General Motors Doubles Down on Removing CarPlay
General Motors began phasing out support for CarPlay in its electric vehicles back in 2023, leading to complaints from iPhone users, but the company has no plans to back down.
In fact, GM is going further and plans to remove CarPlay from all future gas vehicles, too. In an interview with The Verge, GM CEO Mary Barra said that the company opted to prioritize its platform for EVs, but the change will eventually expand across the entire GM portfolio.
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GM Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson suggested that GM’s decision to embrace its own system is a “very Jobsian approach to things” that he likened to phasing out the disk drive.
I would just be laughing at this except I worry about getting stuck with a GM rental car.
Someone should investigate whether Mary Barra is a mole planted at GM by Ford.
Allow me to summarize this: Mary really wants to sell services, or have recurring revenue from partnerships and deals with companies in services to earn money over the lifespan of the vehicle. She cites how disorienting it is to jump in and out of CarPlay, but that’s hardly a hurdle that justifies the development work they’re putting into not supporting CarPlay and Android Auto projection systems.
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The only salient point he raises is that there are features of the car that do not currently integrate with CarPlay, or CarPlay Ultra. It can’t do anything with Super Cruise. Apple, as far as I know, has no real plans for integrating Maps on a phone with any kind of assisted driving, or autonomous technology. I hope that they are working on something for that.
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I do think Mary Barra would love to cut a deal with Apple to have Apple Music as an app on their own platform. Apple currently offers Apple Music apps for Tesla and Rivian and neither has ever supported CarPlay, because it is far more important to Apple to get the recurring services revenue than it is for them to use Apple Music as some kind of wedge issue for car shoppers.
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I’m not going to sign up for a GM federated ID that stores my login credentials in their cloud. I’m not going to individually sign into apps in the car like Google Maps with my Google ID that I use for way more than just navigation.
Previously:
- Testing CarPlay Ultra
- CarPlay in iOS 26
- General Motors to Phase Out CarPlay
- The Enshittification of All Things
Update (2025-10-24): See also: Mac Power Users.
My interest in buying new cars is already at an all-time low. Now GM products are crossed off the list.
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The main benefit for me is that I carry the state with me. Podcasts, for example, will pick up where I left off. Text messages read/unread state will update accordingly, and so on.
Update (2025-10-29): Andrew J. Hawkins:
But today, the company is clarifying that this won’t happen overnight.
“We are not making any changes to existing vehicles,” Malorie Lucich, a spokesperson for GM, said in a statement. “If your car supports Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, that will continue. Both will remain available in all GM gas-powered vehicles for the foreseeable future.
Update (2025-10-31): John Gruber (Mastodon):
If GM goes through with this abandonment of CarPlay, I don’t see how they’ll continue to sell any vehicles to rental agencies. I would never rent a car without CarPlay, and I would never consider signing up for a GM cloud service just to drive a rental car.
I hope so. I worry that all the rental agencies will just keep buying them and customers won’t have a choice.
Update (2025-11-03): Patrick George:
Although GM is the largest automaker that is ditching CarPlay, other car brands are also locking features behind a paywall. Toyota has some navigation tools that require a subscription, but CarPlay does about the same thing at no cost. I own an older Mazda with a remote-start feature that works every time I hit a button on my key fob; on my newer electric Kia, I have to pay up to $200 a year if I want to unlock that service. (I haven’t yet; in fact, study after study shows that consumers are broadly skeptical of more subscription features.)
Some automakers have made a point of proclaiming their allegiance to CarPlay, knowing that’s what buyers want. Toyota’s EVs tell CarPlay how much electric range they have left, so that Apple Maps can prompt the driver to stop at a nearby charger on a road trip. But the relationship between Detroit and Silicon Valley can be a tense one.
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No matter what car you drive, the glory days of CarPlay may be numbered.
Update (2025-11-12): Chris Adamson:
One thing I don’t notice people talking about is how nice it is for CarPlay to be consistent across auto brands. We have a Ford and a Toyota, and our kid has a Honda. It really helps when maps, messages, music, podcasts, and notifications all work the same regardless of which vehicle we’re using.
I cannot imagine going back to a pre-CarPlay era. I like bringing my music collection seamlessly into my car, having Maps and Messages at my disposal, and not needing to sync anything with a different system. I wish I could replace Siri with something even borderline functional, though.
CarPlay Ultra, on the other hand, has not moved the needle for me, at least based on early reviews. The problem CarPlay solves is that it augments the infotainment system with the same environment I am used to elsewhere while still letting the rest of the car feel normal. CarPlay Ultra attempts to replace the entire dashboard, which has not so far been a problem I want solved. I worry that this could be a step too far for some automakers, too, and I hope it does not nudge more of them toward abandoning CarPlay in favour of a parasitic relationship with customers’ bank accounts.
I don’t like CarPlay Ultra, either. I’ve been concerned since it was announced that Apple would eventually force us to use it instead of regular CarPlay or that it would cause a rift with the automakers.
Update (2025-12-01): Joe Rosensteel:
The thing that made the rentals tolerable was knowing I could rely on Apple CarPlay.
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t also lives separately from the software your vehicle needs to function safely on the road. The partition of what’s the automaker’s responsibility and what’s Apple’s responsibility is crystal clear because the software from the automaker looks and behaves differently. That’s a feature, not a bug.
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That same empowerment of consumers doesn’t extend to CarPlay Ultra. With CarPlay Ultra, Apple is also misunderstanding the balance of the relationship all three parties are in between automakers, consumers, and itself.
