For the first time in many years, owners of modern vehicles are reporting less trouble with phone integration. Here’s what the data says about how well Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are working for owners.
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Android Auto and Apple CarPlay revolutionized how vehicle owners use navigation, listen to music, and communicate. For many people, their phone is their go-to device for most daily technology-related activities. They have a data plan, in some cases unlimited or practically unlimited, and they don't incur any added cost by using their phones in their vehicles versus using the phone outside of the vehicle. Unfortunately, many vehicle owners have reported that they struggle to make the technology work perfectly every time.
J.D. Power and The Multimedia Study
To get a handle on how owners struggle with their vehicles, various groups conduct owner surveys to determine in what areas owners experience “problems.” Note the term "problem." A problem may not necessarily mean something is broken in the vehicle. Just that the owner cannot make it work or is frustrated by trying to make it work. By conducting surveys of vehicle owners, J.D. Power can rank individual models based on having the highest and lowest problems.
Automakers buy this information from the group and use it in many ways. Some use it in advertising, bragging about high scores. Many use it to change the designs of their vehicles for better ease of use or simply for better reliability and durability. J.D. Power makes many of its study summaries public. Not the whole study, which costs money since it has great value. However, summaries are still very valuable tools for writers like myself who cover automotive reliability and technology topics.
The J.D. Power Multimedia Quality and Satisfaction study is one important study that helps gauge which brands and models are doing the best job to make technology useful and useable to owners. This study was most recently updated in September. There was a tidbit of information in that study summary that piqued our interest. The study found and reported that for the first time in many years, the number of problems reported by owners related to Android Auto and Apple CarPlay had not gone up but had, in fact, declined a bit. That is good news if you use Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. And more than half of vehicle owners report that they use one or the other every time they operate their vehicle.
How Bad Were Android Auto and Apple CarPlay Problems
For many years, J.D. Power reported that problems with phone integration ranked in the top ten of all problems across all models. In fact, in a conversation we had with a J.D. Power auto benchmarking director, we learned that problems with phones were the top problem overall. A bit over 5% of all the problems reported by survey respondents were phone integration-related. That sounds very bad. So we asked for some details on what types of problems were being reported.
What Are the Problems Being Reported
Our contact at J.D. Power described the problems as primarily failures to connect, dropped connections, and blank screens. Unfortunately, the surveys don’t offer much more than that. We do not know if the dealership resolved the problems by phone or in person, or if the issue simply stemmed from a lack of understanding of how the system is supposed to operate. Our contact said that many of the problems they were made aware of were “self-correctable.” That could mean that a proper cord may have been needed or that a user may have had to take a step to initiate the phone pairing they were unaware of and then discovered later.
What Do Reviews of Android Auto and Apple CarPlay Reveal
We visited the Google Play store and checked out the reviews for Android Auto, an app that comes on every modern Android Samsung (Google) phone. An amazing 4.73 million reviews were posted, and the overall average score is 4.2 out of five. The site does not allow you to mine much data from the reviews, but a 5-star review is by far the most common.
Apple doesn’t offer an easy-to-use review summary like Google, so we turned to PC Magazine. The publication gives Apple CarPlay a 4.0 score, which it calls “Excellent.”
Among the pros listed by this source were
- Intuitive interface.
- Reliable voice activation.
- Robust cloud-connected search.
Among the negatives were:
- Voice activation not available for everything.
- Dated map graphics.
We would agree with the summary by PC Mag.
Our Results In Over a Decade of New Vehicle Testing
Your author has been testing new cars for twelve years. In a typical year, I fully test and review about 55 vehicles, and I have short-term access to about a dozen more. During all of my years of testing, I have never had a problem with Android Auto that I could not resolve myself in under five minutes.
Typically, when I receive a new vehicle of model year 2024 or 2025, my phone integration follows the following steps:
- Plug in the phone using a USB-A or C cord to the car’s data port (not a battery port).
- Tap “Yes” or “Accept” on the vehicle screen one time. - Often this is the final step.
- In some cases, I must also say “Accept” on the phone screen.
- That’s it.
