Tesla’s lack of CarPlay support is said to be due to the slow adoption of iOS 26, with fixing Maps compatibility said to be one of the last hurdles in CarPlay’s path.
Tesla has long been one of the pioneers when it comes to CarPlay support. While there have been many rumors that CarPlay will finally make its way to Tesla’s impressive infotainment system, it still hasn’t appeared.
In Sunday’s “Power On” newsletter for BloombergMark Gurman says that CarPlay is still expected to arrive. Tesla still plans to roll out CarPlay, running in a window within the Tesla software interface, but there are still some hiccups to work out.
Perhaps the biggest issue was between Apple Maps and Tesla’s own mapping software, which it uses for self-driving features. The incompatibility meant that turn-by-turn guidance from Tesla’s mapping app was not properly synced with Apple Maps when the car was driving autonomously.
Since the two apps could be opened side by side, this was considered a problem as drivers could be confused by seeing two conflicting sets of directions.
Tesla asked Apple to make some changes to Maps so they could work together properly. Apple agreed and created a patch for iOS 26 that affected CarPlay navigation.
Fixed slow boot
While the fix did exist and was being distributed to the public, Tesla’s other problem was that it wasn’t being distributed quickly enough. With the apparently slower adoption of iOS 26 than previous versions, too few people were in a situation where their iPhone had an update to Maps by the end of 2025.
This seemingly slow rollout meant that Tesla did not roll out CarPlay support at the end of the year as expected, as Tesla did not think there were enough supported iPhones to warrant the change.
That said, Apple’s App Store data on Friday revealed that adoption of iOS 26 closely followed the rollout of iOS 18. For 74% of all iPhones released over the past four years, it was just 2% behind iOS 18 at the same time a year ago.
Further muddying the waters is that the fix was not included in the base version of iOS 26, but as a later incremental update. While Apple’s data is for iOS 26 in general, it doesn’t address how many people installed the later update, which is of interest to Tesla.
While there’s no firm timetable for when Tesla will finally support CarPlay, it seems like it will depend more on when the automaker believes support is sufficiently widespread in the iPhone ecosystem.
Since CarPlay support has taken quite a while so far, it may be a while before Tesla drivers get to play with it.