CarPlay has been in the news quite a bit this year, ranging from GM’s decision to abandon the platform to Apple’s looming launch of “next-generation” CarPlay.
How important is CarPlay to car buyers? We polled over 6,000 9to5Mac readers to find out…
9to5Mac Insights: CarPlay’s popularity
In case you missed it, we added a new polling feature on the 9to5Mac homepage a few weeks ago. This is a fun new feature that lets us ask our audience different questions on a regular basis. One of the first questions I wanted to ask was: “Would you buy a car that doesn’t have CarPlay?”
Here’s a breakdown of the responses, of which there were roughly 6,400:
- Yes: 734 votes or 11.42%
- No: 5,138 votes or 79.94%
- Maybe: 555 votes or 8.64%
Given the demographic makeup of the 9to5Mac audience, these results aren’t particularly shocking. Obviously, most people visiting the homepage of an Apple-focused blog are going to want CarPlay in their car. Still, I was surprised that “no” received nearly 80% of the votes.
The results line up almost exactly with Apple’s own statistics. At WWDC 2021, alongside the introduction of next-generation CarPlay, Apple said: “79% of U.S. buyers only consider CarPlay-capable vehicles.”
9to5Mac’s Take
In the comments of the poll, there was a clear trend: Most people would only buy a car with CarPlay… unless it was a Tesla. In some cases, people said the other advantages of Tesla outweighed the lack of CarPlay. Others said the Tesla software experience itself is good enough to make CarPlay an afterthought.
Tesla, of course, doesn’t support CarPlay but has developed its own in-car software platform that is generally well-received. Tesla’s operating system also includes a dedicated Apple Music app, something that’s apparently enough to make a lot of people overlook the lack of CarPlay itself.
For this reason, I have a feeling the results would be quite different if I asked the same question over on Electrek. There are obviously a lot of Tesla owners who read Electrek, and many of those people are perfectly happy with Tesla’s in-car operating system.
What do you make of the results of this poll? Are you surprised that such a large majority of our readers wouldn’t buy a car without CarPlay? Let us know down in the comments.
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