Apple CarPlay is about to become a whole lot more powerful. Apple discussed at its WWDC 2022 keynote today its next generation of in-car app mirroring technology, which will now be capable of taking over a car's dashboard display and multimedia system - from the speedometer to the seat heaters.

Next-generation CarPlay will support multiple aspect ratios - portrait to landscape - and can adapt to multi-display dashboards, including those with digital instrument clusters or with ultrawide pillar-to-pillar displays.

The host vehicle's systems will be more integrated into CarPlay. The Apple CarPlay system will take over the navigation and media consumption functionalities of the current system, plus present traditional instrumentation like speedometers, tachometers, temperature gauges, and fuel gauges.

With CarPlay, users can adjust the climate, activate seat heaters, monitor air quality, and even connect to Apple's smart home services.

As with the next generation of iOS for phones, Apple is also allowing users to customize the look of CarPlay through selectable themes, backgrounds, and widgets.

There will be plenty of options to match the interior design of any vehicle and a variety of aesthetic preferences, from bold pink gauges to sleek numerical displays and bar graphs. 

Most interestingly, Apple claims that a new full-fat version of CarPlay that serves as a vehicle interface will still be powered entirely by iPhones connected to their vehicles.

Enabling Apple to control and access data generated by the host vehicles in a way that was never possible before. Hopefully, it can protect this data as well as they claim it can.

Apple states that the first vehicles featuring this CarPlay OS compatibility will be announced at the end of 2023, so we have about a year to wait.

The company also has not announced which automaker will be the first to market with the technology, but it names Acura, Audi, Ford, Honda, Jaguar-Land Rover, Lincoln, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Porsche, Volvo and Polestar as partners who are 'excited about bringing this new vision of CarPlay to customers.'