CarPlay in iOS 9 adds several new features including wireless connectivity over wired Lightning connections, but current cars don’t yet support the new protocol that offers the better experience. None of the new aftermarket displays from Pioneer, JBL, and others from this year support wireless CarPlay, and automakers like Ford and Chevy that are rolling out CarPlay support this year are focusing first on the wired experience and not talking about wireless yet.
CarPlay partner Volkswagen, however, apparently did plan to demonstrate their integration of wireless CarPlay with their concept infotainment system, but pulled the demo from CES this year at Apple’s request, Car and Driver reports:
“We wanted to demonstrate wireless CarPlay and the owner of CarPlay technology didn’t allow us to,” Volkmar Tannerberger, head of electrical and electronic development at Volkswagen, told Car and Driver.
While hunting the CES floor for any demos of wireless CarPlay this week, I ran into a couple of CarPlay engineers from Apple and asked if anyone was doing wireless yet. I’m generally happy with CarPlay these days aside from a few missing features like sending voice messages, but wireless CarPlay would greatly improve the experience and several readers have asked me about it. Their answer was that the protocol is out there and that it’s up to partners to use it, making the VW incident all the more curious.
Update: While VW and other automakers weren’t demoing wireless CarPlay, Visteon which products infotainment systems for BMW, Ford, GM, and others reportedly did have a demonstration of the feature. Notice the battery life indicator which we first noticed here.
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This sort of behavior will only SLOW down CarPlay implementation – What sort of car manufacturer is going to enjoy having such restrictions placed on them that they cant demo already-announced features on their vehicles?
I dont understand what the issue is. Wireless carplay was announced months ago.
Can implementation get any slower? In June it will be 3 years since iOS in the Car was unveiled. Wireless Carplay was rumored about 2 years ago or was in one of the iOs betas, I can’t remember. Apple needs to change how it handles things like Carplay, Airplay and HomeKit. The amount of cars, stereo’s and devices that support those is very low considering how long each has been public.
I just wonder if Apple is developing it own wireless head units for a Car OS and not mirroring like CarPlay is. CarPlay isn’t that much different then what iPod Out was in cars 4-5 years ago.
Apple has toward better with partners and get actual products to markets. Should not be hard to do wireless in the ca. its basically airplay for your car display.
It’s like ApplePay in most of the rest of the world. Or AirPlay which has hardly been given any tender love. or even HealthKit which is super lame for most people with an actual medical condition as it’s hardly got any clinical hooks into it
Realistically it was always going to be slow. Car vendors (of which there are only a few) already had their own software and by giving access top Car Play they essentially hand over the entertainment aspect of the car which is a big deal for many consumers. Even if they continue to offer their own software, it gets pushed to the background once Car Play is active. Obviously some companies like Ford took a very slow and measured approach as to whether that is something they wanted to do. That and there’s only so many cars hitting the market in any given year and a lot of them are coming from non US territories. If you look at Apples roll outs in partner based products, things like Apple Pay have been exceptionally slow despite there being far more banks globally to deal with than car manufacturers.
I think they’re doing ok given the circumstances. Having their own cars might have helped the process, and well, we’ve all read the rumours regarding that.
I think VW needs to worry about cheating on emission tests instead if Apple told them not to demo wireless CarPlay.
Still a lousy reason though. If the implication here is that Apple didn’t allow VW to demo Wireless CarPlay due to VW acting unethically, then it may as well stop doing business with China because God knows they’re not the most ethical of countries. Hypocritical actually.
I wonder, wh’ts Apple’s take over China’s “law” of handing over the encryption codes
I mean, terrorism, in China?
+1
VW is a big company. It cannot stop everything to address their huge emissions failures. You can’t reasonably have all 100,000+ employees work an issue that ultimately needs to be planned out by senior leadership and a few top engineers.
I would imagine they have enough capacity within the VW group to look at both of these issues at the same time
Wh’t I’m worried ab’t is, Toyota (if u know wh’t I mean)
Oh, the arrogance (or foolishness 😒)
It’s such a shame to hear this, but great that at least VW has an implementation even if it is a beta or whatever. This implementation was spotted at CES so it does basically work ! http://www.carplaylife.com/news/first-apple-wireless-carplay-receiver-spotted-at-ces-2016/
Seems like the VW marketing droids just wanted to ignore Apple and their partnership and sell their wears, even though VW and Apple agreed to be partners in this.
Partners mean they work together according to a plan.
Non-story. If they’re partners in CarPlay, then it also makes sense that they’re partners in marketing CarPlay.
Car makers get all the flak for slow implementation and poor features, but designing this stuff in a car isn’t like pumping out an iOS update. Once a car is shipped, updating it is unreliable and expensive. Why didn’t they simply use blue-tooth for the protocol given every single car that can already connect to media has this? No… they wanted to implemented a pointlessly complicated and expensive solution… an advanced wifi that no car prior to 2015 has.