“General Motors Co.’s efforts to distribute Apple Inc.’s in-car software faster than its competitors may be paying off for the Detroit auto maker, some dealers say,” Mike Ramsey reports for The Wall Street Journal. “CarPlay, Apple’s software that displays an iPhone’s screen on a car dashboard and gives access to applications, including Apple’s mapping application, became available on 27 GM models this fall, far more than any other auto company.”
“‘We’ve had people coming in because they’ve heard about it, and once they see it, they really do like it because it mirrors the look and feel of the devices they use,’ said Chris Hemmersmeier, chief executive of a chain of Jerry Seiner Dealerships in Salt Lake City, Utah. ‘It’s helping to close the deal once they see it,'” Ramsey reports. “GM officials say they have anecdotal evidence of an impact, and agree the offering has been well-received.”
Ramsey reports, “Phil Abram, executive director of connectivity an infotainment at GM, said customers have been asking for the feature for years and the company plans to expand it to as many more models as soon as possible.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Vehicle makers without Apple’s CarPlay will suffer the consequences for their shortsightedness and/or laziness.
SEE ALSO:
The Verge reviews Apple’s CarPlay: ‘Miles better than your car’s interface’ – September 4, 2015
WSJ reviews Apple CarPlay: Siri’s finally on the right road – August 18, 2015
Hands on with Apple’s CarPlay in the new Corvette – August 10, 2015
2016 Honda Accord delivers Apple CarPlay – July 24, 2015
GM to roll out Apple’s CarPlay across 14 Chevy models this year – May 27, 2015
Apple’s CarPlay success shows the power of having a long-term strategy – March 15, 2015
Apple’s real CarPlay: Cupertino doesn’t need to build cars in order to reinvent driving – February 28, 2015
Ford drops reputation-scorching Microsoft Sync, enables support for Apple’s sought-after CarPlay – December 12, 2014
Apple’s CarPlay looks like the future of in-car infotainment – April 13, 2014
I would have been temped to look at the cars BECAUSE OF CAR PLAY but I doubt that I could make myself walk onto the car lot because it is GM. I was turned off to all North American cars in my youth and have not yet witnessed a reason to change my mind.
Thank you for putting your fellow Americans out of work.
Translation: “patriotism is more important than capitalism and the free market.”
Being patriotic does not mean saddling yourself with products of lesser quality just because it’s designed/assembled by your own countrymen. The USSR tried that approach and failed miserably.
Agree. The US car business was Detroit’s to lose. …And that’s just what they did !
They aren’t ‘my fellow Americans’. I don’t live in the US of A.
You are what’s wrong with America.
Buying to be patriotic ignoring the failings only encourages companies to ignore those failings themselves, Microsoft are a great example of that as was IBM before them. The best attitude is to buy ‘homegrown’, all other things being equal or at least where differences are barely noticeable. A decision against buying home grown based on prejudice, ignorance or outmoded experience is the real problem amongst consumers.
I couldn’t agree more. I started my car buying with all American made for years. I got tired of the constant repairs, the poor quality, etc. Now I buy Honda’s and have been very satisfied with each Honda I have owned (other than the styling can be a little funky). They are very dependable! I will buy American when the American auto makers can get their act together and produce dependable cars consistently. Until then, I am not throwing my money away, that is the definition of stupid.
Indeed, you’d think that an Apple forum, of all places, would have users who appreciate that cheaper up front can cost more in the long term.
Not everyone lives in the US of A.
You’re right! The US of A is not about the freedom to choose the products you want to buy. You must buy what is made by the government bailed out state supported company.
bore witness to decades of mismanagement from the late ’70s through the first decade of this century. How many times their clueless management snatched defeat from the jaws of victory I cannot count. The shame of it was that GM had a lot of very talented engineers, who were hamstrung by a leadership team filled with batshit stupid finance and sales people – so undeserving of their outlandish compensation.
That legacy will tarnish GM’s brand for decades to come. The irony is that recent GM quality is now outstanding (something I have not seen before in my lifetime) and they are making really good cars.
