I don't want to have an infotainment system in my car I need to spend hundreds of euros to update the software for. Or order a Totally Legit Upgrade DVD from Slovenia via eBay for only 50€. That just happens to require me to insert a CD that says "unlock" on it first :D

Then the upgrade took two hours, 1h 50min of which the device was totally unresponsive and I wasn't sure if it would be OK to turn off the car or not.

Oh, and the maps were always out of date. It cost more to get the "update" (which was always old) than it would've been to buy a separate GPS unit.

And this was a premium VW car, albeit a bit older at the time.

I'd much rather use the device in my pocket that has eons more computing power than all the CPUs in all the cars I've ever owned combined, with up to date maps, traffic data and regular free software updates. The device I can upgrade separately from my car at any time I want.

If a car doesn't support CarPlay, I'm not buying it. (One of the top5 reasons I haven't bought a Tesla)

i.e. it's not about being a fan of particular brands, it's a self-interested desire for a decent UX/platform.

Apple/Google are not a nice experience. If you could share your screen would have been ok. But running special apps is out of discussion. I tried Android Auto. It is terrible, it needs a lot of time to set up (permissions, settings on car), the car must be stopped (ignition off) and 95 % of apps installed are not compatible. In the end, to listen music i have memory sticks and for navigation a Garmin.

First time plugging in, a simple confirmation on my phone to allow connection. CarPlay starts, everything works out of the box. Now I can phone, can search my music library (try that with bluetooth) and I have a voice control that mostly understands what I want to play.

A premium vehicle I owned (Mercedes Benz) needed the dealer to install the new maps, only had support for BT music on my phone, and cost more than a decent Android tablet each time I wanted new maps.

Honestly, if the automobile manufacturers want to wrest back control from Google/Apple they had better up their game while lowering their greed.

Before Android/iOS was viable, they felt no shame about their display of naked greed when it came to nickle-and-diming the owner.

If they want people to use their system as anything other than an interface to a phone, they need to make the updates free, make the system reliable, and make it so much better than the basic phone interface that people prefer their system to the Android/iOS one.

I have little compassion for poor GM not being able to upsell me a touch screen system that doesn’t work

They sold a lot of nav units that way (and that’s about the only way, IMO).

Five years later and the touchscreen keeps causing ghost touches every time the car stops, I actively have to make sure I'm in some obscure menu where random touches won't start calling people or changing the radio channel.

I like and will always prefer that I can get into any vehicle with CarPlay/Android Auto and trust that my phone is not giving out any information.

If infotainment systems matter at all to consumers, we'd expect to see GM take a hit for this, and get their market share eaten by competitors who don't do so.

I think there’s a better chance of this happening than they believe. I bought a new Camry in 2017, right at the start of their 4 year upgrade cycle (i.e., the 2018 version). I chose a Camry due to their well-known reliability.

However, none of the new vehicle models that Toyota sold had CarPlay at that point, and it was unclear whether Toyota would ever offer it at all. After a few months of driving my new car and then getting the chance to use CarPlay in a rental car, I decided I would not buy another Toyota in the future because it was so annoying to be aware of the experience that could easily exist involving navigation, music, etc. but that did not.

Toyota eventually relented in 2018, and luckily my Camry had upgrade support to install CarPlay (so clearly it had been planned a while ago for this model). But they would have lost me as a customer otherwise, and I doubt my perspective on this is unique. It’s sort of curious that such a trivial-to-implement aspect of the car’s design can have such an outsized influence on a purchase decision.

We ended up buying something else that was much more comfortable and better designed (including CarPlay!) and haven't regretted it.

It’s already happening. When GM announced no more CarPlay, we took the $60K we were going to use on a new Blazer EV and gave it to Hyundai instead. (Good thing, too, or we’d still be waiting on that Blazer instead of driving our Ioniq 5 since April.)

I have a Toyota RAV4 from 2 years ago and the display is straight from the '80s.

I had to use the gps ONCE and I almost crashed into a trashbin because I had to manually follow the car pointer as it was leaving the display. Yes, that's right.

If I was Apple or Google, I would make GM execs use a 15 years old version and make it cash I've a day. Revenge.

apple is a hardware company and manages to buck this trend.

Apple and Google got to where they are because people actively want to buy and use their stuff. Apple stuff isn’t cheap and for most of Google’s products, their nearest competitors are a click away and have been even when they didn’t completely dominate major product categories.

People have lots of experience with in-car infotainment and navigation, and here’s the real alternative: people would rather mount their phones in their car using an aftermarket kit or literally just hold their phones in their hands while driving than use the in-built infotainment and navigation systems that car makers provide. CarPlay and Android Auto provide them a nicer experience than doing that which is why new car buyers look for these options by name.

Nothing stops vehicle manufacturers from making the best entertainment system any customer could wish for. Instead, they’d rather nickel and dime their customers for everything they’ve got.

Subscriptions for connectivity, subscriptions for car features, subscriptions for basic entertainment functionality, fees for current maps, and on and on it goes. All the while pinching pennies wherever they can by using yesteryear’s computers barely more powerful than a Raspberry Pi (if that) while inflating prices in the US market on cars sold cheaper overseas and lobbying to keep the market as closed off as possible so overseas competitors cannot enter the market.

And make no mistake, this isn’t about being “wary of partnerships”; GM happily licenses Android Automotive.

This is about collecting as much data as possible and capturing revenue by gating as much as possible behind a paywall.

After all, who will pay for connectivity and other features when people can hook up their pocket computers with all that to the screen?