GM Again Attempts to Explain Its Decision to Drop CarPlay in New EVs

[YellowZx5]

"Conviction" is the same as "Courage", just corporate BS to justify their short-sighted actions. I'm in the market for a new ride in the next 6-12 months, and it sure as hell ain't going to be GM.

I have to agree with you. Everything that this corporate pin head is saying isn’t coming yet and can still happen with car play and android auto. Once I disconnect my phone from the car I still can Taylor the damn car.

I’m happy that Hyundai is still doing this all.

 

[eifelbube]

GM Ultifi = Walmart Pay. A really dumb decision.

You are absolutely right about GM and Walmart here. It is just as dumb as Apple making it impossible to upgrade internal SSD storage …

 

[applepotato666]

You get the most out of your vehicle because now we're the company that builds the vehicle and is also creating the infotainment experience, the cluster experience, the app, and everything.

But clearly they can’t do it so it’s a poor decision. It looks and feels ancient and cumbersome. Not that anyone is buying a GM car nowadays and now it’s guaranteed to be even less.

 

[OneMike]

Before having a Tesla I deemed CarPlay crucial.

Now that I have a Tesla. I still prefer many things about CarPlay, but in terms of maps and Apple Music which are the two things I use the most. Those function as they did with CarPlay. Phone notifications and message capabilities are just acceptable

 

[H.E. Pennypacker]

Good thing i just picked up my 2025 serria 2500 with apple car play

 

[whitby]

Although probably not a popular opinion on this thread, I have to say I can completely understand their position on this. They need to to own the complete experience of owning their vehicle, pretty much like Apple likes to own the experience of owning one of their computers/phones etc. They may not be as good as they need to be at the moment, but they will get there. So long as I can connect my music source to their car, I do not care. For many years I depended on BMW to keep their maps and real time traffic info up to date, and it worked reasonably well for me. I was quite happy for my iPod/iPhone to connect for calls and music. The integrated BMW experience was fine. With EVs needing to track usage and charging locations, a 3rd party such as Apple and Google do not have access to all the subsystems in the car to determine what is needed but the car manufacturer does and and they should be able to do a much better job than the any 3rd party.

Just do not lock me out of doing my calls and music sources and I am happy. I will only get upset if they interfere with those functions. Maybe the car manufacturers will allow apps like Apple Music and allow cell connections via the phone rather than their separate cell connections today (which are a complete waste of money and time).

 

[SnowCrocodile]

You are absolutely right about GM and Walmart here. It is just as dumb as Apple making it impossible to upgrade internal SSD storage …

The big difference is that Apple is the monopolist in Apple devices market, and the leading laptop maker in the overall laptop market, and Walmart is the lead in their respective market segment.

GM is... not a leader.

In 2024 so far, globally Toyota is #1, Volkswagen #2, Hyundai #3, and GM #6.

In the US, Toyota was again #1, Ford #2, GM #3. And Toyota's and Ford's market share grew while GM's shrunk.

GM is acting as if they own the market, but in reality they are just a mid-level car company in the grand scheme of things. And a mid-level company can't afford to drop a major consumer feature which the market leaders are continuing to support.

I think to turn GM around, they would have to get rid of everyone in the top leadership positions who was with GM before the bankruptcy, and replace with people from the outside who know what the brand's real place is in today's market, and are driven by humility instead of hubris. Mary Barra was with GM since 1980s, she grew up in the old GM culture where they were the biggest company in the US and everyone else was puny and irrelevant.

 

[ahaslam]

That’s an incredibly disappointing decision. Admittedly, I'm biased as an Apple power user who relies on CarPlay daily, but if I learned my next car wouldn’t have it, I'd switch to a different brand without hesitation. It's that essential to me.

 

[TracesOfArsenic]

Let's just hope their infotainment is better than Tesla's, which sucks. Especially the voice commands...it's dumber than Siri and that's saying a lot.

 

[Tyler O'Bannon]

“It’s about choice! By giving users the inability to choose. Don’t question it!”

