Casper Kessels in Car industry on Apple’s big bet on in car UI:

Competition aside, from Apple’s perspective, CarPlay is also not ideal in its current form. For a company that values control over the user experience, it’s an eyesore to see their product embedded inside another product.

Apple’s answer is a new version of CarPlay. It doesn’t have an official name, so I’ll refer to it as CarPlay 2.

Today, CarPlay is a standard that carmakers can use to pass a video signal from the phone to the head unit and return input events. There’s only a limited connection with the vehicle. This is changing with CarPlay 2 which has a deeper integration with the vehicle.

Thanks to a deep integration with the software stack of the vehicle, CarPlay 2 can control most infotainment functions. It can therefore take over the entire infotainment display, the instrument cluster, and any passenger displays.

To be honest - this what Apple should have been doing the whole time instead of attempting to build the car. It allows Apple to do what it does best - the UI and hardware/software integration. If this works out for Apple, this could be a huge revenue stream and part of their move to a more ‘service centric’ platform. Done right they could potentially get a get a cut of every car that is sold.