CarPlay Ultra Debuts with Aston Martin, but Broader Support Remains Elusive

Article Comments
1

Originally published at: CarPlay Ultra Debuts with Aston Martin, but Broader Support Remains Elusive - TidBITS

CarPlay is back in the news. Apple writes:

Starting today, CarPlay Ultra, the next generation of CarPlay, is available with new Aston Martin vehicle orders in the U.S. and Canada, and will be available for existing models that feature the brand’s next-generation infotainment system through a software update in the coming weeks. CarPlay Ultra builds on the capabilities of CarPlay and provides the ultimate in-car experience by deeply integrating with the vehicle to deliver the best of iPhone and the best of the car. It provides information for all of the driver’s screens, including real-time content and gauges in the instrument cluster, while reflecting the automaker’s look and feel and offering drivers a customizable experience. Many other automakers around the world are working to bring CarPlay Ultra to drivers, including newly committed brands Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis.

We wrote about “next-generation CarPlay” almost three years ago in “Seven Head-Scratching Features from WWDC 2022” (13 June 2022), when Apple said that supporting vehicles would start to be announced by late 2023. That timeline slipped significantly: the first CarPlay Ultra vehicle is coming in mid-2025, from a luxury manufacturer that sells just 6,000 vehicles annually at an average price of $325,000.

The delay may have been caused by the need to work with automakers to assuage concerns about Apple taking over the infotainment experience, effectively turning the car’s user interface into an extension of iOS. No automaker wants its cars to be thought of as iPhone accessories. That was part of General Motors’ decision to reassert control over its infotainment system (see “GM Plans to Phase Out CarPlay in Future EVs,” 5 April 2023). In response, Apple emphasizes how CarPlay Ultra will be customized for each automaker:

CarPlay Ultra allows automakers to express their distinct design philosophy with the look and feel their customers expect. Custom themes are crafted in close collaboration between Apple and the automaker’s design team, resulting in experiences that feel tailor-made for each vehicle. Drivers can also personalize the colors and wallpapers of themes to match their individual tastes.

For reference, CarPlay Ultra rounds out a competitive matrix of infotainment platforms from Apple and Google. These systems fall into two broad categories:

  • Projection-based systems, like CarPlay and Android Auto, run entirely on a connected smartphone, using the vehicle’s screen for display.
  • Embedded systems, like CarPlay Ultra and Android Automotive OS, run on the car’s internal hardware and integrate with vehicle systems such as climate control, instrument clusters, and cameras.

Most current vehicles—including those from Aston Martin—support both CarPlay and Android Auto. Many cars running Android Automotive OS also support CarPlay, but GM is a notable exception: its new EVs rely entirely on Android Automotive OS and allow smartphones to connect only via Bluetooth for calls and audio streaming. We’ll see if automakers using Android Automotive OS will integrate CarPlay Ultra alongside it, or whether that reliance will limit iPhone users to classic CarPlay. We’re also curious to see how CarPlay Ultra works without an iPhone, given that it’s impossible to guarantee a functional iPhone in the car at all times.

Apple says “many other automakers around the world are working to bring CarPlay Ultra to drivers, including newly committed brands Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis,” but until additional manufacturers outside those three—all part of the Hyundai Motor Group—are confirmed, that promise remains more marketing than momentum.

Personally, I’m trying to hold onto our 2015 Nissan Leaf until bi-directional charging can power our house from an EV during an outage. At the moment, the main option is Wallbox’s Quasar 2, which works only with the massive Kia EV9. Last summer, we had four outages in two weeks, including one that lasted more than a day. It was highly disruptive for working from home, even with the ability to hotspot my Mac to my iPhone and charge devices (and run our chest freezer) directly from our solar panel inverters. With luck, by the time bi-directional charging becomes more broadly available, CarPlay Ultra will also be standard.

2

I’m curious how CarPlay Ultra works when no phone or an Android phone is plugged in. Is CarPlay Ultra an embedded OS taking the place of something like Android Automotive, or is it a layer running on top of the car’s embedded OS?

2 Likes
3

I was thinking about that too. Apple’s press release always talks in ways that imply the iPhone is present and functioning. But my guess is that it has to function without an iPhone present for simple fallback reasons—you could never guarantee that an iPhone would be functional 100% of the time.

