Happy Birthday Apple CarPlay. The Innovative System Turns 10 This Year.

In the last century, cars had a radio, an 8-track player, or perhaps a compact cassette tape player, and eventually a CD player. What they did not have, however was infotainment systems.
The idea of “infotainment” in a car is a relatively new concept and its origins can be traced back to the granddaddy of such systems, BMW’s iDrive, which was introduced in the 7 Series in 2001.
Before that, cars had a radio, perhaps a navigation system, and sometimes a built-in car phone but there was no platform supporting the various functions.
Today, there is so much technology in cars that it’s almost impossible to come up with an elegant way to control it all, although automakers are trying.
The current version of Apple CarPlay on the VW Atlas Cross Sport
Some ten years ago, on the first day of the Geneva International Motor Show, I was one of the first people to take a seat in a Volvo equipped with something completely new and virtually unheard of: Apple CarPlay.
Apple unveiled CarPlay, its innovative in-vehicle touch-based display interface that mirrors and  functions as an extension of a driver’s iPhone, at the Geneva Motor Show on March 4, 2014, and I had an opportunity to take it for a brief test drive.
CarPlay links an Apple iPhone – at the time an iPhone 5, 5c, or 5s –  with the car’s infotainment system, letting the driver access a subset of Apple’s apps. At launch, the apps included Phone, Messaging, Apple Music, and Apple Maps as well as Spotify and iHeartRadio.
Drivers were able to also access Siri, Apple’s digital assistant, via a speech control button on the steering wheel to operate the iPhones hands-free, including sending and receiving texts and placing calls.
It’s now possible to use Apple CarPlay to order a Domino’s pizza or coffee and doughnuts from Dunkin’ Donuts
CarPlay didn’t technically replace the car’s infotainment system but, other than listening to AM radio and NOAA Weather Radio, I can’t really think of an instance where I actually do engage with the car’s native system.
Twenty years ago, I wrote that the automobile was “slowly turning into a mobile information platform.”  Today it’s here and it’s still largely about the music but also about two-way communication such as texting, hands-free of course (although it’s debatable as to whether hands-free texting is really that much safer than typing it in since it requires concentration to know what to say, brain power better put towards paying attention to what’s happening on the road).
Indeed, music and the automobile have been paired since 1930, when Paul Galvin built the first successful car radio, naming it Motorola (a combination of Motor and Victrola) and made the relationship between the automobile and music inseparable.  Not only are cars the stuff about which ballads are written, but music has become an integral component of the driving experience.
CarPlay has seen incremental improvements over the past decade, generally built into iOS upgrades. These range from the addition of wireless CarPlay, a split-view, multiple displays.
It’s also gradually been opened up to allow for parking apps, food-ordering apps, and EV charging station integration. As of iOS 12, CarPlay supports Google Maps and, later, Waze.
Starting this year, Apple is offering automakers a version of CarPlay with deeper integration with in-vehicle systems including access to climate control and a complete dashboard cluster. Apple said that Aston Martin will be the first automaker with the new CarPlay system and more automakers will follow suit. Time will tell, but here’s a toast to the next ten years of CarPlay.
(Photo: Accura Media Group)