Apple has been talking about its next generation of CarPlay for two years with very little to show for it: the system is designed to unify the interfaces on every screen in your car, including the instrument cluster, but so far only Aston Martin and Porsche have done it. made. They said they will ship cars with the system, with no specific dates in the mix.
And public response from the rest of the industry to next-gen CarPlay has been pretty good overall. I talk to auto CEOs about Decoder quite often, and most of them seem pretty 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 performances, you feel more comfortable with that and switch back and forth, be my guest. But handing over the entire cabin head unit (in our case, a passenger screen and all) to someone else? The answer is no.”
That industry skepticism appears to have affected Apple, which posted two videos from WWDC 2024 detailing the architecture and design next-generation CarPlay. Both made it clear that automakers will have a batch of control over how things look and work, and even have the ability to use their own interfaces for various functions using something called “Punch UI”. The result is an approach to CarPlay that's much less “Apple drives your car” and much more “Apple created a set of design tools for automakers to use however they want.”
Look, right now CarPlay is basically just a second monitor for your phone: you connect to your car, and your phone sends a video stream to the car. This is why those cheap wireless CarPlay dongles work: They're basically just wireless display adapters.
But if you want to integrate things like speedometers and climate controls, CarPlay needs to collect data from your car, display it in real time, and be able to control various functions like HVAC directly. So for next-gen CarPlay, Apple breaks things down into what it calls “layers,” some of which run on your iPhone, but others run locally in the car so they don't break if your phone goes offline. and the phone disconnects are It will be a problem, because next-generation CarPlay only supports wireless connections. “Wireless stability and performance are essential,” says Apple's Tanya Kancheva while talking about the next-generation architecture. Given the technology-woes-continue-to-erode-new-vehicle-dependability”>CarPlay connectivity issues remain the most common problem in new cars and tech-consumers-still-arent-connecting”>wireless made it worseThat's something Apple needs to keep an eye on.
There are two layers that run locally on the car, in slightly different ways. There's the “Overlay UI,” which has things like the turn signals and the odometer. These can be designed, but everything about them runs entirely on your car and is otherwise untouchable. Then there's the “Local UI,” which has things like the speedometer and tachometer, driving-related things that basically need to be updated all the time. Car manufacturers can customize them in several ways: there are different styles and designs of gauges, from analog to digital, and they can include logos, etc. Interestingly, there is only one font option: Apple San Francisco, which can be modified in several ways, but cannot be swapped.
Apple's goal for next-generation CarPlay is for it to launch instantly, ideally when the driver opens the door, so that the assets of these local UI elements are loaded into the car from your phone during the pairing process. Automakers can update the look of things and also send updated assets over the phone over time; Exactly how and how often is still unclear.
Then there's what Apple calls “Remote UI,” which is everything that runs on your phone: maps, music, travel information. This is the closest thing to CarPlay today, except now it can run on any other screen in your car.
The last layer is called the “perforated user interface” and is where Apple is ceding the most ground to automakers. Instead of coming up with its own interface ideas for things like rearview cameras and advanced driver assistance features, Apple is allowing automakers to simply power their existing systems through CarPlay. When you shift into reverse, the interface will simply show you your car's rearview camera screen, for example:
But automakers can use the UI for pretty much anything they want, and even deeply link the CarPlay buttons to their own interfaces. Apple's example here is a vision of multiple interface ideas colliding at the same time: a button in CarPlay to control massage seats that can display native CarPlay controls or simply place it in the car's interface itself.
Or a hardware button for choosing driving modes could send you to CarPlay settings, link to the automaker's iPhone app, or just open the car's native settings:
Apple's approach to HVAC is also what amounts to a compromise: the company isn't really reconsidering anything about how HVAC controls work. Instead, it allows automakers to customize controls from a set of tools to match the car's system and even show previews of a car's interior that matches trim and color options. If you've ever seen a car with a weird SYNC button that keeps multiple climate zones paired, well, the next generation of CarPlay has a weird SYNC button too.
All of this is kept running at 60fps (or higher, if the car's system supports it) by a new dedicated UI sync channel, and much of the underlying compositing relies on OpenGL running in the car.
Overall, that's a lot of information, and what it seems is that Apple realizes 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 built in. Allowing automakers to access those interfaces through CarPlay could ultimately speed up adoption, and could also create a combination interface nightmare.
All 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's like if this Porsche and Aston ever arrive, and if that prompts anyone else to adopt them.
