I bought my first car last week and I have been fascinated by CarPlay, the system enabled by connecting an iPhone with your car. My car has a simple 8 inch screen that lights up with Apple’s familiar UI, apps and settings when paired to an iPhone. I particularly enjoy seeing the Home View with various widgets - one for my active Maps route, one for my Music controls and if approaching, then a very useful Up Next Calendar event.
So, fresh from all this car experience, when I saw on Monday that Apple had two sessions on the “next-generation” CarPlay, I immediately set some time aside to watch them. The description made it very clear that it was for auto manufacturers, not app developers, but it was fun nevertheless to understand what plans Apple had in store for this system. And judging from YouTube metrics, looks like I wasn’t the only one keen to watch these videos!
After watching them, I can safely say that the future of driving has never been more exciting. Apple might not make its own car, but their vision for CarPlay is stunning. It brings the best of Apple combined with the experience, aesthetics and brand image of your favourite carmaker - Porsche, BMW, Aston Martin, Mercedes, Kia and a lot more. Most known brands are already on board for the next generation CarPlay experience and in the next few years, we should see a lot of affordable cars enabling this experience too!
Take a look at some of these pictures showing the power of next-generation CarPlay, digital dashboards have never looked this aesthetic before.
The first talk in which Apple covers the various design elements that the car maker can incorporate as part of this system makes it very clear that the car manufacturer’s branding and Apple’s UI can co-exist together. The traditional CarPlay experience simply looks like an iPhone being mirrored on your car. This new system is a stark departure from this wherein the car manufacturer will specifically design how each element should look and feel inside the car. Things like the speedometer UI can be controlled with a wide range of customisation options to create the perfect brand aesthetic so that each car’s experience looks dramatically different from the other but still has the reliable experience of CarPlay within.
As you can see, the core of this new experience is the idea that every screen in your car will be powered by CarPlay, including your instrument cluster! At first thought, it seems scary to think that your iPhone will be powering your car’s instrument cluster - what if you run into some issues? But Apple’s system is very cleverly designed. The instrument cluster UI is installed as a package when your iPhone is first paired to your car and updated on every pair. The result is that the experience is instantaneous and is unaffected by things like Bluetooth or WiFi interference.
It was fascinating to see the amount of thought that has gone into the architecture of this system and I have broken it down in this simple sketch -
As depicted in the diagram, every screen powered by CarPlay can be broken down into four parts -
The Overlay UI -
This portion is completely controlled by your car and it’s simply overlaid (duh!) on CarPlay’s UI. These include important indicators like your headlights, handbrake, wipers etc. Apple’s system cleverly works with this UI and seamlessly overlays this in a way that it looks as if it belongs to the CarPlay system.
The Remote UI -
This portion is the fancy stuff you see with CarPlay, like the maps, music controls or any other additional feature you have access to from your iPhone. This feature is fully controlled by your iPhone and works very similar to how traditional CarPlay works today.
The Local UI -
This is my favourite portion. The Local UI is the elements on your instrument cluster like your speedometer, fuel gauge, RPM and other details you might want to display behind the steering wheel. Apple has done something incredibly clever here - when your iPhone first pairs with your car, it delivers a package of OpenGL render content that your car can process and render on screen. This includes the design information of how the gauges should look. So while the car is responsible for rendering this content, the actual content itself is delivered from your iPhone. This ensures reliability and robustness and the elements on this screen are unaffected by WiFi or Bluetooth interference.
The Punch Through UI -
This includes elements that occasionally surface on your screen like the reverse camera, ADAS etc. In the current system, when a reverse camera activates, it takes over the screen and CarPlay is inactive. With the new system, CarPlay is able to render these elements within its UI. Again, the rendering is done by the car but CarPlay renders it effectively such that you feel it’s all part of one seamless experience.
Current Status
As I mentioned earlier, brands have the ability to customise all these elements, so we can expect that each brand will have a different aesthetic when they launch. Porsche and Aston Martin have already unveiled their designs and they look very different from each other.
One important note is that the next generation CarPlay is wireless only and not supported by wired methods. This could be to ensure that the iPhone is able to connect instantly with your car and start showing data instead of waiting to be plugged in.
Future
If I had one wish for this new system, I would say it would be great if Apple could also add video apps to CarPlay. Now that every screen can be controlled, it makes sense that some screens be allowed to play video so that other passengers can enjoy video content from their favourite iPhone apps.
The first cars with this new system of CarPlay might hit the roads later this year but it might take a while before this gets adopted by a larger number of manufacturers. By the end of this decade though, I am sure the new CarPlay experience will become the norm.