The tech world is a rich and complex global ecosystem. If a butterfly flaps its wings in your smartphone’s operating system, that can potentially cause a hurricane for Tesla’s sales, according to the the interpretation of events laid out in the latest column from Apple scoop guy Mark Gurman of Bloomberg.
Specifically, it seems that iPhone users’ apparent resistance to iOS 26 led to CarPlay not being adopted by Tesla, which may have cost Tesla precious revenue at a time when it was sorely needed. (It’s worth noting that while it was rumored that users were slow to adopt iOS 26 because they hated the gross new Liquid Glass aesthetic, the data on that are contradictory, although updates to iOS 26 really do appear to have lagged.)
Apple CarPlay, which brings up a familiar and easy-to-use representation of your iPhone screen on your car’s infotainment system, is a make-or-break feature for some car buyers. You can find Reddit posts in which CarPlay fanatics lament the feature’s absence in Teslas, and possibly let it dissuade them from buying the company’s EVs at all.
According to Gurman’s reporting from November, sales-starved Tesla noticed this complaint, and moved to correct the omission, possibly by the end of the year. Tesla apparently knew it was in trouble at the time, and Q4 sales numbers reflected that: they were down 16% from the previous fiscal quarter, and compared to 2024, deliveries were down by 9%.
According to Gurman’s anonymous leakers in and around Apple, CarPlay was expected to run in a window within the Tesla proprietary infotainment system, and “CarPlay also won’t tap into Tesla features like FSD, or full self-driving mode. Drivers will need to rely on Tesla’s own navigation app for that,” according to Gurman.
If you’ve ever been in a Ford with Blue Cruise driver assistance and CarPlay running at the same time, you’ve had a taste of this complicated technological dance.
Apparently, harmonizing maps functions in CarPlay with Tesla’s autonomous driving system wasn’t going well when GPS guidance was running, resulting in “a confusing experience for users, who could theoretically have both applications open side by side,” according to Gurman.
So reportedly Tesla asked Apple to tweak its iOS, which they were willing to do in iOS 26, which should theoretically have paved the way for CarPlay to roll out in Tesla’s. But that reportedly still hasn’t happened, because Tesla was worried that all those theoretical iPhone users becoming first-time Tesla owners were going to try and sync them with still glitchy, un-patched iOS 25.
Gurman implies, but doesn’t state outright, that recent reports of 74% adoption of iOS 26 on iPhones from the past four years represent some kind of possible watershed moment—as long as too many people don’t still have iOS 26.0—the original version of iOS 26 that still didn’t have the Tesla bug fix—on their phones.
So does that mean enough people have comparable software, and Tesla is about to finally ship support for CarPlay? Gurman specifies no such thing. Nonetheless, the update is still apparently in the works.
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