News Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Also, Elon Musk has a complicated relationship with Apple. He has criticized the company’s App Store policies, and was reportedly miffed when Apple poached dozen of Tesla engineers to staff its own failed car project. But times have changed, and in the wake of the Great Elon Musk Backlash of 2025, Tesla is now in a sales slump and looking for ways to juice demand. Bloomberg reports that adopting CarPlay, as outlandish as it seems, could be part of a broader strategy to get people interested again in Tesla’s cars. Tesla’s version of CarPlay would, of course, be subject to the automaker’s own allowances. The company plans of featuring CarPlay in a window within the larger interface, Bloomberg said, which means the projection would not fully swap out Tesla’s own software. Tesla also plans on using the standard version of CarPlay, and not Apple’s new more immersive CarPlay Ultra that includes core functions like the speedometer and climate functions. Unsurprisingly, the absence of Apple CarPlay is often a dealbreaker for many car shoppers. A 2023 survey revealed that nearly half of new car buyers globally wouldn’t buy a car without CarPlay or Android Auto. The same survey said that 85 percent of people preferred the phone-based system to their car’s built-in software. It’s indicative of this strange, upside down time in which we live that a company like GM is actively plotting how to fortify its own software to obviate the need for CarPlay, based largely on the success of EV-only companies like Tesla and Rivian that don’t allow phone projection — and meanwhile, one of those same EV-only companies is now contemplating its own flip-flop on CarPlay. Wild stuff! Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates. Andrew J. Hawkins