I hate driving (specifically in the city), but I am fascinated by the next generation of Apple's CarPlay, which I recently wrote about, here.

One of the reasons why I'm fascinated is because so much of our built environment is built around the car. And since the built environment tends to be very sticky, I think one can safely assume that -- for better or for worse, it's actually worse -- we're going to need a lot of cars for the foreseeable future.

According to Apple, 98% of new cars in the US come with CarPlay already installed. So, all cars. And the obvious reason for this is that many or most people want it. According to this survey, about 1/3 of new car buyers say that they wouldn't buy a new car if it didn't have Apple CarPlay or Android Auto.

Apple believes this number is much higher at 79% of US buyers. I don't know what the right number is, but I do believe the number is substantial and probably closer to Apple's than the 1/3 figure. I certainly wouldn't buy a new car without CarPlay.

The result is a suboptimal situation for carmakers. Apple is still going to do whatever it takes to make carmakers want to use CarPlay. My recent post was largely about the design efforts that they have undertaken. But in the end, I'm not sure the auto industry has much of a choice.

There's likely no way they're going to be able to compete with Apple (and Alphabet) from a software perspective and, in the end, consumers are going to want whatever pairs perfectly with their existing phone, since that's where their entire life already lives.

No wonder Apple killed their car project. They can just use everyone else's cars. Even if this is a departure from their typical approach of controlling both the hardware and software.

Apple had plans to make an electric car. Then, earlier this year, it cancelled that project. Now, the plan seems to be to just get Apple CarPlay into everyone else's cars.

This is obviously smart, because it expands the Apple ecosystem, but it also means that they have to make it so that automakers want them in their cars.

And since car companies have their own brands to manage, you end up with a somewhat unique scenario where Apple doesn't own and control both the hardware and software, and it needs to be flexible in order to scale.

This is if they want to control all of this:

The solution: A special co-branded experience that is going to allow car makers to heavily customize the appearance of CarPlay such that it reads as their own brand. This is how the next generation of the software will work and I think it's a fascinating balancing act.

Here's another screenshot:

If you're also interested in this sort of thing, here's a video explaining the new CarPlay's design system. It's primarily aimed at automakers and system developers, but you'll also like it if you're a designer.

We talk a lot about walkable urban communities on this blog, and I'll be the first to admit that this is my own bias. It's my preference. But at the same time, we can't ignore that, as of 2022, there were nearly 280 million registered personal and commercial vehicles in the United States. And that only about 8.3% of households do not have a vehicle. Most households drive in this part of the world.

The result is that lots of people want to regularly wash their car(s). According to Bloomberg, there are some 60,000 car washes across the US, and the overall sector has been growing at roughly 5% per year (I'm not sure over what time period). More thrilling, though, are the stats that the car wash market is expected to double by 2030 and that there were more car washes built in the last decade compared to all prior years combined.

The obvious reason for this is that there are a lot of drivers. But why right now? Apparently, there are other more specific reasons for the recent boom in car washes:

Now, washes can take just 90 seconds, labor costs have been automated down, and recurring revenue from memberships has eliminated weather risks. Plus, the tax reforms enacted in 2017 by former president Donald Trump allowed car wash owners to claim 100% depreciation on new equipment — a generous subsidy to further investment. While that incentive was written to shrink over time, the tax proposal currently in Congress would restore the 100% depreciation allowance.

This has the PE and real estate industries interested:

“If private equity thinks it’s sexy, they’re gonna throw money at it, right?” said Emil Khodorkovsky, founder and CEO of Forbix, a real estate firm that just acquired a car wash in Santa Monica, California. “It’s a basic business. It isn’t complicated finance. Certain actors are getting squeezed but this one still has a much higher-yielding return than an apartment building or a retail center.”

It's hard to think of a retail use that is more antithetical to walkable urban communities. Even most drive-through places have the ability to service things that aren't cars. It is also possible to go through a drive-through on a bicycle or other micro-mobility device. I have done this before and it was fun. But going through a car wash on a bicycle is probably a lot less fun.

Intuitively, as long as there are lots of cars, there will be lots of people who want car washes. At the same time, there may even be a more urban use case, here. If you happen to have a garage and a driveway, there is always the possibility that you could wash your own car. But if you live in a walkable urban center and you park your car in a stacker accessed via an elevator, it's probably a lot harder for you to do that.

In this case, there's a subscription for that.