Apple's New CarPlay Becomes Last Hope to Crack the Auto Industry | Hacker News Reader

Apple's New CarPlay Becomes Last Hope to Crack the Auto Industry

bloomberg.com

24 pointsmfiguiere70 comments

I’m not a driver and so maybe my estimation is wrong here, but the mocked-up interface in the article looks like a disaster for driver distraction: a live map in the middle of the HUD, notification elements in the dashboard, and a touchscreen with actual apps on it (including the Books app?) within reach of the driver.

Smartphones have already increased distracted driving; it’s concerning to see both automotive and tech companies seemingly encourage the trend.

It's not - a lot of vehicles already have live map data on the cluster. That is to say, Apple isn't doing anything new here, they're just unifying it under their own system.

The Books app you see here is actually Apple's AudioBooks.

I think the live map looks quite nice (the amount of times I've had to glance over at my phone to see the GPS make me long for something like this), but the calendar and two analog clocks look decidedly less enticing. We need simpler interfaces that are easy to read what we need at a glance, not a bunch of distractions.

The problem with this, of course, is that it runs counter to the continuous consumption much of this industry has been built upon. Apple could probably pull it off if they wanted, given their ability to curb stomp companies into compliance, but they would have to actually want to do it and resist the constant stream of investors asking "why not increase upselling opportunities in the CarPlay UI?"

Much the same way that vinyl records are back in vogue, I wouldn't be surprised if someday some luxury car brands started advertising physical controls for minimal distractions someday, given the direction the entire automotive industry seems to be headed. Hopefully my old Toyota will keep on chugging until we see a physical resurgence, I can't stand the way automakers are trying to shove everything onto a single screen to cut costs.

Also, that's audiobooks, not iBooks.

Before Apple/Android CarPlay/auto drivers would get the equivalent of a refrigerator magnet and stick their phone to the center dash.

By comparison a larger resolution and UI restrictions on controls and apps make this outcome safer. A lot of apps and gestures on a phone don’t work in auto mode.

Alex Lindsay commented that he loved the big touch screens in cars because they are a perfect place for a suction cup mount for his phone.

There is a big warning over the touch screen on my rental car not to put suction cup mounts on it, with a fee of $1500 in case you break it.

That’s the way car HUDs already look, whether using CarPlay or the built-in one.

I had not seen one with the map right there behind the wheel

Manufacturers are already doing maps in the instrument cluster like you see in the story.

It's not Apple, but rather just what all manufacturers seem to be doing. And yes, it is extremely distracting. There is so much noise, so much to take you away from driving. In that one picture at the top of the article, you have of course the distracting colorful app icons (but people are used to those I guess) but also so much needless information. An icon of a garage door? Your schedule for the next couple days (you should not be looking at that while driving!)? Two clocks because you need to see alternate time zones? I can't even stand music apps displaying album art: just one more distraction to take you away from what you should be doing, driving, changing with every new song.

But hey, I purposefully sought to purchase a (manual) car a couple years ago that did not have a center screen, so clearly my opinion is in the minority.

The Books app is for audiobooks, FYI.

It’s all fun and games until Apple wants 30% of your revenue. I feel Apple has seriously harmed the trust of potential partners too much for them to bet the farm on deep integration.

If I were a car company I would try to focus on making good cars.

I'd leave the software to others, making sure to support both CarPlay and Android Auto.

Except they've gone away from standard sizes and replaceable head units in order to push people to new cars, so the software integration has become a driver of car sales and a big part of the "good car" experience. You can't assume you'll replace the stereo head later if you don't like it, so software features now influence the car industry.

Case in point, I have owned mostly Chevies through my life and have been mostly happy with them. But I won't buy the new ones because they've done away with plugging the phone in (or will in the future) and made their own. It's a cash grab to get our data and force subscriptions on us and I'm not buying it even if it's a good car.

The whole thing is absurd. We have to get a whole different car if we don't like a screen, but that's how it is now.

Most car manufacturers (with the notable exception being Tesla) think like this. A lot of the in-car software comes from third parties like TomTom. It makes sense until what happened to phones happens to cars and the hardware becomes increasingly a commodity and software the factor defining the user experience.