But I will never buy one. The damage is done for my generation. Screw with your brand quality and you will pay for decades. This is something Steve Jobs and Apple understood very well. The Apple brand is everything!
So you actively recommend hypocrisy, JWSC?
You and several other posters seem to be brainwashed into thinking that companies are static. They aren’t. GM learned its lessons. Ford learned its lessons. The products they offer in showrooms today demonstrate that they can build great cars. Chrysler doesn’t exist anymore because they didn’t, so what you see in Fiat dealerships are brash designs discounted heavily to attract undiscerning buyers. To the MDN faithful, GM is more like the old Apple Mac division, which is high quality with a range of affordable models, whereas Fiat acts like Android at its worst.
But it’s more complicated that just branding. Each product has a different design team and radically different price points. consider Chevrolet, one of GM’s oldest brands, previously aimed at the lower cost/high value market. But the Corvette is amazing and can stand up next to the best any other company has to offer. The Malibu is just as good as any Camry or Accord, at least according to many industry experts. But admittedly, the Chevy Sonic is a rebadged POS aimed at 3rd world nations. One must be puzzled who at GM decided to attempt to sell it in the USA. But that’s the auto industry for you. For buyers not to recognize how broad some brands are is self-delusional.
Next, what’s with the nationality bias? If a given brand has a broad range of quality and price points, it follows that nations do as well. With all the recalls of Asian and European makes lately, it’s disingenuous to say that those makes are automatically superior. Many European and Asian carmakers assemble products in North America: Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Subaru, BMW, Mercedes, etc.
Then to make issues even more complicated, every automaker sources its components globally. American cars may have German or Asian transmissions. The best cars in the world have steering and suspension components built in the USA. You get what you pay for no matter what the hood ornament looks like.
Moreover, a little-known fact is that in 2009, ALL automakers operating in the USA, including Ford and foreign brands, received loans and underwriting from the US Federal government, which acted proactively to prevent the entire industry from implosion in the event that any key player of the industry caused a cascading collapse which can easily occur in incestuous industries. You can bet your bottom dollar that the US government would bail out Intel if they were hit by an earthquake and needed an emergency loan to get their chip fabs back online. This type of action would save the entire Mac/PC industry. You may like the fact that Apple and Microsoft and Google have deep enough pockets that they would never need a bailout, but thousands of smaller suppliers and specialty makers don’t have that luxury, and the asshole banks that effectively run both political parties in the USA are sitting on piles of cash refusing to lend it. How do we know they won’t lend it? Because most didn’t lend to GM in 2009 and many wouldn’t lend to VW in 2015 when cash was needed to sustain manufacturing operations.
So rather than ragging on complacent past management and holding lifetime grudges, the smart car shopper evaluates all brands before purchasing. For the record, GM and Ford have seriously upped their game in the last 5 years. In many ways, other automakers that survived the 2008 implosion have not improved, and actually got complacent. Toyota and Honda have had some of the most severe safety recalls in history, and VW has been exposed in cheating regulations — not that the cars are bad or that other automakers are any worse in that regard, but it just underscores the importance of personal accountability in creating great products.
Mary Berra, CEO of GM, has made it clear that this is a new GM and she’s taking personal accountability for ensuring that GM quality is high and continues to rise. The same cannot be said for Cook, who because of the success of Steve Jobs’ iTunes Store has inherited the luxury of resting on his laurels, investing only in consumer-grade profit taking and fragmenting Apple’s OSes rather than fundamentally improving core Apple technology on all platforms. For example, while Apple’s engineering teams have done a fantastic job with iOS hardware, the software teams have delivered too many buggy and ugly products in the last 5 years to count them all. Some Apple products – displays, Airport Express, etc — haven’t been updated since Jobs rolled them out. Several services don’t even work reliably at all — Handoff is a joke. It doesn’t work.
So don’t rag on all American automakers when Apple is allowing quality to slip so severely. Automakers have a much more difficult competitive landscape and Apple has more cash than they know how to use, so why is everyone giving Apple a free pass while automakers work under much more highly regulated and complicated environments, under much more severe design constraints, in order to produce the excellent work they do?