People might have forgotten it, but there were a few years where Apple marketed this as “next generation CarPlay” and stalled out development on regular CarPlay. It was the Apple /// successor to the Apple ][‘s CarPlay.
12 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
Whatever reasons they claim, this has always been only about GM trying to charge monthly rents to their customers.
This is a major reason why I ended up with a Honda Accord after my Chevy Sonic died early last year. Well, that, and GM's nearly wholesale abandonment of the passenger car market. I wasn't in the market for an EV so it wouldn't have affected me directly at that point, but the company stance even then made me basically ignore them as an option.
I still have many thousands of points on a GM credit card that I'm not sure what to do with as they keep eliminating non-GM-related redemption options.
re: Joe Rosensteel's: "...Apple currently offers Apple Music apps for Tesla and Rivian ..."
I'd be stunned if the steaming PoS that is the Apple Music App on Tesla is actually coded by Apple Employees / Contractors. I (maybe wrongly) always assumed that it was a Tesla developed front end interacting with a very limited https://music.apple.com or something similiar.
A couple of years ago I'd thought my next car would probably be a GM. But not anymore.
If Ford starts to actually make cars again (as opposed to trucks and SUVs) I'll probably buy another Ford for my next vehicle. I love my C-Max (and its CarPlay support). Otherwise I'll probably go with Hyundai or VW or something.
There are lots of comments from people all over the internet this week saying that they will never buy a car without CarPlay, and that specifically means they will not even consider a GM car going forward. That makes perfect sense to me, I certainly feel that way myself.
Unfortunately, it seems like these comments probably aren't representative of general consumers. Over the past year GM has rocketed up to become the second ranked seller of EV vehicles in the US - behind only Tesla, another manufacturer that doesn't support CarPlay. So it seems like when actually putting down their dollars, consumers actually don't really care about CarPlay/Android Auto.
I sure hope this doesn't catch on with other manufacturers, but I'm afraid the lure of recurring revenue will be just too seductive. For now, my Genesis EV has fantastic CarPlay support, including navigation directions appearing in the heads up display and map display in both the center console and in the steering wheel cluster display. So I'm good for now, but I'm concerned about what options might be available when it's time to purchase my next vehicle. Like Michael, I'm also worried about choices when renting. Showing up in an unfamiliar city and then having to deal with a non-CarPlay nav system is a big step backwards.
On the other hand, I think if there wind up being only a couple of manufacturers supporting phone projection, that's going to be a big sales booster for them. In fact, I recently had a long conversation with a Chevy salesman at a local EV event and he said that lack of CarPlay was the biggest deal breaker he saw in closing sales. He thought that GM was going to have to issue an OTA update to add phone projection, but I think that was wishful thinking on his part, at least unless there is a top level management change. And for now, it appears that super low lease offers win out over CarPlay (also, this conversation was a few weeks before the federal tax credit expired).
And the sheep go "Baaaa"
Of course GM (or any other manufacturer)should put Apples fucking OS in their cars. This is an obvious business/branding decision.
Only reason not to is if Apple start paying them like Google is doing for search in Safari
One of the things I really like about my Hyundai: You can use their navigation while using CarPlay. AFAIK, they simply refused Apples requirement to disable the car’s navigation when CarPlay is connected and Apple gave in when they threatened to remove CarPlay.
The best part: You can split the display to show CarPlay (2/3) and Navigation (1/3) at the same time. (Might be they removed that in newer models but my i30 has it and it is great.)
The thing about if the car company owns infotainment versus Apple or Google, eventually the car company stops innovating, or patching, the car’s operating system and you’re stuck with the capabilities as they were at that time forever. With CarPlay or Android Auto, upgrades are limitless.
It’s about revenue, but I don’t think it’s about subscription revenue. I think it’s the classic planned obsolescence mindset. If I keep infotainment up-to-date, you’ll never want to buy a new one.
I’m driving an electric pickup which also doesn’t have CarPlay. At some point the car company will stop releasing updates and I’ll be stuck. If I had CarPlay, I could keep the innovation going.
@Adam Scheblein: "With CarPlay or Android Auto, upgrades are limitless"
Yeah, Google famously never discontinues nor drops support for any of their products or services. /s
I don't actually *need* CarPlay. What I need are:
Most important:
- steering wheel controls of play/pause/next and volume.
- good connection for audio (usually Bluetooth. If integrated with charging cable also fine).
- a phone mount with charging (wired or wireless).
Also nice:
- good updated maps in the car. This is not *really* necessary, because I can use the maps on the phone, with a mount. Problem with that is that in summer, the mounted phone can overheat.
Could be just me, but I could achieve this whenever Apple/Google Maps first appeared on phones years ago. Could do it (without maps), when cars had no centre screen and the connected device was an iPod.
IMO I like CarPlay a lot, but it's not super essential. Having said that, if not having CarPlay/Android Auto means that I have to log in with a VW/Toyota/Nissan ID to use the car, then that's a negative.
My guess is that the change will come from the lower ends. I don't actually know, but I assume that CarPlay (and Ultra) are free to the car vendors. Say if my low end Renault 5 has a fancy Car Play Ultra powered by a phone that is 20x faster than the headunit they include, that's an obvious win. This is a car, not a computer, the (very fast) computer is already in my pocket.
Maybe premium vendors can put an extra iPhone in the car, but at the lower end, that should be a major cost saving measure, "just provide the monitor". And if it actually turns out to be *better* (for whatever reason), then the higher up cars will have an actual issue.