GM clearly does not.

They were in the news pretty prominently recently trumpeting their intention not to support Android Auto or CarPlay, but instead to roll their own system that they intend to monetize heavily.

There's a lot of software in a car besides the entertainment system, you can't leave that to carplay or android. To make good cars, car companies need to be able to write good software.

Right. There is a lot of innovation possible in controlling all the little embedded systems.

But I think that "car platform" should be clearly separated from the "userspace".

My sense is that why the legacy manufacturers are failing, at software, they have coupled the "userspace" to the "car platform". Updating UI in the center console is the same thing to them as updating the embedded code that controls the windshield wipers.

That being said, I admit you cannot fully leave the "userspace" to apple or google, because you, for example, probably have some custom kind of sunroof that doesn't fit in whatever generic APIs CarPlay and Android Auto offer for Sunroofs.

Additionally, if you go all in on Android Auto, you have no leverage when Google tries to extract more money.

At the same time, competing with Google or Apple on UX and continuity is a losing battle. When I enter the car, I want my car to continue playing the podcast I was listening to. No car manufacturer can do this, only Carplay/Android Auto can.

I guess the answer is to have good support for Android Auto/ CarPlay. But also have your own version as an insurance against being held hostage.

Tesla seems to do just fine without CarPlay or android car.

0 growth at the moment.

That is one way to spin it. At the same time Tesla model Y is also the best selling car model of 2023 worldwide, so outselling all models that come with CarPlay available…

I would wager that there were more cars with CarPlay and/or Android Auto sold in 2023 than Models Y, or any Tesla for that matter.

Sure, and i also prefer carplay, rather than something provided by the car manufacturer.

But Tesla shows that there are car companies that can build satisfactory entertainment software, which is not surprising as writing good software is something every car manufacturer need to do, considering how much software is used in a car.

It’s superior to carplay…

Depends on how loosely you define superior. It doesn't have my podcast app. It cannot send iMessages. I won't buy another Tesla if they don't add CarPlay support, because there are plenty of good EV alternatives that do now.

nope nopr nope.

Car manufacturers should engineer good cars.

Leave the good software engineering to good software engineering firms.

That is what GP is saying. There are two types of software in the car. The entertainment system and the software that drives the engines (ECU), lights, etc, etc. The car company should be good at software engineering to ensure that all software directly related with driving is done properly. And then leave the faster paced entertainment software to other suppliers.

Auto pilot, adaptive cruise control, engine start stop controller, brakes, gas, etc, etc. Modern cars can’t drive without software. 100m+ lines of code in a car, 70-100 cpus according to this article: https://medium.com/next-level-german-engineering/porsche-fut...

Exactly! That is the software I want the car engineers to focus on. I do expect most have their firmware provided by Bosch/Siemens or whichever supplier. But Tesla shows how much improvement there is to gain when designing cars from the ground up instead of from parts lists of a vendor.

At the same time the Polestar 2 is an example of a modern EV built using a legacy mindset, and it is great and spends way less time at the mechanic than my colleagues Model 3.

What do you mean with legacy mindset? The polestar 2 also contains many million lines of code, besides the software running carplay/android car.

Yep. If it were possible to buy a car with no native infotainment and just a dock slot for a phone and dumb screen for CarPlay/Android Auto, I would. Car infotainment turns outdated, unsupported, and near-useless at breakneck speed and is generally buggy lowest-bidder junk to begin with, so why not just skip all of that, save some cash on the BOM which can be passed on to the buyer, and just let me plug in my phone which will never have these problems?

I agree with the previous poster. If there’s one thing Silicon Valley has taught us, it’s the danger of allowing a tech firm to control the customer interface for your business: whether that’s taxi scheduling, food delivery, search, or automotive UX. Everything will go beautifully until lock-in is achieved, at which point the business switches to revenue maximization. I don’t know exactly what that will look like in the automotive world, but I suspect customers will pay for it in the end.

Almost certain when EV charging apps get embedded in carplay.

