Apple CarPlay 2.0 Never Showed Up in 2024, So What’s Next?

• Next-gen Apple CarPlay was due in 2024.
• We were shown a preview of the next-gen software early last year, but Apple has gone radio silent since.
• There's no indication from the tech giant on what the future holds for CarPlay 2.0.

Apple said CarPlay 2.0 would start rolling out to cars in 2024 (the screenshot of Apple's website below confirms it), but we're now in 2025 and the next generation of Apple's near-ubiquitous in-car software is nowhere to be found. The biggest event of the year is always the one where they announce the new iPhone. This year's "Glowtime" event introduced the iPhone 16, 16 Pro, AirPods 4, a new Apple Watch, and gave more details on Apple Intelligence. But not a single word was uttered about the next generation of CarPlay that was first shown more than two years ago. 

In February of this year Apple invited Edmunds to their offices in Los Angeles to show how much progress they'd made on the next gen product. The new UI was polished, and very different to the concept you see above. It completely takes over every screen in your car (the gauge cluster, the center display, and so on). It offered all the functionality you'd expect from a gauge pod and infotainment screen, but with the added bonus of customizable layouts, themes that pull from your car brand's heritage (like a houndstooth background in your Porsche), and the ease of use we've come to appreciate from CarPlay. Apple also told me that it would be rolled out with new models from Aston Martin and Porsche.

Since that meeting Apple has kept to itself on what the future of CarPlay holds. The World Wide Developer Conference that took place in June (where the company mostly talks about its upcoming software) made no mention of CarPlay, either. We've since reached out to Apple on multiple occasions for more information about what else we can expect to see in the update to CarPlay and a more concrete timeline, but have yet to hear back. We'll update this piece if we do.

When it released its concept for the next version of CarPlay in 2022, Apple said "more information about the next generation of CarPlay will be shared in the future, and vehicles will start to be announced late next year." That was two years ago, and the official announcement on vehicles that will support the software has yet to materialize. The lack of any news about a product that was supposed to come but is still absent several years after its official announcement reminds us of another Silicon Valley tech company that announces products and never delivers them (we still haven't seen that new Roadster, Tesla). 

As a result, we still don't know what the future of CarPlay looks like, and we'll be intrigued to see if Porsche and Aston Martin follow through with an eventual CarPlay 2.0 rollout and if other manufacturers join them.