Unsurprisingly, the absence of Apple CarPlay is often a dealbreaker for many car shoppers. A 2023 survey revealed that nearly half of new car buyers globally wouldn’t buy a car without CarPlay or Android Auto. The same survey said that 85 percent of people preferred the phone-based system to their car’s built-in software.

It’s indicative of this strange, upside down time in which we live that a company like GM is actively plotting how to fortify its own software to obviate the need for CarPlay, based largely on the success of EV-only companies like Tesla and Rivian that don’t allow phone projection — and meanwhile, one of those same EV-only companies is now contemplating its own flip-flop on CarPlay. Wild stuff!