CarPlay Ultra Questions
I like cars, and I like Apple products, so the announcement of CarPlay Ultra hit right at the intersection of two of my big interests.
I have written about CarPlay a fair amount. My current car, my beloved Alfa Romeo Giulia, has what is possibly the last non-touch CarPlay system that was on sale. In fact, it doesn’t meaningfully move the game along from when I upgraded my previous car, too old for fancy GUIs, with a CarPlay head unit. In other words, the CarPlay interface only shows on the screen in the middle of the dashboard; the only thing that shows in front of the driver is the title of whatever is playing on the phone. Even that is quite obviously using software features originally designed for browsing files stored on a USB device plugged into the dashboard. At least the steering wheel controls all work with CarPlay, including the voice-control button invoking Siri. That last point is not a given; for some years Volkswagen cars insisted on using that button only to invoke a Volkswagen voice assistant — but since that was a paid feature, I am willing to go out on a limb and make quite a large bet that nobody anywhere ever paid up.
I have in fact been a fan of CarPlay since its original launch at the 2014 Geneva International Motor Show:
We upgrade our phones every year or two, but our cars much less frequently than that. In-car entertainment systems are limited by the automotive industry’s product cycles, so they are basically already obsolete (in consumer terms) by the time the car hits the showroom. Enabling cars to piggy-back on the smart, GPS-navigating, voice-recognising, music-playing computers that we already carry in our pockets can only be a good thing.
Modern cars have finally got the idea of more frequent software updates, even in some cases over-the-air without requiring a trip to the dealer, but the point still stands. My phone can already do everything I require of in-car entertainment, navigation, and communication, and it’s all set up already. Why would I want to go through setting up a whole other system?
All of which brings us to Apple’s announcement of CarPlay Ultra, described as bringing “the best of iPhone and the best of the car together for a deeply integrated experience”.
If you prefer moving pictures, there is an extensive video from Top Gear which goes through the whole system in some depth. Either way, the description pretty much covers it: CarPlay Ultra lets Apple take over rendering a whole lot more of the dashboard than before, including key elements like the gauges or the HVAC controls.
Interestingly, that video also addresses what is surely the elephant in the room, namely the reluctance car makers might have to relinquish control of their primary interface to their customers. It’s one thing to have a CarPlay screen in the middle of the dashboard, but taking over the primary interface, down to the speedometer and climate control? That might be a bridge too far. I have written here before about the importance of owning your own interfaces, after all.
The Top Gear video cites Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius and his reluctance to use CarPlay instead of his own MBUX system. However, if you go to the original interview he gave The Verge, his objection is a bit more nuanced than just a dislike of giving up control of the user experience to CarPlay (or Android Auto):
Everything that’s going on in this digital window into your car and to the world is not just infotainment. It’s not just the music that you listen to or the phone call that you make. Where there is another revolution going on is assisted and automated driving. Our so-called Mercedes-Benz operating system is really the central nervous system in the brain of the whole car, of which the infotainment is one of four domains.
That’s why it’s interesting that we also get to hear from Marek Reichman, Chief Creative Officer of Aston Martin. When questioned about any “reluctance on the part of Aston Martin” to commit to CarPlay Ultra, he instead talks about how constraints actually help creatives, as well as describing a process with a lot of interaction between the teams at Apple and Aston Martin.
That sounds like a process in which MBUX and Apple designers could find a way for CarPlay Ultra to exist on the Hyperscreen in a way that is native there — if Mercedes is willing to engage in that process.
This all makes sense to me — except for one thing.
I am selling my Giulia — not because I have fallen out of love with it, but because the Son&Heir is basically as tall as I am, and his sister is not far behind. The two of them and their little brother simply do not fit in the back of the Giulia comfortably for anything more than a short trip.
I am getting a big Audi wagon to haul the family around — more on that when it actually shows up, probably in early July — but the point is that it has one of those dashboards that is basically a single display from one side to the other. I am not clear on whether Audi will get CarPlay Ultra; Apple’s announcement cites its stablemate Porsche, so I have some hope. However, I am not sure how much of a difference it will actually make in practice. I made sure to test CarPlay support during the test drive (in addition to rear-seat capacity for my inconveniently large offspring), and what I saw is that the Audi already has a halfway-house between first-gen CarPlay and CarPlay Ultra.
For instance, Apple Maps shows up in the display in front of the driver, in between the dials, as does a full-featured “now playing” screen, much like the one in the CarPlay Ultra demos. Apple Maps can even drive the heads-up display that is rendered on the windscreen in front of the driver. The difference is that the dials themselves are still rendered by the Audi software, and most of the vehicle controls are either displayed outside the rectangle of the screen that is delegated to CarPlay, or require dropping out of CarPlay entirely.
The conclusion of the Top Gear video is: “If you already love Carplay, you’re going to love this even more, because you don’t have to flick in and out of the CarPlay software, it’s just so much slicker, everything is integrated, it’s got that Apple familiarity”.
The question is whether that extra slickness and integration will be enough to get manufacturers to commit to CarPlay Ultra — on top, let’s not forget, of having to build a non-CarPlay UX for their customers who don’t have iPhones, or whose iPhones have run out of charge or whatever — or whether manufacturers will stick with the halfway-house approach that the soon-to-be-mine Audi already has today.
🖼️ Photos from Apple PR