Car giant General Motors wants to take back control of its entertainment and navigation systems and will ditch its interface with Apple’s CarPlay and Android Auto systems as it redesigns the future of its in-car systems.

This is significant for radio in various ways, with some pros and cons for Australia.

With no more local car manufacturing in Australia, corporate decision makers in the company’s American HQ will have no local representation to pass on Australian policy decisions like the upcoming radio prominence legislation. On the other hand, the American radio industry is heavily lobbying for the continued inclusion of analog radio in US automobiles and is also working with the auto industry to keep radio prominent, so there may be an upside.

Apple and Android have their own priorities, which are about keeping users in their ecosystem, so neither multinational telecommunications technology company has been particularly keen to work with free to air broadcasters to include radio receivers in phones or to make it easy to move between apps and radio in cars.

The decision by GM is aimed at taking back control of its infotainment systems and is part of an industry-wide rethinking of the car as a whole experience, not just as a transportation machine with added extras. This rethinking comes in the wake of some of the most significant changes taking place in the auto industry since Henry Ford manufactured the first car in 1896. The rethink has been sparked by new players in the electric vehicle industry segment, who started from scratch and invented new ways of traditional petrol car design. Another factor is the growing industry realisation that the technology apps are bypassing vehicle infotainment systems and gathering data that is not always available to the automobile companies.

GM plans to phase out CarPlay and Auto technologies and replace them with Google functionality within a GM designed system, starting with the 2024 Chevrolet Blazer electric vehicle, according to a Reuters report. Core mapping functions, your music streaming account and  other functionality that drivers now use through Apple or Android, is planned to interface directly with the GM electronics within the car, it will remove the ‘middle-man’ technology.

The eventual aim is to decrease the amount of non-GM control/interface technology within the vehicle and also open up new revenue opportunities to the company, which currently go to the telco technology companies.

To achieve its goal, General Motors has made some strategic hires in the past two years, including Baris Cetinok (pictured) and David Richardson from Apple. Speaking to technology publication The Verge, Cetinok told the publication’s editor -in-chief Nilay Patel:

“Our cars have had software for decades now. What I think is changing is the software is now coming a bit more to the forefront in how you interact with the vehicle rather than ABS, which has been around for decades. That’s the magic of software, right? Emissions and how that’s controlled? That’s the magic of the software. How you take corners safely, that’s magical. There’s a lot of embedded software. I think what’s coming is just to the forefront and creating interactions…

“Customers actually don’t need to know [about the internal technology]. Our job is to hide that complexity and those choices. All you want is a reliable car that you can easily and comfortably get directions from, that routes you in such a way that you know when you need to charge, how much, where the charging stations are, that you can stream your music, answer your phone calls, etc. But let us do our job. We’ll hide the complexity, and we’ll continue to innovate and make things even better without you having to know it…

“Some of those pieces of information and preferences should be accessible to other devices that you choose to use. I don’t think they need to be locked in this walled garden of a single domain. I personally believe I should be able to take my podcast preferences from one podcast app to another. I always find it interesting that some of these very generic preferences I declare are locked and loaded, especially for non-specific content.”

Cetinok says GM will use Google Built-In and Google Automotive Services for content, but the company will “create our own experience around it.” GM’s long term aim is to “unify the experience” of driving any of their cars, with the first roll out of these new interfaces only in EVs for now, then adding them to petrol cars over time.

“I’m not here to compete with Spotify or Apple Music. They do a fantastic job servicing all of our music listening needs. We work with them, we bring their apps to our platform, and we run it. So I am not too concerned about that,” said Cetonok

What will future car entertainment systems look like? They will include more extensive displays, more voice control, remote control via an app and of course self-driving functions.

“When you get into that car, you’re going to see this pillar-to-pillar display with front control and back control. We have so many ideas of what experiences we can create for you there before we get into this area of revenue and shared debates around a gaming app… today we’re doing Level 2 [autonomy], I call it,“eyes-on, hands-off driving” with Super Cruise. But we are also the company that has already invested in a fully autonomous future, which is with Level 4. There is a zone of Level 3 autonomy [still to come until reaching level 4]…

“I think the biggest change with large language models is that I can finally be understood by the machine… the device is going to be able to interpret my intent and give me answers.

“The reason I think we all default to a more touch user interface today is that we as users have to do a lot of the disambiguation instead of the machine understanding what you want. You are going through things, when all you want to know actually is this. If you want to drive to Aptos, California, to surf in an hour: “Tell me the surf conditions.” It’s a two-sentence answer. Do I really need the app for that?”

In another sign of things to come, the NY Times recently wrote about driving habits being tracked without their knowledge through connected cars, resulting in higher insurance premiums of drivers were monitored as ‘hard breaking’ or ‘rapidly accelerating.’

Analysis by Steve Ahern.

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