CarPlay Away
By doing away with CarPlay in the hope of getting services revenue, car manufacturers are just making it easier to reject their vehicles.
Entertaining piece about how GM’s move to drop CarPlay and Android Autos from its new cars. It’s not going well. The software is glitchy, and notably degrading the experience for people who used to connect their phones:
Once home, Waldron’s Blazer went to the dealership where it stayed for a month as technicians tried to diagnose the glitches. He wasn’t alone: Press reviewers and numerous customers ran into major software failures and vehicle faults, forcing GM to ground the vehicle and halt all sales starting in December. As the weeks dragged on at the shop, a service rep asked Waldron if there was anything he could do to make the situation right. “I said, ‘Well, you could put CarPlay back in it,’ ” Waldron recalls. “The guy was laughing and said, ‘I have a feeling I’m going to be hearing a lot of that.’ ”
I first experienced CarPlay in 2019, in a hired car for my school reunion in Scotland. I knew straight away that my next car would have CarPlay. It was too useful, too compelling. And, indeed, my EV has CarPlay and, to my delight, my courtesy car did, too. Result.
All GM has done is close their cars as an option to people who are used to CarPlay or Android Auto, the Android equivalent. By focusing on potential services revenue in this way, all they’re doing is giving themselves a bigger slice of a shrinking pie…