-GM, probably.

 

[whitby]

That’s an incredibly disappointing decision. Admittedly, I'm biased as an Apple power user who relies on CarPlay daily, but if I learned my next car wouldn’t have it, I'd switch to a different brand without hesitation. It's that essential to me.

Surprised that driving the car is not most important to you. To me the driving experience is paramount. The infotainment is system is very secondary. Most cars have more than adequate 'normal' displays etc. Apple's Car Play is nice but not essential to the experience of owning car. Handling, power, seating, finish are way above whether it supports Car Play. At least it is to me. The only thing I might have issues with, that is not a core part of the experience, is the sound system, and again that has nothing to do with whether it supports Car Play.

 

[Premium1]

Ah yes, because these systems are always top-notch and have such great support (LOL). This should be something out of the hands of the car manufacturers but they want to extract every $$ they can from people.

 

[ahaslam]

Surprised that driving the car is not most important to you. To me the driving experience is paramount. The infotainment is system is very secondary. Most cars have more than adequate 'normal' displays etc. Apple's Car Play is nice but not essential to the experience of owning car. Handling, power, seating, finish are way above whether it supports Car Play. At least it is to me. The only thing I might have issues with, that is not a core part of the experience, is the sound system, and again that has nothing to do with whether it supports Car Play.

I’m not saying those things matter less, but after dealing with one too many clunky infotainment systems and outdated GPS, I have no desire to go back. I’m not a fan of GM anyway, so their shift away from CarPlay just gives me one more reason to look elsewhere.

 

[SnowCrocodile]

Surprised that driving the car is not most important to you. To me the driving experience is paramount. The infotainment is system is very secondary. Most cars have more than adequate 'normal' displays etc. Apple's Car Play is nice but not essential to the experience of owning car. Handling, power, seating, finish are way above whether it supports Car Play. At least it is to me. The only thing I might have issues with, that is not a core part of the experience, is the sound system, and again that has nothing to do with whether it supports Car Play.

If the driving experience is paramount to you, I'd think there are a number of brands that I'd consider over GM, especially if you throw long-term reliability into the mix...

 

[whitby]

I’m not saying those things matter less, but after dealing with one too many clunky infotainment systems and outdated GPS, I have no desire to go back. I’m not a fan of GM anyway, so their shift away from CarPlay just gives me one more reason to look elsewhere.

That makes sense. So long as it is not the only reason. I am not a fan of GM, but some people are and I would hate them to make decision purely on whether it supports Car Play or not.

 

[whitby]

If the driving experience is paramount to you, I'd think there are a number of brands that I'd consider over GM, especially if you throw long-term reliability into the mix...

Not a GM fan but some of the Cadillac Black Wing's have tempted me, until I get into the car and see the poor interior quality and controls. Most performance cars are not that reliable.... But Car Play support is not a deciding factor.

 

[krakenrelease]

TL;DR - GM is smocking crack

 

[sigurros]

GM will reverse course like Home Depot did with Apple Pay.

I’ve owned 3 GM vehicles and won’t buy another one without carplay.

 

[edrozenberg]

GM attempts to explain its complete moronity once again. "We're complete morons but for a very good reason, we're trying to push our inferior UI garbage because we don't want to pay Apple a few dollars, and also most of our customers have told us they prefer morons".

 

[dlopan]

Nope. I won't buy any GM products anyway, just one more nail in the box. I would like to have a 80 ish 3/4 ton GM truck before they went with electronic ignition. I had one but sold it because it just not worth fixing.

 

[jmgregory1]

GM is crazy if they think owners of their vehicles are going to subscribe to features on an app on their iPhone and let GM pull all their data so that all the things the iPhone does natively can show up in the dashboard, like CarPlay works.

If GM wants to capture the recurring revenue that a cell phone provides, they should start making cell phones and car to car cell systems and compete against Apple and Android. Otherwise they should just do the CarPlay and Android Auto integration and instead work on other vehicle related products or services that they can make money from imho.