As you can see, I can usually pair my Samsung S24 (Android phone) to a newly delivered test vehicle in under 10 seconds. In most models, the cord is not needed after the initial interface and Android Auto loads Google Maps and my music or audiobook selection automatically upon entering and starting the vehicle subsequent times. In over a decade of testing, I have not had any individual models or brands that would not work (as long as they had the technology.) Over the past two years, I have not had any glitches or goof-ups I can recall. The technology is very reliable, and it is the same from model to model.
Tesla As a Control Group
We have been discussing the use of Android Auto and Apple CarPlay as if they were universal. They are almost universal. There is only one manufacturer that doesn't offer it that builds cars in volume. That manufacturer is Tesla. No Tesla has ever shipped from the Tesla plant with the technology. It’s nice that Tesla provided us with this real-world control group to show how the number of problems of a vehicle brand without the technology compares to one with the technology. Let’s compare:
- The best brands on J.D. Power’s Dependability Study are Lexus and Toyota. They have the lowest reported problems per 100 vehicles at 135 and 147, respectively. This is the gold standard in the industry today. Every modern Toyota model has Android Auto and Apple CarPlay included.
- Among the very worst brands for dependability is Tesla. This brand has a PP100 score of 252. If omitting Android Auto and Apple Car Play has helped Tesla it is not reflected in its dependability study results.
Another study that J.D. Power conducts its its Initial Quality Study. This study reports problems that new car buyers experience. This seems an ideal gauge of how Android Auto and Apple CarPlay work. In this study, all of the top brands offer Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. Both Tesla and Rivian are included in the rankings, and are rated among the very worst brands. Neither brand offers Android Auto or Apple CarPlay. Again, our real-world control group failed to result in better dependability or to offer a better initial quality score.
What is Google Built-In
Automakers don’t profit by providing vehicle owners with Android Auto or Apple CarPlay. There are no updates to sell, like automakers have done for a decade with native navigation. There is no subscription they can profit from, like there is with satellite radio. So automakers are starting to move away from Android Auto and Apple CarPlay in favor of offering built-in Google Maps. This sounds great, except that the system will reply forever on a subscription to a data service. The initial period is almost always free of charge. However, eventually, users will have to pay to use it.
Our colleague Jill Ciminillo is a very tech-savvy vehicle reviewer. She recently tested out GM’s Google Built-in system. How long did it take her to get it working? Over four hours. You can watch her review here. She mentions the 4-hour struggle at timestamp 19:25. Which system would you prefer? The free system that takes 10 seconds to use. Or the system with a monthly subscription cost that takes four hours for an expert to make work?
The Secret To Never Struggling with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay
The very best thing about Android Auto and Apple CarPlay if you don’t like it it is that you never have to use it. You can kick it old-school and navigate using the lousy built-in cartoonish maps the manufacturers still often provide. You can buy a Tom Tom and suction cup it to your dash or windshield. You can navigate using a paper map on your lap. You can listen to the satellite radio cut in and out as you go under trees and bridges. Using Android Auto and Apple CarPlay in a vehicle that offers it is entirely optional and costs you nothing to have. We have never seen an option package that charged for Android Auto or AppleCar Play, though some base trims did omit it in the past. Other than Tesla and Rivian vehicles, we have not seen a new vehicle without this technology in many years of testing. The final solution if you are anti-Android Auto and CarPlay is “don’t use it.”
Summary - Android Auto and Apple CarPlay Are Improving
It’s great news that the reported problems with phone integration have leveled off and begun to decline. We consider it very bad news that some manufacturers now want to profit by selling subscription-based Google built-in rather than offering a technology that earns very high reviews as standard equipment. Tell us below what you think of the technology. We value your comments.
John Goreham is a credentialed New England Motor Press Association member and expert vehicle tester. John completed an engineering program with a focus on electric vehicles, followed by two decades of work in high-tech, biopharma, and the automotive supply chain before becoming a news contributor. He is a member of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE int). In addition to his eleven years of work at Torque News, John has published thousands of articles and reviews at American news outlets. He is known for offering unfiltered opinions on vehicle topics. You can connect with John on Linkedin and follow his work on our X channel. Please note that stories carrying John's by-line are never AI-generated, but he does employ Grammarly grammar and punctuation software when proofreading.
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