If you haven’t paid attention to Apple news last month, tell yourself that it’s better not to wait for the Apple Car. At the end of February, it became known that the company had canceled plans to launch its own car. The reasons were high costs and little progress. And the main chip was almost ready. But nothing, we will not see the Apple Car.
Apple’s goals, according to leaks, are now focused on investing resources in the area of artificial intelligence. However, a big doubt remains in the air and it is whether or not they will apply the advances obtained in CarPlaythe system used to connect iPhones to cars from other manufacturers.
The new CarPlay aims to be the big beneficiary of the farewell to the Apple Car
To begin with, you should not confuse Apple Car with CarPlay. The second is, as we already told you in the introduction, the system that Apple uses to connect an iPhone to a car screen. On this screen we can access iPhone applications prepared to work in a car (map applications, music and podcast players, etc.).
The Apple car, on the other hand, was the complete package. Not only was it going to include the particularities of an electric vehicle at the mechanical level, but it was also going to obtain various technologies that are currently suspended. From autonomous driving patents to the in-car navigation system, it was surely going to look a lot like CarPlay.
Of these driving licenses, it can be expected that they will eventually be sold or issued to third parties. What is expected from the multimedia system is that it will eventually be integrated into the new iteration of CarPlay arriving this year and which, although it is not officially called that, is known as CarPlay 2.
This is what the new CarPlay looks like according to an image shown by Apple in its presentation
The idea of this new CarPlay is to benefit from not one, but several screens integrated into the vehicle. For this, Apple has created eight new applications intended to management of the vehicle itself beyond traditional applications who already has the “old” CarPlay. Thus, we find complete communication with the vehicle systems, allowing us to obtain widgets and advanced tools to know tire pressure, control the air conditioning or close the doors.
The problem is, as Mark Gurman reported in his last newsletter, Apple works separately with each manufacturer. Because yes, there are minimum standards common to all cars, but since they are not all identical, nor do they have identical functions and screens, Apple works with each one to make the system as accessible and practical as possible. .
In any case, it does not seem unreasonable for Apple to suggest that these manufacturers add some of the advances already made for their own vehicles. It’s unclear where they stood in that regard, but if they have something, the logic is to take advantage of it that way instead of keeping it in a drawer of failed ideas forever.
What if we saw an Automotive CarPlay in the purest style of what Android does?
This is what Android Automotive looks like as a native system in some vehicles
Another possibility that some analysts are already considering is to imitate what Google is doing with Android Automotive, which should not be confused with Android Auto. The latter is, so to speak, the rival of CarPlay, since it is a system designed to connect an Android mobile phone to a car. The first is actually the car’s native system
Until now, the only way to use something from Apple in a car was to connect it to CarPlay or put the iPhone directly into a holder. However, this idea of creating a native CarPlay could be interesting. Visually it could be very similar and even more convenient for the user since they don’t even need to have an iPhone. Obviously Apple would have to provide some benefit to bring them into their domain and extra for iOS users would be their thing, but it’s not required.
What makes sense in this hypothesis (we emphasize that there is nothing official) is that licensing the entire pack to car manufacturers to acts on their native system could give Apple even more advantages. Once again, as in the previous case, the idea is not to waste the few or more advances already ready and even to continue working on them.
The fact is that what we see in CarPlay 2 shows good signs that Apple does not want to abandon the field of driving systems. And while it can’t be for your own car, it doesn’t seem like anyone inside is ruling out the idea of enjoying it with third parties. What they will do next with what they have in the cupboard is a mystery we will begin to solve in the coming months.
Cover image | Porsche
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