Apple has been talking about its next generation of CarPlay for two years now with very little results: 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. said they would ship cars with the system, without any specific date in the mix.
And public response from the rest of the industry to next-gen CarPlay has been mostly positive overall. I talk to auto CEOs on Decoder quite often, and most of them seem quite skeptical about allowing Apple to come between them and their customers. “We have Apple CarPlay,” Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius told me in April. “If for certain roles you feel more comfortable with that and want to alternate, be my guest. But handing over the entire main cockpit unit – in our case, passenger display and all – to someone else? The answer is no.”
This industry skepticism appears to have rubbed off on Apple, which released two videos from WWDC 2024 detailing the architecture and design of next-generation CarPlay. Both have made it clear that automakers will have a plot control over how things look and work and even have the ability to simply use their own interfaces for various features using what is called “punch-through user interface”. The result is an approach to CarPlay that looks a lot less like “Apple manages your car” and more like “Apple has created a design toolkit that automakers can use however they want.”
You see, at the moment, CarPlay is essentially just a second monitor for your phone: you connect to your car and your phone sends a video feed to the car. That’s 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 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 has divided things into what it calls “layers,” some of which run on your iPhone while others run locally on the car so they don’t won’t break if your phone disconnects. And the phone disconnects are is going to be a problem because next-gen CarPlay only supports wireless connections. “Wireless connection stability and performance are critical,” says Apple’s Tanya Kancheva of the next-generation architecture. Since CarPlay connectivity issues remain the most common problem in new cars and wireless has made the situation worse, it’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 contains things like your turn signals and odometer. These can be styled, but everything is completely run on your car and otherwise untouchable. Then there’s the “local UI,” which contains things like your speedometer and tachometer — driving-related stuff that needs to be updated all the time, basically. Automakers can customize them in several ways: there are different gauge styles and layouts, from analog to digital, and they can include logos and more. Interestingly, there is only one font choice: Apple’s San Francisco, which can be changed in a variety of ways but cannot be replaced.
Apple’s goal for next-generation CarPlay is to have it start instantly – ideally when the driver opens the door – so that the assets for these local UI elements are loaded onto the car from your phone during the coupling process. Automakers can also update the look of things and send refreshed assets over the phone over time – exactly how and how often is still a little unclear.
Then there’s what Apple calls “Remote UI,” which brings together everything that runs on your phone: maps, music, travel information. It’s the closest thing to CarPlay today, except now it can work on any other screen in your car.
The final layer is called the “punch-through user interface,” and it’s where Apple cedes 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 rear view camera screen, for example:
But automakers can use the punch-through UI for virtually anything they want and even deeply bind CarPlay buttons to their own interfaces. Apple’s example here is a take on several interface ideas colliding at the same time: a button in CarPlay to control massage seats that can either display native CarPlay controls or simply drop you into the car’s own interface. the car.
Or, a hardware button to select driving modes could send you either to the CarPlay settings, to a deep link to the automaker’s iPhone app, or simply to open the car’s native settings:
Apple’s approach to HVAC is also a compromise: The company isn’t really rethinking how HVAC controls work. Instead, it allows automakers to customize a toolbox’s controls to fit the car’s system and even display previews of the car’s interior that match trim and trim options. color. If you’ve ever looked at a car with a weird SYNC button that keeps different climate zones paired, well, the next generation of CarPlay also has a weird SYNC button.
All of this continues to run at 60 frames per second (or higher, if the car’s system supports it) thanks to a new dedicated UI sync channel, and much of the underlying composition relies on OpenGL running on the car itself.
All in all, that’s a lot of information and makes it seem like a lot of Apple is realizing that automakers aren’t going to just abandon their interfaces – especially since they’ve already invested in the designing this type of custom interfaces for their native systems. many of which now run on Unreal Engine with lots of fun animations and integrate directly with Google services such as Maps. Allowing automakers to create these interfaces through CarPlay could finally accelerate adoption – and it could also create a nightmare of mix-and-match interfaces. .
That said, it’s telling that no one has yet seen anything other than renderings of next-gen CarPlay. We’ll have to see what it would look like if these Porsches and Astons ever arrived and whether that would entice anyone else to adopt them.