I said my next car would have to have CarPlay but the Tesla software in my Y is good enough to live without it. I rent a lot of cars with CarPlay, and like it, but now that the Tesla software supports both Apple Music and Spotify, I’m good. That said, I wouldn’t buy a car that supported Google Carwhatever but not Apple CarPlay.

As far as i know the tesla car has its own spotify account. So this only works, if you’re the only one driving your car. In my family up to five people drive a car - I don’t think i want one spotify-account used by five people.

This was only the case in Europe. US cars instead come with a Slacker account, and you need to associate your Spotify account to access it, same with Apple Music.

Not sure if the associations are per-user or per-car, though. I believe there was work to move them along with some other settings to your "user profile" and would go with you across cars.

It's not the same Spotify account you login to your phone with, or it only supports logging into one account?

It used to be that way, now you can set a spotify account per driving profile

That was the case a few years ago—now you just associate your personal Spotify account with your Tesla driver profile. It auto-switches to the right one based on the driver, which works great!

Supporting Apple Music isn’t enough. For instance, I use Overcast as my podcast player and it has excellent Carplay support.

I won’t buy a car that doesn’t support CarPlay.

I have a Model 3 right now and like it well enough I guess, but I think next time I get a car my ideal is to get a non-Tesla EV that has CarPlay. My hope was that Tesla has pushed the industry enough to start making competitive EVs so that I don't have to get another Tesla. And I think I would prefer using CarPlay. I've used it a couple times in rental cars and really liked it. The screens are smaller and less nice than Tesla's, but the navigation on Tesla kind of sucks compared to Apple and Google and I think that's more valuable to me.

Tesla is the gold standard for in car infotainment. I wouldn’t trust GM or even google to be as good at software as Tesla without them establishing a track record first.

The Model 3’s system is one of the few out there that can actually compete with/replace CarPlay.

Agreed, but I have my gripes with the system. We waited a long time for Apple Music to come to the infotainment - and even then it's slow, you cannot adjust to a higher music quality, you can't download playlists to local storage, I need to login every month, etc.

Additionally, my 2019 Model 3's infotainment is noticeably slower than a 2023's. I'd hate to be limited by compute in a car that I'll probably replace in 8 years. If it's my phone, the replacement time is much shorter (and much more affordable!).

It would not stop me from buying another Tesla. The infotainment is generally fantastic (as is the rest of the car). But CarPlay would make the music and podcast experience so much better.

Tesla started shipping the new AMD based MCU3 at the end of 2021. MCU2 in previously Model 3s is an Intel Atom architecture.

Previously Tesla offered MCU1 to MCU2 paid upgrades for Model S/X owners. It seems unlikely that Tesla will offer anything similar for MCU2 to MCU3 but not impossible that it could be done as a 3rd party retrofit. The connectors and physical dimensions are different so it’s not trivial.

It _is_ excellent, but it is annoyingly ignorant of integrating with phones. If you have an Android phone you can send and receive texts, but no other notifications come in and nothing else is projected there either. If you have an iPhone, it works _sometimes_ but I am rarely able to reply to messages using voice successfully. I wish it better extended into my phone, but it's largely because of Apple's rules, which I guess aren't Tesla's fault—but are a side-effect of not using carplay.

While annoying, my real gripe is what this says about their development process. If you can’t get these things right, how can I trust that you will get the safety critical software right?

> you can’t get these things right, how can I trust that you will get the safety critical software right

Does any major car manufacturer routinely nail their infotainment systems?

Yeah… I honestly think that altho the Tesla infotainment system isn’t perfect, if we’re gonna judge the safety competency of car companies based on how good their in-house infotainment is, Tesla’s would be far and above the best (until the Apple car comes out or something…).

Infotainment is so horribly universally bad that Apple CarPlay and the Android equivalent came into being.

No, but other manufacturers are much more conservative about how they market their software (e.g., naming it ‘driver assist’ vs ‘autopilot’). It’s an obvious and explicit declaration that their software should not be relied on to be the main mitigation in safety-critical scenarios.

Model 3's system is better than other cars I've owned, but not as good as what I think CarPlay can be. The only advantage of my Model 3 vs the rental cars I've used with CarPlay was that Model 3's screen is bigger and nicer and so the maps look nicer and I can have music info/controls on screen at the same time as maps. But both Apple and Google navigation is a lot better than Tesla's navigation. I also use Apple Music and was initially excited about getting integration into Tesla, but I continue to just use it through my phone instead so it ended up not mattering. The one thing I hate about Tesla's system is the semi-frequent UI changes. A moving car with a touch screen is not the place where I want to have to re-learn some aspect of a UI after I get a system update.

The UI updates essentially once a year to keep up the with massive influx of features that are being added, and keep those features accessible and organized on the available screen real estate.

Basically with Tesla you get the latest model year car software on an ongoing basis, and it’s revolutionary from an owner’s perspective.

The alternative is needing to trade in/buy a whole new model year car to get to enjoy whatever new feature, which is how it always used to work, and is so scammy.

If you don’t want the latest software, you can always choose not the install it, but you would be seriously limiting the performance, comfort, safety and entertainment value of your car.

Most cars don’t get faster, safer, and cheaper to operate after you buy them, but Tesla’s do. The obvious trade-off to getting the latest model year’s software and features is getting the latest model year’s UI as well.