If someone wants to send over an Aston Martin, I’ll be happy to test.

5 Likes
4

Never thought of using the car to feed back to the house in the event of an outage.

I’ve my eye on a large battery like the Jackery and its kind. Something solar chargeable. We have increasingly rare outages but they do take quite some time depending on the level of storm damage. I had neighbors who were out for ten days. But anyway, you could buy a lot of Jackerys for one Aston Martin… (vaguely back on track…)

6

My Understanding is the F150 Lightning can power a home for three days during a power outage. More if you skimp on usage in the house. The truck is like a home battery.

7

Yes, the Ford 150 Lightning is one of the few that currently support V2H, or vehicle-to-home. The problem seems to be the necessary regulations to ensure that random products don’t start sending large quantities of electricity where they shouldn’t, or at least when they shouldn’t. Looks like people are discussing it here.

8

I have a reservation in for an Aptera LE and it is supposed to be CarPlay & Android Auto compatible. However, I don’t want CarPlay Ultra as it sounds like they would have to redesign the entire UI for the Aptera.

9

This video has a really good exploration of how CarPlay Ultra works

Of particular interest to me, it indirectly answers this:

It’s clear from what the presenter says at various points that there is a standard Aston Martin interface for the car and if you never plug an iPhone in, it will always use that. The first time you connect an iPhone it asks you if you want to use CarPlay Ultra and if you say ‘yes’, spends some time setting it up. After that it seems that whenever you turn the car on, the CarPlay Ultra interface is displayed, even if you haven’t connected your phone yet. I guess during the initial setup there are some files downloaded to the car that tell it to use the CarPlay Ultra interface (or maybe some of the assets used in the interface are downloaded?).

Maybe we’ll hear more about the architecture of the system at WWDC. It seems to have been implemented in a sensible and frictionless way. If you don’t have an iPhone, the car works as normal. If you do have one, you can enable CarPlay Ultra, but you don’t have to connect your iPhone (or wait for it to connect) every time you want to drive. And after the initial setup you get the CarPlay Ultra interface whether or not your phone is connected, so it’s a consistent experience.

2 Likes
10

Aston Martin as the first CP-U car is nice and all, but obviously it’s at the super high-end of car owners just a little bit, Apple.

EV’s as a whole remain mostly overpriced, and have been so over the last few years. Especially because car makers want to get higher margins from selling larger cars to people who often don’t want or need them, as the increased battery costs make that better for them to do for their margins. But large sections of people want and need much smaller cars for local journeys most of the time across the planet (outside of simply using public transport, of course) –often in cities with small road space here in Europe, along with Asia, et al.– but models in these classes are becoming rarer and rarer with this constant focus on SUV and SUV-like cars.

In the US, you even still have the ‘light truck’ laws which give huge tax incentives to buying large trucks than buying smaller more efficient cars. It’s a perverse policy the car lobby love.

When smaller cars arrive with much more realistic prices with CP-U inside, then I might be interested. But until then, I’m simply not unfortunately.

11

Apple also announced that Hyundai & Kia will be adding CarPlay Ultra to their cars. They have smaller cars in their range, so it might not be too long before we see this (emphasis on ‘might’).

1 Like
12

Apple also announced that Hyundai & Kia will be adding CarPlay Ultra to their cars. They have smaller cars in their range, so it might not be too long before we see this (emphasis on ‘might’)

Might, is certainly the word, that’s for sure. But where are the big affordable European brands like VW et al… nowhere in sight.

VW is a brand of car I’ve owned a lot of, as the Golf in particular (and other VW Group related cars including more sportier Cupra) offered the ‘midi’ hatchback size that our cities (London in my case) make best use of – not too small that they’re tiny and hold nothing & no one comfortably, but big enough they can carry medium sized stuff and people in reasonable comfort with decent performance on the upper models, all at prices that are not 50K upwards!

Their iD.3 is the nearest EV model, but it’s bad value for money (~45K upwards for one you’d actually want) with depreciation off-a-cliff (like most EV’s right now, until the technology matures), and bad feature-wise in comparison to previous ICE standards (eg. touch screen use for almost everything, with touch buttons on the few others, which you simply couldn’t use efficiently without them screwing-up where you wanted the thing set).