On a flip side - having one app instead of 10 would be nice…

Don't they (Apple) want a monthly fee from each install, causing the car manufacturers having to pass the cost on to their customers?

No, Apple doesn't charge for the existence of CarPlay in a particular car. The manufacturers used to for a while, probably to reclaim their perceived implementation costs and because the industry has worked that way for a long time, but that's not as common anymore, most (besides certain manufacturers) ship it as a default now.

Right - the problem is car companies ceeding that 30% to Apple, when they could be rent-seeking instead.

I worked for a car company in Infotainment for several years, and while I wasn't privy to any conversations like this, I can say that they (my company at least) are desperately brainstorming ways to come up with anything to make money. This is why we've seen all those crazy ideas like BMW trying to make seat warmers a subscription. They're trying to find some way to maintain a better cash inflow than selling a product.

I also spent time working with car makers while at Visa. There was a LOT of wishful thinking by carmakers that they could magic-up their own digital app stores (and pay for gas, for parking for drive-thru) all through their own proprietary infotainment platforms. There were these hopelessly unscaleable expectations that brands (McDonalds, Chevron etc.) would want to build and maintain custom apps just for, say, this model year's new 3-series BMW, and then do the same for every other car maker and model type. It was very much like the shortlived mindset of carriers trying to control downloadable mobile apps, prior to the iphone/appstore.

Rent-seeking by apple and rent-seeking by car makers are both legitimate concerns!

I guess the sentiment for the rest of us punters and hoopleheads is, if we have to be rent-sook by one of them, at least CarPlay is likely to have a less-unpleasant user experience?

If there are ten rent-seeking car manufacturers, you can conceivably buy your next car from a different company. If there are 1-2 phone OS makers (both coincidentally charging identical fees and duplicating the same business model) you’ve got many fewer options.

Isn't it rent seeking in both cases?

Depending on the specifics, 30% for a deep Apple partnership sounds like an amazing deal

The article was interesting until the “bbbut apple has to make money from CarPlay” without any assertions from Apple itself.

CarPlay is a feature not a revenue source. It drives device sales and increases retention for the ecosystem.

I have no clue why it needs to suck additional money from consumers.

I agree. Apple's play here is not as an additional revenue stream, but and additional means to be central in your digital life. Instead of using Bluetooth to the car's system or using built-in maps, you're using their tools.

I will never buy or rent another car that doesn’t support CarPlay. It’s not perfext but it’s pretty good and provides a uniform, dependable interface across many different cars. This is especially useful with rental cars, I won’t use a car without it anymore.

https://archive.ph/07JWe

This looks like a terrible distraction

The proliferation of these dash screens is very concerning.

In multiple models across several manufacturers the replacement cost is astronomical. $2000-$5000 for small screens and $5000-$10000+ for larger screens.

When these screens die instantly, and without warning, the vehicle becomes unuseable. You can get used (unwarranteed) screens for about half the price of new but then you are at the mercy of the dealership if they can find it in their hearts to flash it for you using the proprietary OEM software so that it will work in your vehicle.

I really hope Apple can find their way home again as the leading consumer hardware business they once were.

It feels like they have been in a seemingly never ending spiral of trying to figure out how to make money off services, while abandoning enterprise growth, hardware category innovation, and releasing new revolutionary software experiences.

I haven’t been wowed by anything from Apple since the ARM transition, but before then the iPhone X.

> I really hope Apple can find their way home again as the leading consumer hardware business they once were. [...] I haven’t been wowed by anything from Apple since the ARM transition, but before then the iPhone X.

That was in ... 2020.

> It feels like they have been in a seemingly never ending spiral of trying to figure out how to make money off services, while abandoning enterprise growth, hardware category innovation, and releasing new revolutionary software experiences.

Well, I guess 3 1/2 years?

Who is the leading consumer hardware business you think of if not Apple?

Samsung and Sony come to mind.

To be clear, I still view Apple as a leader, I just think they’ve lost focus and become lazy on their hardware innovation while they are draining all their resources on trying to be viewed as a serious services company.

