Someone recently told me I may have overplayed my hand regarding the General Motors Apple CarPlay situation. He said it’s not that big of a deal, and I’m making a mountain out of a mole hill. This is after someone else told me once you live with the vehicle it’s NBD. And if you’re an Android person, well, who cares?
So, lets dig into what’s going on with GM and Apple CarPlay, and what this means for the consumers of all GM products in the future.
The GM Apple CarPlay back story
If you’ve been living under a rock, the TL;DR is that GM opted not to include Apple CarPlay in its electric vehicles about a year ago. The official story is that the omission is due to safety concerns. A 2023 article from Motor Trend cites GM’s head of product infotainment, who said driver distraction and cell phone usage behind the wheel is the primary reason. He said CarPlay has stability issues, and if it doesn’t work, drivers will pick up their phone. GM argues that they have little control over fixing problems with CarPlay, and thus, using their own native (cough, Google) system will cause less distraction.
While I haven’t lived with this system for a full week test, I did play around with it for more than 5 hours and did a video that shows how my phone and I interacted with the system.
The more likely reason for phasing out the popular phone mirroring system: control and money. Using Google built-in gives GM more control not only on the features and functions available to the driver but also over how that information appears. Additionally, the Google operating system isn’t free. Yes, GM is giving you an 8-year trial, and for people who trade up every 3 years, none of this matters. But for those who keep a vehicle until it dies, 8 years isn’t a very long time, and eventually they’ll have to pay an additional fee for a vehicle they likely paid off 5 years ago. Furthermore, GM hasn’t said what these fees are going to look like.
Isn’t there an app for that?
An enterprising company did come up with a short-lived work around. White Automotive & Media Services created an unauthorized CarPlay retrofit kit, designed to work with the Chevrolet Blazer EV, Equinox EV, Silverado EV, GMC Sierra EV and Cadillac Lyriq. There was only one dealer in the U.S. that was able to install it, and a couple weeks ago, according to an article from The Drive, GM reached out to that Chevy dealer and told them to shut it down. I’m assuming there was an implied “or else” in there.
So, there is no longer an aftermarket fix to bring CarPlay to your GM vehicle, and for those lucky dogs who got the retrofit kit before the lockdown, well, GM says it could void portions of the warranty. Not to mention the fact that if GM does an over-the-air software update (and it will), the retrofit kit will likely break.
But I drive gas vehicles
At this point you may be thinking this whole Apple CarPlay sitch doesn’t apply to you since you aren’t planning to buy an EV any time soon. Whelp, you’d be wrong. The long game for GM is to phase the phone mirroring systems out of all its vehicles. Full Stop.
There is no time frame for this transition to occur, but GM has already started putting Google built in into its gas-powered vehicles. So, our best guess is that Apple CarPlay will start to disappear as some of the new next-gen vehicles start to roll out within the next couple years.
The current infotainment system in EVs is still a work in progress, and as EVs still have a relatively small market share, this gives GM time to perfect the system before pushing it out to a wider customer base.
Our take on the GM Apple CarPlay situation
Google built-in is a great system, and when paired with an electric vehicle’s operating system, you have realistic range estimators, better vehicle preconditioning and easy-to-find charging stations that will work with your vehicle. But (you knew there had to be a but) if you are someone who lives in an Apple environment, like I do, ditching Apple CarPlay cold turkey is going to be tough. I download my music to my phone, listen to podcasts through iTunes, save my voicemail messages to listen to while I’m driving and send voice-to-text messages prolifically (even when I’m not driving). Not to mention the fact I give my personal information to Apple, and I don’t want to give it to Google, too.
For a lot of people this will be NBD. But if you want a GM vehicle and the hands-free use of your phone while driving, there is a low-tech solution: You can either buy a suction cup mount to attach your phone to the windshield or a magnetic dash mount.