 

[tweaknmod]

Is there a practical, technical, reason why they can’t offer multiple options?

 

[mrr]

Bad move GM.

 

[subjonas]

I agree, and so does Apple, that it's ideal for the hardware-maker to also make the software and vice versa. It allows a level of integration and optimization that's not really possible otherwise. But for car infotainment, that ship has sailed, because there are other major factors involved. Namely, people already have established infotainment functions in their phones--their phones are the hub of their entire digital lives. Trying to encroach on that just causes fragmentation of the UX and creates another point of vulnerability for private information.
At this point, I think the best thing car manufacturers can do to create the most optimal customer UX, is to focus solely on the software that pertains to operations that are relevant specifically to the car and nothing else (eg. climate control, fuel/charge, driving modes; and not music, maps, contacts), and have that integrate with people's phones. So that would mean things like displaying people's map/media/calling phone apps, providing vehicle charge level for route mapping, and providing odometer reading for Reminders. Because fragmenting is a bad UX and competing is unrealistic.
Whether providing the best customer UX is the best business decision for GM, I can't say. GM should do as they see fit, but based on how much people love their phones, I don't see GM's choice having a good outcome for anyone including GM.

I do agree though that switching between full screen apps is not the ideal experience in a car. Ideal would be dedicated/permanent displays and physical controls for each core function--climate, charging if applicable, map/nav, audio media--like it used to be! But if not physical, then virtual but still dedicated would be the next best thing--a large screen divided into dedicated display/functions. Tesla kind of does this, I believe. And I believe next gen CarPlay is attempting this as well.

 

[wnissen]

GM's decision was made when the Apple Car was still looming on the horizon. It almost makes sense to for them to decide against continuing to hand over an expanding part of their cars' dashboards to a company that was about to make a competing car itself. That's akin to Apple's decision to launch Apple Maps when it realized location services were going to be a core function of smartphones, and didn't want to hand that over to the company making Android phones. It was a rough transition, but a sound decision on Apple's part to bite the bullet and deal with their competitive reality.

GM's problem now is that Apple dropped its car project, and a company that makes iPhones but not a car is absolutely better positioned to handle music and satnav and other features that depend on a shorter replacement timeline for the hardware running it. The exact same customers who will gladly replace a three-year old iPhone to get the latest features, will be very unhappy about needing to replace a three-year old car to get those same features on their dashboard.

The problem for the car industry is that their business model has always been to sell you a car and be done with it. They're glad to have you at the dealer for maintenance, and they'll handle recalls as necessary, but they've never followed the business model introduced with iPhone, where you buy the hardware and get several years of software upgrades -including the addition of entirely new features- at no additional charge.

For any carmaker to compete in-house on the advancement of software features you get via a phone's more rapid replacement cycle, the carmaker will have to start selling computer module upgrade replacements for existing cars. If they don't, their customers will start getting cranky that their three or four year-old $40,000 car simply doesn't have the hardware capacity to run software that corresponds to whatever advancements smartphones have brought in that time period.

So GM's original decision here was probably sound when they made it. Now that the Apple Car is no longer in the pipeline, GM's kind of stuck. Do they keep going with their in-house plans, or do they punt and go back to CarPlay? It's not an enviable position to be in.

That's a remarkably incisive post and I think you are almost certainly right. When faced with an existential threat the choice to burn the boats of CarPlay and strike out alone makes a lot of sense. Doubly so if you believe that cars will become more like phones as time goes on.

The only thing I would add is a comment on a market force that is highly underrated outside the financial world. Regular, recurring revenue for services is actually counted more highly by analysts assessing a company's earnings. So is even quarterly earnings. You'd think that a company making X dollars per year would be worth the same as any other company making X dollars. Who cares if GM made that dollar by selling a vehicle or selling a subscription service on that vehicle, right? The market does, a lot. So much of the misery inflicted on the public by seat reservation fees, cloud services, and absurd fees for car features is due to that.