Why I Don’t Like CarPlay

Get into the car, take out the phone, put in into a flimsy piece of plastic that is somehow attached to the vents, connect the charger. Navigate to your destination.

That was the life before CarPlay. Now 79% of buyers aren’t even going to look at a car that doesn’t have it.

Don’t get me wrong, CarPlay is ifinitely better than what we had before. Car manufacturers operate in a very different paradigm than smartphone manufacturers. They source individual blocks and parts years in advance, so in the end your car problaby has a dozen of small computers running different areas, and multimedia was never their strong suit.

But after trying out Tesla, I have to say I prefer their built-in navigator and multimedia experience to CarPlay. Rivian is probably the same, along with other electric-first brands.

CarPlay has the lowest denominator problem. Since Apple doesn’t know what kind of screen the car will have, they have to adapt. In addition to this, Apple is extremely cautious and paternalistic. Because of this, the experience is worst than it could have been.

Here’s a simplest scenario that works great in a Tesla. Look at the map, pinch to zoom out, find a place you want to go but can’t be bothered to remember the address. Long tap, go. I do it all the time when I want to drive to a random place in a city or when I’m traveling in another country and maybe looking for the next sightseeing point. Or when you realize that the road is blocked and you have to force the nav to go a weird route.

You can’t really do that with CarPlay. All navigation apps, whether it’s Apple Maps, Google Maps or Waze, have to operate accoridng to their invisible rules. There’s no pinch-to-zoom because your car’s screen can be shitty, you have to tap a button to change the scale, adjust it and get back. You can’t just long tap on a specific point and drive there—never works reliably for me. And worst of all, even if you’re just at your driveway, you can’t simply take out your phone and do the thing there—your nav will be stucked on turn-by-turn directions, because Apple doesn’t want you to look at the phone. Unless you know the name of the place or an address, you’re screwed.

There’s more. Yes, CarPlay lets you have your music or podcast app, even if you use a third-party one like Castro. But you can’t scroll the song or the podcast episode. Again, because Apple believes you shouldn’t. The apps themselves are pretty bad. Go try and open Spotify simply to play Liked Songs or another recent playlist. It’s not obvious at all. Finally, renting a CarPlay-enabled car in Scotland reminded me how much of your phone’s battery is burned on this, especially with wireless CarPlay. The phone dies in a few hours.

Now, the unique advantage of CarPlay is that you indeed have your phone’s envirionment with all the apps. The world is not limited to the US and Western Europe and other countries have their own maps and music services, which probably have iOS apps. Still, Tesla locks you in with their providers. For a few months it didn’t know they turned a crossing nearby into a roundabout. And I have to use either Apple Podcasts or Spotify to listen to my shows. Well, actually I don’t, because I can continue the same show I had on my morning dog walk by simply tapping the Bluetooth button—everything switches automatically and almost instantly. Still, it’s less native (and I can no longer scroll the episode here either). The audio was a problem we solved years ago and I don’t get why people act so annyoned by having to connect to Bluetooth. The phone is already connected the second I get in anyway.

But the entire experience with built-in multimedia so much smoother I’m willing to lose some things. Plus, electric vehicles in general require good navigation specifically as the app has to know your car’s charge and energy consumption to build the route accordingly and plan for charges. Google Maps won’t cut it. With combustion, most of the time you don’t need to think about gas station, you only do this when you realize you’re low on gas already.

I’m not actively opposed to CarPlay. It would have been interesting if Tesla and Rivian used it. Although I doubt Tesla would be willing to drop their Mobile Connectivity subscription. The $10 I pay every month enable the built-in “phone” inside the car to stream music and even videos when you’re stopped. But to their credit, basic navigation and remote control are free, which can’t be said about many legacy manufacturers like Kia.