CarPlay, Apple’s in-car iOS integration product, has shown up in flashy demos at various trade shows this year, but it will take a while before we see it on the roads, according to Lucas Mearian at Computerworld. Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, and Honda are all believed to be pushing back plans to include CarPlay in some of their new models until 2015.
Apple’s influence on the automotive industry may have been unintentional at first, but the arrival of the iPod created an infotainment paradigm shift. iPod owners wanted their MP3 players to connect to their cars. Less than a decade later and even the cheapest rental car now comes with a plethora of USB ports and wireless options for piping one’s tunes through the car’s speakers. CarPlay is an evolution of this approach, moving the display from the mobile device to the car’s center stack, as well as integrating Siri into the infotainment system.
An Apple-created solution, (potentially) free of the kludginess that often comes with third-party systems may help sell cars to the 42 percent of American smartphone users who have iOS, but equally might do little to attract their Android-using counterparts, who outnumber them 5 to 4 domestically and by quite a considerable margin worldwide.
Google, like Apple, is also hard at work with its own bridge into our cars, Android Auto. You can read my colleague Ron Amadeo’s thoughts following some quality time with Android Auto, but it may be a while before you’re able to poke at its icons on a dashboard of your very own. Like CarPlay, its roll out will depend on each participating car company refreshing their various models, and as we’ve explored before, that happens at a different tempo to that of Silicon Valley.
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