Now reverse your plan to kill CarPlay or I won't touch any of your vehicles.
I don't really care how great their new stereo head is, cars last a long time and there's 0% chance they'll keep up with the phone over the long term.
Now I'm right there with you on the mechanicals and exteriors.
However, the display often ends up too low on the dash in older vehicles with a retrofit, modern cars typically place it higher on the dash almost level with the instrument cluster to make it easier to check for navigation etc, most modern cars can even sync carplay directions to a secondary display in the instrument cluster. The siri mic solution can be compromised too, depending on the vehicle and how you fit the mic. It's livable of course, but often not optimal.
I have CarPlay on my Subaru and use the Model 3 in the Bay Area. (Borrowed car [a].) Tesla's UX is unrivaled. But it still can't match Apple's seamlessness. Shitty as Siri is, it can dial my next conference call, pull up the place I was just searching for on my Mac and respond to texts, consistently and hands free.
[a] Funny enough, I had suggested a Bolt to the owner. They got uncomfortable with the thought of buying a discontinued model, and so gave Tesla their money.
No, because you will still have parts and trained technicians for it.
A car manufacturer integration fails on two counts:
1) I don't trust them to make good software. I dread to think what permissions I'd have to grant the GM app in order for it to read and write text messages but I'd fear data leaks, voice transcription errors, etc etc. and I don't want to have to choose a music/podcast service based on what they do and do not support.
2) They'd make you pay extra. You know they would. Maybe not to start but they'd introduce monthly fees for it all once they've got you locked in.
Edit: Tesla might be the exception here, but do you imagine GM is going to be shipping OS updates for a 10 year old car? I think not.
They have to, because in order to drive these features natively in your infotainment system they need active LTE/5G service.
Which is a total waste for the consumer, who likely already pays for such service for their smartphone, which has built in software designed to provide all these features to your infotainment system.
My iPhone...on my dashboard. There's far more to CarPlay than just Apple Music, and Tesla's offering isn't even close.
If automakers just can't get their act together to make a proper internet stereo/navigation system, they should develop an open standard allowing third parties to provide it instead. Not halfheartedly farm it out to the tech giants.
That's frustrating but tolerable on a $300 device. But on a $30,000 car?
We did upgrade the central computer a few years ago to get 4g support, but $1500 felt very cheap for a whole new center screen, a new higher resolution instrument cluster, and a new computer making the whole car run faster.
The beauty of CarPlay and Android Auto is that it turns your infotainment system into a dumb terminal for your smartphone. As long as it can decode the video and audio streams, there is no reason it will not continue to get new features indefinitely via phone upgrades and new versions of iOS or Android.
Our phones are perfectly capable of doing all the things these car companies want us to pay extra for.
CarPlay gives it to you for free, using the data plan you already pay for on your phone to fetch maps and stream music.
My car does not need it's own internet connection to do these things, my phone can do them just fine. And as CarPlay and Android Auto have shown, it is borderline trivial to turn the giant touchscreen in my car into a dumb terminal for my smartphone.
It's one thing to charge me a subscription for something I use regularly, it's another entirely to make me pay a subscription for something I already get somewhere else, just so I can have it in my car.
Fuck GM.