13

The video says that it (at least on the Aston Martin) requires Wi-Fi in the car. Does this mean your will need to pay for Internet connectivity for your car? Or can the phone communicate on a private LAN shared only with the car and other devices also in the car? I hope it’s the latter. Or if I don’t want to pay for automotive Internet, will I be able to use it exclusively via USB? I’d be fine with that too.

But my biggest concern is not with Apple but with the cars themselves. Factory-provided infotainment systems have never impressed me. They never seem to work right, and it’s pretty much impossible to install aftermarket radios anymore. So if you get a car with this capability, you’re pretty much stuck with it - whether using the factory UI or one from your phone.

In the past, I’ve had problems with cars rejecting my iPods (often crashing them or crashing the radio firmware), flaky Bluetooth connectivity and even flaky USB connectivity (our 2018 Kia Sedona’s USB port pretty much doesn’t work anymore even after we had the dealer perform a warranty replacement on it). So I find myself needing to fall back to very old-fashioned analog audio via a line-in jack. Which is really going to be an embarrassment if it happens on a brand new car with the latest and greatest everything.

So I like what I’ve seen so far, but I’m really afraid that when the rubber meets the road, I may end up having to drag out a portable Bluetooth speaker in order play music from my phone, after finding that something is tragically incompatible and both the car dealer and Apple just spend their time blaming each other.

14

I think you might have been unlucky. As someone who doesn’t own a car, I drive a wide variety of makes and models through the local car club and normal car hire. Over many years now I’ve used CarPlay in all of them basically without issue. There was one where it took a while to connect once or twice. Overall, though, considering all the cars I’ve used for the past ~8 years from a variety of manufacturers have all supported it, in my experience CarPlay working as intended is the norm.

1 Like
15

To be fair, CarPlay itself worked great in the Kia (our only car with the support) before the USB port itself failed.

Our other cars were too old for CarPlay, but all supported iPod controls. The results were very mixed:

  • 2018 Kia Sedona. Worked great until the USB port failed.
  • 2012 Kia Sedona. Used a proprietary cable (USB plus analog audio), which worked great with an iPod Classic, iPod Nano and later devices with a Dock-to-Lightning adapter.
  • 2012 Honda Civic.
    • My flash-based devices (iPod Nano and iPodTouch) work fine for music, but get a bit wonky with audio from other sources (like podcasts).
    • My iPod Classic crashes after about 15-30 minutes of playback. Rebooting it usually gives me another 30 minutes, but it sometimes would leave the radio with a non-functioning USB port. I’d need to power-cycle the car to recover.
  • Chevrolet Impala (not sure when, late 2000’s, I believe). The iPod Classic would crash after a few minutes connected via USB.

That iPod Classic works flawlessly otherwise. It never had a problem with the 2012 Sedona, works great with the clock-radio on my nightstand (where I’ve been using it for many years).

At the time, I reported this problem to Apple, Honda and Chevrolet. (The iPod Classic was still in production at the time). Honda and Chevrolet said they used the code they got from Apple and wouldn’t pursue the issue any further. Apple never responded to me at all.

So you can understand why I’m very pessimistic about all things involving car audio. I really really want to just buy an aftermarket radio from Crutchfield and throw out whatever the automakers install (or even better, just buy the car without a radio), but that doesn’t appear to be an option from any automaker anywhere.

16

Even though I have no interest in getting an EV, I have to say I’m intrigued by the upcoming Slate vehicle.

17

For my part, I still find CarPlay Ultra to be a head-scratching feature. Should the splashy Apple marketing videos have convinced me that it’s a must-have?

I’m fortunate enough to have a current vehicle that supports CarPlay, but all I want out of it is to listen to the audiobooks and podcasts that are queued up on my phone, and to show my preferred mapping service. I couldn’t care less about what system is displaying the speedometer or managing the climate controls, as long as it does so without fail.

1 Like
18

The thing is, these aren’t ‘radios’. For many years now they are essentially an interface to many features and settings of the car and happen to have an integrated radio. For better or for worse, cars no longer come with a radio unit, it’s just another feature in the various conveniences on offer.

1 Like