On Wednesday, software developer Casey Liss published a blog post titled “CarPlay Is Additive” that promptly shot to the top of Hacker News and lit up the kind of people who argue about infotainment systems on the internet. In it, Liss took aim at a claim that keeps surfacing in interviews with car executives: that phone-projection systems like CarPlay “take over every single pixel in the car,” and that’s not how automakers want to “interact with their users.”

Liss’s counterargument is elegant and, from a software-design standpoint, unimpeachable. CarPlay, he writes, is additive. It doesn’t remove the car’s native system. It adds a layer on top — one you can leave anytime by pressing a single button. The car’s own climate controls, vehicle settings, and gauges remain right where they were. CarPlay just gives you a better map, better music, better messages, and better voice control than whatever the automaker’s internal team spent five years and half a billion dollars building. “I literally will not buy a car that does not support CarPlay,” Liss writes, and the Hacker News crowd nodded along.

He’s right. And that is the problem — just not the one most readers think.

The Praise That Condemns

Read Liss’s piece carefully and you’ll notice something: every compliment he pays CarPlay is, by inversion, a brutal verdict on the state of automaker software.

CarPlay is additive, he says, because the car’s own system is subtractive. It removes value. It gets in the way. It is the thing you tolerate between the moment you start the engine and the moment your phone takes over the screen. His argument’s core premise — that a phone-projection layer running on a five-year-old iPhone provides a categorically better experience than a bespoke system developed by a company with a market cap north of $50 billion — should be humiliating to every automotive CEO on the planet. And yet nobody seems humiliated.

The reason Liss’s framing landed so hard is that it captures what drivers already know implicitly: the car’s software isn’t the main event. It’s the pre-show you skip. CarPlay’s value proposition is that it lets you ignore the thing the automaker is most proud of building.

The $26.4 Billion Side Door

This is where the automakers are in an impossible position — and not for the reason they think.

General Motors famously dropped CarPlay from its EVs starting with the 2024 Blazer EV, and Rivian and Tesla never offered it in the first place. The stated logic is about data, subscriptions, and a connected-car market projected to reach $26.4 billion by 2030. Every minute a driver spends in CarPlay is a minute the automaker can’t track, target, and monetize.

But the unstated logic is worse for them. The reason GM needs to wall off CarPlay to capture that data is that its own software can’t compete on the merits. If the native system were genuinely better — not just different, not just “integrated with the battery temperature sensors,” but better at the things drivers actually do — they wouldn’t need to block the competition. People would use the native system voluntarily. The fact that exclusion is the strategy tells you everything about the quality gap.

A senior engineer at a Tier 1 supplier, texting from a test track parking lot in suburban Detroit, put it this way: “We spend three years integrating a nav system, and then the customer plugs in their phone and never sees it again. The business case for blocking CarPlay isn’t strategic. It’s triage.”

The Wrong Lesson

The danger of Liss’s argument — and the reason it’s worth pushing past the applause — is that it lets automakers off the hook by praising the workaround. If CarPlay is additive, then the car’s software only needs to be not actively worse than nothing. That’s a bar so low it might as well be painted on the floor.

And it’s a bar automakers have been failing for a decade. Recall the widely documented disaster of the 2023 Chevrolet Blazer EV’s infotainment system, which was bricking screens and stranding drivers before GM paused sales for a software fix. Or the fact that, according to J.D. Power’s 2025 U.S. Tech Experience Index, infotainment remains the most-cited problem category in new vehicles, year after year. These are not “premium experience” companies. They are companies that ship software defects and hope over-the-air updates will arrive before the class-action filings do.

What the Additive Argument Actually Demands

If CarPlay is additive, then the thing it adds to matters. A layer on top of garbage is still resting on garbage. The best outcome for drivers isn’t that CarPlay exists as a permanent escape hatch from the car’s own interface. The best outcome is that automakers build native software good enough that CarPlay becomes a genuine choice rather than an automatic override.

That means automakers competing — actually competing — on software quality. It means hiring real product teams instead of treating infotainment as a checkbox on a spec sheet. It means iterating fast enough that a phone-projection layer stops looking like a five-year leap forward every time it activates.

Liss is right that CarPlay is additive. The question his argument leaves hanging is: will automakers finally produce something worth adding to? The answer, so far, is the button you press to escape them.

Casey Liss’s post “CarPlay Is Additive” was published July 2, 2026, at caseyliss.com. GM’s CarPlay removal policy was first announced in 2023 and applied to its EV lineup. The connected-car data market projection of $26.4 billion by 2030 is sourced from industry analyst reports cited by Carluex and others.

Sources