Somewhat agreed (I prefer the Tesla infotainment system over CarPlay, but they both have their own advantages, despite being imo equally good overall), but I would say it’s not super relevant to the argument. And only because Tesla infotainment is the only car manufacturer’s first-party infotainment system I’ve seen that can hold a candle to CarPlay. Not a single other one I’ve seen was even close. CarPlay was the best I could hope for, because anything that was first-party (excluding Tesla) was absolutely awful.

I don’t remember which specific brands had CarPlay and which ran their own infotainment systems, but I remember a couple years ago visiting dealerships of BMW/Mercedes/Honda/Toyota/Kia/Subaru/Ford and walking away either relieved that the car had CarPlay or internally cursing at their first-party infotainment system and promising myself to not even bother trying next time.

Doesn't matter because CarPlay and AA allow you to bring whatever apps you want to with you. If you listen to podcasts or books on your phone, you can continue them from the CarPlay/AA interface next time you drive.

CarPlay and Android Auto give you the choice of your own app and full integration with the rest of your listening life.

That's a statement about audio playing only though. To first approximation the core job of a car infotainment product is map and navigation display. Everything else is noise.

People listen to audio in their cars a lot more than they use navigation.

Have you not used maps via CarPlay?

I think CarPlay is kind of stupid because the ONLY apps that make any sense are audio and maps. Both of which don’t need much variety… Google Maps, plus a handful of audio apps, and the infotainment system is complete.

Hmm waze is hugely popular where I come from, because of all the police speed traps it crowdsources. And I’ve not seen that as part of an official infotainment system like ever.

And to be fair I prefer waze, not just because it makes driving simpler, but the community feeling you get by marking stopped cars or other obstructions on the road for others to pay attention to.

Unless automakers organize and come together to build a common os/ui layer, I don’t see apps like that ever being present in official infotainment systems.

And audio book apps change all the time too - local variants with local libraries, language learning apps etc. There is quite the variety of stuff you could do in a car.

I imagine a lot of companies would like to integrate their apps to cars. Think the police, ambulances, taxis/Uber, etc. Currently they just solve the problem by mounting more devices to the car.

And even if you want to use only audio and maps, then there are still a selection of audio streaming providers and map providers around.

Yes. It's awful.

Plus CarPlay it's pretty unstable and requires cable on some cars.

Offline maps such as Gaia don’t work on Tesla so that is it failing at its job compared to CarPlay

Maybe you can use your phone for when you actually go offline once a year…

try every week or two?

camping hiking etc bring me places without reception.

driving between towns here (BC, canada) often mean long stretches of road without reception.

Tesla's Spotify app had a long standing bug where it couldn't recognize playlists with more than 100 songs. To be dependent on a car company to give bugs for every individual apps rather than to just mirror from your phone, which will have patched apps right away..

Yeah its like smart TVs but worse

Plus, that musky smell…

If that were true, Tesla would have no problem offering CarPlay and Android Auto compatibility.

After all, it’s just a protocol to let your phone use the display (or part of it) as a second monitor.

My theory is that Tesla want to strongly encourage people to use the in-built navigation that works very hard to ensure you don't run out of charge.

Or because they want to charge a subscription for "premium data" which nobody would buy if there was CarPlay.

You don't need premium data for online maps. Premium data is for sat maps, music and live camera views. Also at $10 per month it's actually quite cheap.

Which is $10 per customer per month more than they’d get if everyone was using CarPlay / Android Auto.

It’s been proven time and time again that vertical integration is a massive money earner and you can bet that if Tesla were to release a smartphone then support for that in their cars would be a software update that follows immediately after. But since there’s no plans for a phone, the next best thing is a subscription-based infotainment system.

Can carplay live stream video from hyundai’s cameras..?

We are talking about mapping and music. Not parking sensors

You mean that feature I've never used?

I pay for premium data only because of Spotify and live traffic. Which I wouldn't have to do if it had CarPlay.

Are you saying you can't listen to music in a Tesla without a subscription?

Bluetooth, radio, usb and using your phones hotspot is still an option (tho unrealistic given how shit iOS hotspot is)

ah right, that is just internet connection for anything else but maps

I'm saying I can't get live traffic on my Tesla maps without a subscription.

Yeah it doesn't seem to be a profit centre, at the moment anyway.

It's also for live traffic.

it is not just that, and cheap decks with laggy carplay/AA unfortunately prove that some processing happens external to the phone

I assume every touchscreen monitor has its own processor, but that does not mean it is seeing any data other than the video stream. And I imagine that video stream data is not going elsewhere.

Lol. Just a protocol that you need to get a blessing from Apple and pay them dearly.

> pay them dearly.

Source? I cannot find a single reference to Apple collecting fees, much less onerous fees, for implementing CarPlay functionality.

Automakers don’t like CarPlay because it makes cars fungible. I like CarPlay because it makes cars fungible. Apple seems like it would give away CarPlay (at least for now) to broaden the reach of its platform.

Unless I want to use my favorite podcast app - Overcast - or use my radio station’s CarPlay app.

It has a far more limited selection of apps and Some I use daily are not available so it really doesn’t matter if it works better because for me it doesn’t work at all.