In an interview with Nilay Patel on his Decoder podcast, Volvo's CEO Jim Rowan was asked if GM taking CarPlay out of its cars was the right approach to an infotainment system. Rowan vehemently stated that he didn't think it was the right approach.   

Rowan: "I don’t think that’s the right approach. No, I absolutely don’t because I don’t think that GM are ever going to have 3.5 billion users that use a product every single day — 200, 300 times a day that they get really used to — and they want their car to basically be a simple, easy connection point to that car. So whether it’s Android or whether it’s Apple or whether it’s iOS, it’s the same experience. Unless all of a sudden they’re going to get into making smartphones that are as competitive as Android and iOS, then I don’t personally think that’s the best strategy. I think the better strategy is how do you add value for your customer. And adding value by saying inside the car, “Hey, Volvo,” rather than, “Hey, Google” or “Hey, Siri,” I don’t think adds value. You can still use the Volvo operating system. You still always have that, but if you want to use Apple or Android, you could use that as well.

Rowan later noted that "The infotainment stack where we are saying we want to have a base level of Volvo OS that we can set on top of, but we also want to offer the choice of Android Auto or Apple CarPlay so that they can then offer all the plethora of choices that they’ve got, whether that’s the different apps that you can download into the car itself that sits on that center stack or just the convenience of having your iPhone or your Android machine connect directly and seamlessly with the car."

As cars become computers on wheels, Rowan, a former BlackBerry and Dyson executive is approaching Volvo’s EV transformation with a consumer electronics mindset.

Rowan later noted that "the attraction for me, I’m an engineer, and the amount of technology that’s been poured into the industry simultaneously, it just makes for a really appealing place to be right now, just simply as an engineer alone. So, because you’ve got this massive transformation on electrical propulsion from internal combustion, that’s one side, and although the industry talks a lot about electrification, it’s really the easy part. That’s the tip of the iceberg.

The much more profound change that’s happening in the industry is this move to core compute, and the move to core compute technology brings with it silicon and really being able to understand high-computational silicon, software — of course, in all its various strands of software, be that embedded software or mission-critical software or the application layer to your iPhone. Then you’ve got connectivity inside the car. Then you’ve got 5G externally. You’ve got cloud architecture. You’ve got connectivity to the phone and the iOS strand, or Android for that matter."

If you're following the car industry's latest moves then the interview with Rowan is an interesting read (or podcast) worth checking out here.