Apple spent years trying to build a car. Then it didn’t. The surprising leftover is sitting in a Gaydon showroom with a Vantage badge on the nose.
The latest Aston Martin Vantage S is the first car to run Apple’s new in-car platform — CarPlay Ultra — not as a rectangle of phone-on-the-dash, but as the brains of the cabin. Driver’s display, key controls, vehicle settings: the lot. The phone still comes along for the ride. It just isn’t the whole show anymore.
That is a very Aston way to inherit a cancelled megaproject. No robotaxi. No skateboard EV. A front-engined sports car that is neither self-driving nor electric, carrying the bit of Apple’s car programme that actually shipped: the software that talks to the driver.
For a travelling lodge of car people, this is the interesting bit. The industry spent a decade promising the car would become a phone. Aston has gone the other way. The phone is invited in, then put to work on Aston’s terms — wireless, deep in the dash, looking like it belongs in Gaydon rather than Cupertino.
We have not driven it. The motoring press who have say the operating logic of the screens is the story, not another row of icons. Fair enough. The test is the same one we apply to any new gadget in a proper car: does it help you enjoy the road, or does it argue with you at 70?
If you want the full road-test colour, the Straits Times piece is here. Our version is simpler. Apple never built the car. Aston built one anyway — and it is the first to wear Apple’s new cabin.
Source: The Straits Times, “Apple’s first car is an Aston Martin.”