If Apple was to release a car — which they won’t — Cook would quickly discover that Apple doesn’t have the faintest idea how costly and complicated it is to achieve the level of quality an refinement that current cars — including GM cars – offer the consumer, at prices everyone can afford. Tesla, which has often been held up as an example of what Apple could do in the automotive market, is the perfect example of a complicated toy that takes the joy out of driving, while providing no cost savings and negligible environmental benefits. The real magic of Tesla is that it takes money from automotive fashionista customers to support a manufacturing industry based in one of the most expensive places in the world one could manufacture anything — and in doing so actively feeds the Google overlords which track everything each car does. What an Orwellian future. At least with a new GM vehicle, you can opt out of OnStar.
The average life of a car covers what, 3 or 5 iPhone model iterations? How many versions of Bluetooth? There is no guarantee that CarPlay will be any better or more stable than the infotainment crap that automakers have installed themselves in the long run. Apple forces change for the sake of change too.
One more thing — GM is a mature company operating in a mature industry with tons of legacy processes and costs, with enormous overhead. Apple, if it even exists in 2100, will likely look like a dinosaur to your present MDN rose-colored glasses too. It’s amazing how in the last 5 years, Cook has let the financial wonks overtake Apple, allowing the engineering and quality to take a back seat.
Agree with MDN take. Was planning to trade up to a 2016 Dodge Charger, but Fiat-Chrysler is non-committal on their CarPlay plans. Will probably lose my sale.
Just had a rental 2016 Malibu for the weekend. Both my wife and I were surprised at the fit & finish of the car. I’m still not exactly thrilled by the visual appeal (many elements still have extremely obsolete, almost “retro” look, compared to European, and even Japanese / Korean cars), but it is miles ahead from what GM, and in particular, Chevrolet, used to be.
Most importantly, I had two days to play with CarPlay. It is a simple, intuitive and straightforward experience, in true Apple fashion. Having rented plenty of cars with Microsoft’s Sync before, the difference is night and day. With Sync, you simply can’t figure things out; everything is totally counter-intuitive (you look for a feature in one place; it turns out to be in another, etc). Apple’s CarPlay requires you to plug your phone into the car’s USB and allow the trusted connection on your phone. That is all the configuration you need. From then on, in-dash touchscreen gives you a simplified version of your phone’s home screen, with access to many apps (those that are CarPlay-enabled), which include the obvious ones (maps, phone, contacts, etc), as well as things like Pandora, Spotify, iHeartRadio, TuneIn Radio, YouTube, etc. Car’s built-in voice recognition navigation surrenders to the phone (when connected), with buttons on the wheel launching Siri. It is exceptionally simple and straightforward, and very functional.
I can see how people who have experienced CarPlay would consider the lack of CarPlay a dealbreaker for their next car.
I simply will NOT consider buying any vehicle that does not support Carplay. Luckily my next purchase is the 2017 Chevy Silverado!
Exactly. Also, that’s a quality vehicle that compares very well to any manufacturer, foreign or domestic.
Garbage. Smart pickup truck buyers buy pickup trucks from the company that invented the pickup truck, not cheap, tinfoil junk from Government Motors, that’s for sure.
As I first heard it said on the playground in the 2nd Grade…
F – Found
O – On
R – Road
D – Dead
I LOVE the Ford vs Chevy fights wayyyy more than Democrat vs Republican 😉
Interesting logic. So no one could ever possibly improve on the first marketed version of a product? Wow. What hubris.
Also, you should know that Gottlieb Daimler sold the first pickup, the Model 42, in 1896.
That first truck was followed by many others before Henry Ford even launched his Model T, let alone the option for a pickup bed installed at the Ford factory.
http://www.thetruckersreport.com/trucking-timeline-vintage-and-antique-truck-guide/
Recently bought a GMC Yukon Denali with Car Play. For texting and phone calls the Car Play interface is excellent. For playing music though, the GMC native interface is better, simpler, and more visually attractive.