Image: Michał Gapiński
Apple’s CarPlay is sorely missed by some Tesla owners, and it is right up there with some of the most requested features for the company’s electric vehicles (EVs).
Polish developer Michał Gapiński (@mikegapinski) is done waiting on Tesla and Apple to make nice with each other and give customers of both companies what they want, and he has come up with his own workaround — reports Tesla North.
Gapiński on Tuesday shared a video with the publication, showcasing Apple CarPlay running on his Tesla Model 3.
Gapiński’s solution features AutoKit — an Apple CarPlay client for Android, accessed through his car’s internet browser and running on a Raspberry Pi with an alpha build of Android 12 installed.
The developer first showed off his idea last month and has been working on improving it since. The implementation doesn’t offer the smoothest user experience at this stage — it’s pretty slow to respond to touches, and you can tell the animations struggle to keep up, but it certainly manages to emulate what official CarPlay support from Tesla would look like.
Once he has polished his approach into a reliable and viable solution, Gapiński plans to release it to the public.
The developer explains in the video’s description that, once released, the feature will open “new possibilities for running third-party apps and integration like CarPlay.”
Tesla owners saw a ray of hope for CarPlay when support for Apple Music was spotted in a firmware update back in December 2020. It has been over a year since then, but Apple Music support is nowhere to be seen.
That said, there are reports of Tesla working on a dedicated app store for its cars that would give users access to third-party apps, so there might be hope for (official) Apple CarPlay on a Tesla after all.
In the meantime, Tesla owners have a public release from Gapiński to look forward to. The car Gapiński demonstrated CarPlay running on was an older Tesla Model 3 with an Intel Atom chip (newer models are equipped with significantly more powerful AMD Ryzen chips), so the developer’s solution should work on most Teslas.
