Mercedes won't use Apple's next-gen CarPlay because it doesn't want to "give up the whole cockpit head unit"

Mercedes will not be using Apple's next-generation CarPlay, which was announced last year and should be starting to roll out by the end of this year, bringing a "cohesive design experience that is the very best of your car and your iPhone", according to Apple itself. The next-gen CarPlay will handle vehicle functions like radio and temperature controls and will have personalization options "ranging from widgets to selecting curated gauge cluster designs".

Just not in any Mercedes car. The news comes straight from Mercedes CEO Ola Källenius, speaking to The Verge in a podcast released today. Mercedes is debuting its own MBOS 1.0 next year in the new CLA, and has no plans to "give up the whole cockpit head unit" to a third party like Apple.

Källenius explains:

Our so-called Mercedes-Benz operating system is really the central nervous system in the brain of the whole car, of which the infotainment is one of four domains. The whole operating system — infotainment, automated driving, every single function of the body, exterior and interior of the car, the whole drive system, the battery management, the telecommunications module speaking to the cloud where we have the personal delay file for you with your settings and everything — is all one holistic software architecture.

He says you need to feel like you're "stepping into your Mercedes cocoon, your Mercedes rolling living room, and the furniture and the digital stuff are from Mercedes". And if anyone is to create "a superior customer experience" in the car, "only the manufacturer can tie all of it together", so that you, the driver, don't have to "jump between different worlds", constantly having to switch between MBOS and CarPlay.

Mercedes' "quest" is "to create the best digital experience in the world" for its customers, which includes "fantastic and intuitive UI", and that's not a "quest" that's compatible with allowing Apple to insert itself in between Mercedes and its cars' drivers.

However, the company is going to continue offering the current-gen CarPlay as well as Android Auto for those people who "feel more comfortable with that" for some of the functions and will switch back and forth. It's also "developing with Google the next generation of what a map in a car married to the driving-assistant system should look like", according to Källenius, and this is "a fascinating product where the best of the Google engineers and the best of the Mercedes engineers can throw their expertise together and take that to the next level".

At one point in the podcast, Källenius outlines his vision for what Mercedes should be primarily focused on, and it further explains the CarPlay decision:

Take care of the customer. Create the best digital customer experience. Partner with companies like Google and Apple where it makes sense for them and for us. But be the architecture of your digital environment in the car. And as I said before, it’s no less than the brain and the central nervous system of your vehicle. You can’t outsource that.