News and updates on the rumored Apple Car
General Motors Vice Chairman Bob Lutz:
“When it comes to actually making cars, there is no reason to assume that Apple, with no experience, will suddenly do a better job than General Motors, Ford, Volkswagen, Toyota, or Hyundai.”
And then:
“If I were a board member of Apple, I’d ask some serious questions about this thing,”
Read the full article on Trusted Reviews.
Australian Hyundai fans can look forward to CarPlay support as Hyundai Australia has now rolled out an infotainment upgrade for a handful of models, adding Apple CarPlay connectivity to variants in the i30, Tucson and Santa Fe lines, according to a report by Mike Stevens of Car Advice.
Stevens reports that while international models of the Tucson have had CarPlay since mid-2015, the Australian market had missed out until now.
Find out more from the Car Advice report.
Apple today released a list of over one hundred cars (105 at the time of writing) and breaks them down by make and model.
It’s assumed that Apple will keep this list up to date. But in the meantime, here’s the cars that support CarPlay as of Jan 11, 2016:
In other CarPlay news today, Apple released information about the forthcoming iOS 9.3 update which adds new CarPlay functionality for finding places when driving using Apple Maps:
…the Nearby feature in Maps lets you find gas, parking, restaurants, coffee, and more with a tap. So you’ll know the best places to stop, whether you’re on your daily commute or an epic road trip.
Lastly, Apple Music comes to CarPlay in iOS 9.3, scheduled for release later this month.
With iOS 9.3, CarPlay adds even more useful features. New and For You from Apple Music — with songs, artists, and albums handpicked by experts, plus selections based on your preferences— are right at hand on your screen.
Photos: Apple
Apple made news in December 2015 when they registered a range of car-related domains, including apple.car for their car project.
Now Google has registered similar domain names for their own car project. Google on January 7 2016 registered both Google.car and Google.auto, as reported by Zdnet.
In other Google Car related news, Road and Track now reports that the latest prototypes for Google’s self driving car now feature wipers. Not for the windscreen, but for the sensors on the roof.
Wipers on the roof-mounted sensors. Image: Google
A piece from 2015 in the New Yorker discusses Jony Ive and his love of cars:
These days, Ive flies around the world in a Gulfstream GV that Jobs once owned. He drives an Aston Martin and a Bentley. For someone whose job involves promoting a form of commodity fetishism, that’s hardly surprising.
This goes on to note that Apple would, and should only release a car if it can charge higher than commodity prices. The quality needs to be there:
Apple’s vast profits—$39.5 billion in 2014—partially disguise the fact that it operates in a manufacturing industry whose products are rapidly commoditized, and in which only market leaders make much of a return on their investments. Apple can charge higher prices than its competitors because it has a reputation, which Ive helped to create, for superior quality and superior design. If that reputation were to be tarnished, Apple’s profit margins would quickly fall.
The rest of the article is worth a read.
Photograph By Michael Kovac/Getty Images For Vanity Fair
Industrial Designer Matías Papalini has released mockup designs of how he believes the Apple Car interior could look.
This image shows multiple areas of touchscreen display across the dashboard, and an iPhone tethered around the place of the steering wheel (not a wheel in mockups).
It’s too early to know what these could look like, but this is something to look at in the meantime.
View more of Matías’s work in fleshing out some Apple Car concepts.
Apple in December 2015 registered three domain names for its upcoming car project, as reported by Joe Rossignol on MacRumors. The domains registered are:
There isn’t any content on these sites yet, and are likely being registered simply to prevent others squatting on the domains.
The domain name for applecar.com was registered back in 2004, and is not associated with Apple in any way (at this stage!)
