Apple’s fancy new CarPlay will only work wirelessly

Apple has been talking about its next-generation CarPlay for two years now, with very little to show for it – the system is designed to unify interfaces across all of your car’s screens, including the instrument cluster, but so far only Aston Martin and Porsche have said they will ship cars with the system, with no specific dates in the mix.

And the public response from the rest of the industry to next-gen CarPlay has been very good overall. I talk to auto CEOs at Decoder quite often, and most of them seem quite skeptical about letting Apple come between them and their customers. “We have Apple CarPlay,” Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius told me in April. “If for some of the roles you feel more comfortable with that and switch, feel free. But handing over the entire main cabin unit – in our case, a passenger screen and everything – to someone else? The answer is no.”

This industry skepticism appears to have reached Apple, which posted two WWDC 2024 videos detailing the architecture It is project of next-generation CarPlay. Both made it clear that automakers will have a very of control over how things look and function, and even have the ability to just use your own interfaces for various features using something called “punch-through UI”. The result is an approach to CarPlay that is much less “Apple drives your car” and much more “Apple built a design toolkit for automakers to use however they want.”

See, now CarPlay is basically just a second display for your phone – you plug it into your car and your phone sends a video stream to the car. That’s why these cheap wireless CarPlay dongles work – they’re basically just wireless video adapters.

But if you want to integrate things like speedometers and climate controls, CarPlay needs to actually collect data from your car, display it in real time, and be able to directly control various features like HVAC. So for next-gen CarPlay, Apple breaks things down into what it calls “layers,” some of which run on your iPhone, but others that run locally in the car so they don’t break if the phone is unplugged. And the phone disconnects they are It will be a problem because the next-gen CarPlay only supports wireless connections. “Wireless connection stability and performance are essential,” says Apple’s Tanya Kancheva when talking about the next-generation architecture. Given that CarPlay connectivity issues still the most common problem in new cars It is wireless made everything worseThis is something Apple needs to keep an eye on.

There are two layers that work locally in the car, in slightly different ways. There is the “Overlay UI”, which contains things like turn signals and odometer. They may be styled, but everything about it is run entirely in your car and otherwise untouchable. Then there’s the “Local UI”, which contains things like the speedometer and tachometer – driving-related items that need to be updated all the time, basically. Car manufacturers can customize them in a variety of ways – there are different gauge styles and layouts, from analog to digital, and they can include logos and so on. Interestingly, there is only one font option: Apple’s San Francisco, which can be modified in several ways but cannot be swapped.

Apple’s goal for next-generation CarPlay is for it to start instantly – ideally when the driver opens the door – so that assets from these local UI elements are loaded into the car from your phone during the pairing process. . Automakers can also update the look of things and send updated assets over time over time – exactly how and how often is still unclear.

Then there’s what Apple calls the “Remote UI,” which is everything that runs on your phone: maps, music, travel information. This is the most similar to CarPlay today, except now it can run on any other screen in your car.

The final layer is called “UI punch-through” and is where Apple is ceding the most ground to automakers. Instead of coming up with its own interface ideas for things like backup cameras and advanced driver assistance features, Apple is allowing automakers to simply power their existing systems through CarPlay. When you shift into reverse gear, the interface simply shows your car’s backup camera screen, for example:

But automakers can use the punch-hole UI for basically anything they want, and even link CarPlay buttons to their own interfaces. Apple’s example here is a vision of multiple interface ideas colliding at once: a button in CarPlay to control massage seats that could show native CarPlay controls or simply place it in the car’s own interface.

Or a hardware button to choose driving modes could send you to CarPlay settings, link you to the automaker’s iPhone app, or just open the car’s native settings:

Apple’s approach to HVAC is also a compromise: the company isn’t really rethinking anything about how HVAC controls work. Instead, it’s allowing automakers to customize a toolkit’s controls to match the car’s system and even display views of the car’s interior that match trim and color options. If you’ve ever looked at a car with a weird SYNC button that keeps multiple climate zones paired, well, the next generation of CarPlay also has a weird SYNC button.

All of this is kept running at 60fps (or higher if the car’s system supports it) by a new dedicated UI timing channel, and much of the underlying compositing relies on OpenGL running in the car itself.

In short, it’s a lot of information and what appears to be a lot of Apple realizing that automakers aren’t just going to give up on their interfaces – especially since they’ve already invested in designing these types of custom interfaces for their native systems. , many of which now run on Unreal Engine with lots of fun animations and have Google services like Maps directly integrated. Allowing automakers to access these interfaces through CarPlay could finally speed up adoption — and it could also create a mix-and-match interface nightmare.

That said, it’s telling that no one has seen anything but renders of next-gen CarPlay anywhere yet. We’ll have to see what it will be like if this Porsche and Aston arrive, and whether that leads anyone to adopt it.