Personal opinion, but Apple trying to be a News, Medical, Sports, Financial, and Movie company all at the same time is a bit much and is proving to not be executed very well by them. I get why they want it since the profit margins are easier, but I just feel like it goes against the DNA of the company and what I’d expect out of them.

There isn't really a company, especially a hardware company with 1B+ users that doesn't do this. After this size you can't really expand to new users, only to new services to sell. You have that influx of profits and the existing user base you can funnel to. You can't just be a phone/tablet/pc company, there just isn't that much to that segment YoY.

All depends on the companies goals and priorities, right?

Assuming Apple’s goal is to be the largest, richest, and most diversified company in the world - then sure, keep chasing honey pots. Maybe they can drill for oil, try to become an ad agency, and get their own bank charter next.

I’m obviously being cynical now, I just really don’t like (and think it’s gross) the direction Apple is going in now. It’s all shareholder and board appeasement, meanwhile employee retention and convictions are at the lowest I’ve seen from them. They just keep launching subpar devices and services hoping consumers will just follow them along for the ride, without actually offering any innovation in return.

I hope that mock-up isn't from Apple. It's terrible. Ironically, it demonstrates why nobody needs a huge screen like that. If Apple can't figure out how to fill it sensibly I'm not sure who can.

Then there's that huge gear indicator and the tiny climate controls right at the bottom...

It's from their 2022 WWDC presentation: https://youtu.be/q5D55G7Ejs8?t=2271

It's too bad cars are getting these proprietary things that are tied to a specific OS.

It's a significant R&D investment for sure, but it basically boils down to building a modern interface to talk to CAN-bus driven hardware from high-level software, and providing that data, along with audio/video output and user input, to an Apple smartphone.

If you do it right, the effort should be re-useable for an improved Android Auto experience as well, not that I know if anything like that is in the making as of now.

Speaking of, I was just wondering the other day:

Why did cars never get some sort of networking protocol, that would have let them "feel" the speed and bearing of other nearby vehicles and avoid collisions, jams etc?

Something like that could have been implemented with radio tech available half a century ago or even sooner.

They already tried this probably 20 years ago. The frequencies were allocated to car companies for inter-vehicle communication for exactly this purpose, and the car companies promptly did nothing with the technology except sit on it. Finally the FCC took it back because they clearly had no intention of doing anything with it. I can’t find a source, but I’m fairly sure it has now been allocated as the 6GHz WiFi band.

Qualcomm developed a tech for this:

https://www.qualcomm.com/products/automotive/c-v2x/overview

Mercedes has a concept (or maybe they have it on some models: https://group.mercedes-benz.com/innovation/case/connectivity... )

I look forward to the old trite HN comment of "I don't want my car to be calling home, I drive a 1980's fully mechanical car and I like it that way!"

Seems ripe for spoofed data. After all, how would you verify that what you receive from other cars is valid/real?

There are a hundred different ways to cause car accidents if that’s what you want to do; this would be adding a single, highly technical one.

In practice, people just don’t do that.

I disagree. Most obnoxious things you can do right now require some sort of physical presence and traceability. You can cause dangerous situations/accidents by blinding people with lasers. You can throw bricks or other obstructions on the highway, and so on.

The problem is that both of these acts immediately pinpoint you (or at least your general location) as the culprit, so it's pretty risky, not just from a law enforcement point of view but also from a "brick in the face" point of view where you might get a taste of your own medicine by the angry driver whose windshield got destroyed by your mischief.

A technology-based attack on the other hand is invisible. By the time someone even uncovers that this was an attack rather than a generic malfunction you're long gone or may not even have been physically there to begin with.

Is that protocol called the brake and signal lights?

Up until Silicon Valley got their hairy hands into self driving tech, there was never a need for such data to be communicated to other *cars* (not drivers).

I wonder if the families of the 19 000 who died in traffic last year in the US alone also consider this a solved problem...

You mean like the traffic monitoring and road hazard reporting of Waze, Google maps Apple maps, etc?

Having a car directly implement that protocol instead of software on an internet connected phone is of limited additional value but adds massive complexity.

> BPC > disable Dark Reader or enable Javascript for site

That's a new one for me

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