The main thing is Apple: the new Carplay feeds all screens in the vehicle and accesses all data. This creates a standard cockpit for all cars. Whether that is the future remains to be seen.
Image: manufacturer
Internet giants want to take over the car of the future. Your infotainment offers are becoming more and more attractive. Perhaps the auto industry is giving up control.
Where is the infotainment of the future headed, and why is this topic getting out of hand in the German car industry? More and more electronics are moving into vehicles, screens are getting bigger, mechanical controls are disappearing, and hundreds of functions can be operated on the touch-sensitive monitor or with voice control. Then there is the personalization: the car recognizes the driver along with their favorite music, their most frequent navigation destinations, preferred settings for the air conditioning and the seat massage.
Michael Spehr
Editor in the “Technology and Engine” department.
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Clever and reliable software is required here, but the German car manufacturers seem overwhelmed by this challenge. 4,500 employees work at Volkswagen in the Cariad software division, and the problems are so great that even the VW supervisory board is now getting involved. 400 additional IT staff are to be hired. While most Volkswagens are currently running software version E 1.1, the developers have been working on an operating system 2.0 since 2020, which has been postponed to 2026. Meanwhile, Audi and Porsche are pulling the emergency brake and relying on an intermediate version 1.2. It’s not quite as modern, but reliable and available. Porsche’s CFO Lutz Meschke recently told this newspaper that one can no longer do all the complex tasks alone. And customers wanted to seamlessly take their digital world from Apple and Google into the car.