fuel up from your tank is not very sophisticated, afaik. Fuel injector timing and quantity, along with ignition timing, is generally computer controlled, certainly on any modern vehicle.
donkey_brains 3mo ago
That’s a very hard line
AnotherGoodName 3mo 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.

MBCook 3mo 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.

bhhaskin 3mo 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.
- my_username_is_ 3mo ago
  This is crazy to me because the primary value proposition of Rivian's Connect+, as I see it, is enabling the hotspot while you're in the car and being able to monitor Gear Guard while you're away from the car. These are entirely separate from supporting CarPlay/Android Auto. If Rivian et al. truly want to sell a premium product, their software needs to be premium. And frankly it's just not there. The other day I was trying to listen to an upcoming album that has a few singles released. On my phone I can do that no problem. On the Rivian Spotify app, the album just didn't show up. It wasn't possible to play those songs in order without searching for the songs one by one. There are a ton of things that I love about my R1T, but as more time passes, the gap between what they offer and what other manufacturers offer becomes more and more apparent
- bitmasher9 3mo ago
  The car companies need to stay in their lanes on this one. You’re risking selling a >$40k piece of hardware that requires professional service every six months in order to sell me $240/yr in software subscriptions.
  - orthogonal_cube 3mo ago
    $240/yr in software subscriptions but likely far more than that by selling the extra metadata they can extract from the service

bdavbdav 3mo 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.

_factor 3mo ago
That’s just a line. More like, “We can collect our own data”, or “We can lock them in and collect subscription fees.”
- grumbelbart2 3mo ago
  Mostly the second point. They already collect and track you, even with car play. I strongly recommend this CCC talk, where they hacked a Volkswagen database that contained unfiltered, high-accuracy, timestamped locations of a large majority of electric cars from VW group. Based on that they were, for example, able to identify cars owned by members of Germany's security apparatus: where they work, where they live, where they drop off their children each morning. Who visited brothels. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGzoXbbth0s&t=30m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGzoXbbth0s&t=30m
  - bdavbdav 3mo ago
    The frustrating thing is I bet they’re still tracking and collecting this when you stop paying for the tracking / telematics.
    - DaSHacka 3mo ago
      They do, you just then don't benefit from the service. At least, that's been confirmed to be the case with Subaru from other security researchers looking at the telematics system.
  - vincnetas 3mo ago
    good thing that brothels are legal in germany.

bikelang 3mo 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 3mo 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%.

monitorlizard 3mo 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 3mo ago
It might be new cars. I could see new car buyers having an iphone bias vs android.

conk 3mo 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.