On Thursday, developer and podcaster Casey Liss published a blog post titled “CarPlay Is Additive (You Dolts),” arguing — correctly — that Apple’s in-car interface is a layer that augments a vehicle’s native infotainment rather than replacing it. By Friday morning it had cleared 268 points on Hacker News and generated hundreds of comments, the latest skirmish in a war that has been simmering since General Motors announced in 2023 it would drop CarPlay and Android Auto from its electric vehicles.
The debate has ossified into two camps. Camp One: automakers are greedy suits killing a feature customers love so they can sell subscription data plans. Camp Two: automakers need to own the software stack to build differentiated experiences and capture the recurring revenue Wall Street now demands. Liss’s post lands squarely in Camp One, and it resonated because people feel it. They like CarPlay. They will not buy a car without it.
Both camps are arguing about the wrong car.
The Fleet Doesn’t Care About Your Dashboard
While consumers and OEMs battle over screen projection protocols, the structural transformation of who owns the vehicle has made the entire argument quaint. Leased fleets now account for roughly one in four new vehicle registrations in the U.S., according to data from Experian. Hertz alone ordered 175,000 EVs from GM and Polestar before its infamous Tesla unwind. Enterprise, Avis, and a growing army of subscription-based startups — Autonomy, Finn, Care by Volvo — are turning the personal automobile into a service.
When a fleet manager orders 20,000 crossovers, CarPlay compatibility does not make the RFP. Telematics integration does. Maintenance-predictive APIs do. The ability to remotely disable the vehicle when a payment is 48 hours late does. The dashboard interface that matters is the one the fleet operator sees, not the driver.
A fleet buyer for a major rental company, standing in a parking lot at Orlando International Airport last month while inspecting a delivery of mid-size SUVs, put it plainly: “I don’t care what the screen shows. I care about the data pipe back to our ops center. Apple doesn’t give me that pipe. The OEM does.”
GM Wasn’t Greedy — It Was Reading the Room
The 2023 GM decision looked consumer-hostile, and it was. But it was also a rational bet on where the revenue actually lives. GM’s own projections, outlined at its 2024 investor day, estimated that software and services could generate $20 to $25 billion annually by 2030. Not from selling heated-seat subscriptions to you — from selling fleet-management platforms to the companies that will own the car you drive.
GM executives have been blunt about this internally. The automaker’s Ultifi software platform is designed to serve both retail and commercial customers, but the margin structure tilts entirely toward the latter. A retail driver might pay $9.99 a month for a navigation package. A fleet operator managing 40,000 vehicles will pay per-vehicle per-month for a suite of services that includes everything from charge optimization to driver behavior scoring.
CarPlay is additive, as Liss argues. But it adds value to a customer GM increasingly views as a legacy revenue stream.
The Dashboard War Is a Distraction
The real tension isn’t between Cupertino and Detroit. It’s between the concept of the car as a personally owned, indefinitely held asset — the model that made CarPlay relevant — and the car as a transient, fleet-managed liability that you access through an app. In that world, the in-car screen is a commodity. The interface you touch most often is the one on your phone before you get in: the rental app, the subscription dashboard, the mileage tracker.
CarPlay’s victory — near-universal adoption among traditional automakers, beloved by users, improved every iOS release — came just as the market began to shift underneath it. Tesla and Rivian never adopted it, not because they were hostile to Apple, but because they were built from the ground up to treat the vehicle as a connected platform the company controls end to end. That architecture happens to serve fleets as well as retail buyers.
The HN commenters and the Decoder listeners are right about what they want. They’re just not the marginal buyer anymore. The marginal buyer is a procurement director at a leasing company who will never sit in the driver’s seat of most of the cars they purchase.
Liss titled his post “CarPlay Is Additive.” He’s correct. But the thing it’s adding to is disappearing.