All Major Carmakers to Get Apple CarPlay except World’s Largest Carmaker

Toyota has no plans to support Carplay in its vehicles. That’s a big blow to Carplay’s market presence

Although it was one of the first car manufacturers to register with the CarPlay initiative of Apple, the Japanese auto giant Toyota is reportedly planning to keep its vehicles free of CarPlay. It is set to retain its own infotainment system in its cars for some time now, as it seems.

Toyota has been distancing itself from the Apple project for quite some time now. This started as early as in 2014, when a post published on its UK blog stated that the 2015 models of Toyota would be coming with CarPlay. However, the post was deleted shortly afterwards. There was another post instead that read “no announcements have been made about if and when Apple CarPlay will arrive in Toyota cars.”

However, the company’s own partnership with Apple remains intact. On the official website of Apple, Toyota is still mentioned as a “committed partner”.

The advanced technology communications manager of Toyota, John Hanson, said in a recent interview:

“We may all eventually wind up there, but right now we prefer to use our in-house proprietary platforms for those kinds of functions…”

The company has also shied away from using the Android Auto of Google. In order to provide support to apps, the Japanese auto giant has created its own system.

It was around a year ago that CarPlay was announced by Apple. The app helps users of iPhone, running on iOS 8, to pair their smartphones to infotainment systems. The vehicle dashboard looks quite similar to that of the phone, when the connection is done.

At the Apple press conference on Monday, the Apple CEO Tim Cook mentioned that “every major car brand has committed to delivering CarPlay”. He also said that as many as 40 models will sport CarPlay by the end of 2015.

Mercedes-Benz and Ferrari are the only car manufacturers at the moment to have CarPlay on some of their models. But Apple will have a reason to smile about when Toyota joins the bandwagon. After all, Toyota has become the global leader in worldwide car sales last year with a sale of 10.23 million vehicles – beating competitors like General Motors and Volkswagen.

Source: Data and information presented on this blog have been sourced from http://jalopnik.com/all-major-carmakers-to-get-apple-carplay-except-worlds-1690360091