Apple sets the table for electronic vehicles in CarPlay

Find and buy fuel from your dashboard with CarPlay

Apple is creating a CarPlay ecosystem that logically should grow to support Electronic Vehicle (EV) energy payments in the relatively near future.

CarPlay lets you buy fuel from the dashboard

Apple announced its plans to improve CarPlay at WWDC earlier this month.

While we won’t see some of the finest fruits of this effort ripen until next year, one under-reported improvement that will come this fall must surely be that CarPlay will allow users to navigate to a pump and buy gas directly from the car dashboard.

That’s really useful and sees Apple leveraging some of its existing technologies in App integration and payments to help support a third party market in fuel payments. It also means drivers don’t need to pull out their credit card by the road or leave the vehicle much at all. That’s all good in terms of gas but I think will become even more attractive (and relevant) as CarPlay begins to be rolled out in EVs.

One Dallas gas station told Reuters that it will use the new CarPlay tech and intends announcing details of this in a few months’ time.

How to use it

To use the new CarPlay feature iPhone users must install a fuel company’s app, enter payment details and can then use the navigation screen to activate a pump and pay.

But cars don’t just need gas these days

But that’s just for gas, and as EVs are set to become much more popular on the road ahead, it makes complete sense to expect Apple’s system to integrate with EV charging stations as they come on stream. With that in mind Apple’s existing relationships with ChargePoint and others means CarPlay can answer one of the bigger pain points of EVs, which is the need to find local energy supply to keep on with the drive.

 Apple and Chargepoint teamed up on EV charging locations via CarPlay and Maps back in 2020. It’s a no-brainer to think this association will extend tp making a purchase from the dashboard, also. It is also worth noting that the big fuel companies are also investing in EV charging points even while big name auto manufacturers, including Ford, are also seeking out opportunities with which to eat Tesla’s lunch.

Data insights ease the journey

Competition in the space is intensifying, and yet there still won’t be enough charging points to sustain the number of vehicles we expect to see on the roads.  The US Department of Energy tells us there are just 111,000 public EV charging stations, but this should increase relatively quickly. It needs to. The World Economic Forum says 290 million charging points will be required to support all the EVs it predicts will be in use globally by 2040. Meantime, Alix Partners says 46% of drivers won’t purchase an EV until charging points are as common as gas pumps.

Information is power, of course, and what Apple is doing here is ensuring that any driver of any vehicle using CarPlay will be able to find what pumps OR charging points are available and make decisions to match.

And, of course, it’s not impossible that anonymised usage information will help Apple decide where it needs to place its own charging stations in order to provide power to the Apple Car, once that vehicle hits the road.

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