Hartley Charlton, reporting for MacRumors:

Apple’s next-generation CarPlay experience is still nowhere to be seen following Porsche’s announcement of a major upgrade of its infotainment system for 2026.

The upcoming 2026 model year Porsche Taycan, 911, Panamera, and Cayenne feature an upgraded version of the Porsche Communication Management (PCM) system, making it more responsive, adding Dolby Atmos support, and integrating Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. The new system brings the Porsche App Center, a kind of app store for the vehicle, to all of the new models…

When it unveiled next-generation CarPlay in 2022, Apple said committed automakers included Acura, Audi, Ford, Honda, Infiniti, Jaguar, Land Rover, Lincoln, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Polestar, Porsche, Renault, and Volvo. Nearly three years have gone by since Apple shared that list, however, so it is unclear if it remains entirely accurate.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a few months now but just haven’t found enough to say about it. That changes today. This “next-generation CarPlay” feature was built by the Project Titan group at Apple, which also was responsible for the now-defunct Apple Car concept. As Charlton writes, next-generation CarPlay isn’t available in a single vehicle, despite it being announced three Worldwide Developers Conferences ago. Apple even said it would be coming “later in 2024” for the entirety of last year but just recently changed the webpage to display no estimated time of arrival.

Something is rotten in the state of Cupertino. This is the second major feature in a few years that Apple has failed to ship. But this time, I don’t actually think it’s because Apple hasn’t made the next-generation CarPlay features yet. I think they exist and work perfectly fine. Instead, the blame probably lies within Apple’s CarPlay sales department, or whatever it’s called. Forget General Motors — BMW, Porsche, and Aston Martin have been some of the most steadfast purveyors of CarPlay. The fact that none of them have integrated it into their latest models indicates something Apple isn’t telling us. Maybe Apple is exerting too much control over the design of the software. Luxury carmakers tend to want to tweak designs to fit their general aesthetic, so maybe that’s the catch.

But Porsche already announced next-generation CarPlay would be coming to their latest cars. So what’s the holdup? I’ve seriously been pondering this for hours — why hasn’t next-generation CarPlay shipped when the designs were apparently good enough for Porsche to publish on its own? Again, my mind goes to control — Apple wants carmakers to give up control over some key facet of the car, whether it be software updates, connection to an iPhone, or something related to the carmakers’ own software. Maybe Apple doesn’t want users to have a way to switch back and forth between its interface and the native one — I couldn’t find a “Porsche” or “Aston Martin” button in the next-generation CarPlay images, unlike the current CarPlay experience.

Whatever the bottleneck is, Apple needs to stop promising dates for features that simply don’t exist yet. As WWDC approaches, it’s hard to believe any dates the company gives during the keynote. “Coming later this year” should set off alarm bells in any Apple reporter’s head, and now that Apple has consistently shown it can’t deliver pre-announced products on time, its deadlines should be taken with a grain of salt. I’m not suggesting it can’t repair this reputation, but it’s going to be difficult. In the meantime, it should be known that Apple threw away one of its most prized possessions: the trust people have in it to ship products on time.