For over a year, Apple’s CarPlay -Site has teased the arrival of the next generation in 2024. Now that it’s 2025, Apple finally admits that it’s not happening.
When it was announced at WWDC in 2022, the next Gen Carplay was an exciting look at the future of navigation systems in DASH. Instead of a rectangular screen, the next gene-carplay takes over the entire dashboard, including car features such as air conditioning and meters. Apple says Next-Gen CarPlay “ensures a coherent design experience that is the very best of your car and your iPhone-with design for each car manufacturer expressing your vehicle’s character and brand.”
While it was originally to arrive in 2023, only two carmakers, Porsche and Aston Martin, have actually advertised support for the system, and neither have produced a car nor even a real concept that coasts out of the interface. At the end of 2023, Porsche and Aston Martin showed images of their respective systems, with a number of digital meters and a “background wallpaper that mimics the brand’s various houndstooth (or pepita in Porsche-Speak) seat pattern” and “a central information screen bookended of a circular speedometer and tachometer, the latter of which integrates’ hand built into the UK’s wrapped text.
There is a lot about the next gene-carplay that we do not know yet, including whether it requires an iPhone to work. At the time of its message, Apple was still joking on his own vehicle, and the next Gen CarPlay seemed to be something of a test to run a vehicle’s instrument cluster. But now that the project seems to be dead, it is unclear how CarPlay fits into Apple’s ecosystem.
Apple eventually removed the “Coming in 2024” text from the CarPlay site but has not replaced it with any new estimate. In a statement to the media, Apple said: “The next generation of CarPlay is based on many years of success and insight gained from CarPlay, and delivered the best of Apple and the car manufacturer in a deeply integrated and customizable experience. We continue to work closely with several car manufacturers, enabling them to show their unique brand and visual design philosophies in the next generation of CarPlay. Each car brand will share more details as they near the messages about their models that support the next generation of CarPlay. “
It is much less specific than “coming in 2024” and means that the project is far less far than Apple previously implicated. We may get our next look at CarPlay at WWDC in June, but so far it is anyone’s guess when the first cars may show up.