Tech
Mercedes-Benz To Cease Using Apple’s Next-Generation CarPlay
Mercedes will not be using Apple’s next-generation CarPlay, which was announced last year and should be starting to roll out by the end of this year, bringing a “cohesive design experience that is the very best of your car and your iPhone,” according to Apple itself. The next-gen CarPlay will handle vehicle functions like radio and temperature controls and will have personalization options “ranging from widgets to selecting curated gauge cluster designs.”.
Just not in any Mercedes car. The news comes straight from Mercedes CEO Ola Källenius, speaking to The Verge in a podcast released today. Mercedes is debuting its own MBOS 1.0 next year in the new CLA and has no plans to “give up the whole cockpit head unit” to a third party like Apple.
Källenius explains:
Our so-called Mercedes-Benz operating system is really the central nervous system in the brain of the whole car, of which the infotainment is one of four domains. The whole operating system — infotainment, automated driving, every single function of the body, exterior and interior of the car, the whole drive system, the battery management, the telecommunications module speaking to the cloud where we have the personal delay file for you with your settings and everything — is all one holistic software architecture.
He says you need to feel like you’re “stepping into your Mercedes cocoon, your Mercedes rolling living room, and the furniture and the digital stuff are from Mercedes.”. And if anyone is to create “a superior customer experience” in the car, “only the manufacturer can tie all of it together” so that you, the driver, don’t have to “jump between different worlds,” constantly having to switch between MBOS and CarPlay.
Mercedes’ “quest” is “to create the best digital experience in the world” for its customers, which includes “fantastic and intuitive UI”, and that’s not a “quest” that’s compatible with allowing Apple to insert itself in between Mercedes and its cars’ drivers.
However, the company is going to continue offering the current-gen CarPlay as well as Android Auto for those people who “feel more comfortable with that” for some of the functions and will switch back and forth.
