Ford’s upcoming budget electric vehicle won’t force you to choose between a built-in map and one borrowed from your phone. Apple announced today that Ford’s Universal Electric Vehicle (UEV) platform will ship with Apple Maps running natively on the car’s screens. The feature will arrive in 2027 through Apple’s new MapKit for Automotive SDK, a toolkit that lets automakers build Apple Maps straight into their dashboards.
Today, getting Apple Maps onto a car’s main screen usually means running CarPlay. With the native Apple Maps integration, Ford’s upcoming UEV will pull Apple Maps data directly, giving drivers turn-by-turn navigation with natural language prompts, live traffic and incident alerts, and detailed place cards for search results, all without a paired phone.
Drivers will also get route planning that accounts for charging stops and battery preconditioning. Details like these are likely to make a bigger difference on Ford’s upcoming affordable electric vehicle than on pricier models with bigger battery packs.
Prefer CarPlay for calls, texts, and music? Ford says that option will stay put alongside the new native maps. The bigger story may be what happens behind the scenes. Ford’s Latitude AI team plans to use road-level detail from Apple Maps to help build a hands-free driving experience. Ford also says the same data will feed its next-generation BlueCruise highway system, aimed at smoother transitions from highway entrance to exit. Apple says it will apply the same privacy rules here as in its phone app, so location activity won’t be tied back to individual drivers.
For a company positioning its next EV lineup around affordability, handing navigation to Apple instead of building it in-house is a pragmatic move. However, it may seem unnecessary to drivers who already run Apple Maps through wireless CarPlay, which activates as soon as they step in.
Apple won the PC market’s worst quarter, but that’s not the entire story. It won the race by stumbling less than everyone else.
PC makers shipped just 57 million computers worldwide in Q3, which might look good, but it’s a 21% year-over-year plunge (via Counterpoint Research). And despite Apple’s Mac shipments falling by 11%, to 5.6 million, its market share rose from 8.7% to 9.8%. How did that happen?
Update (October 22 23:54 PT): In response to our query, GM clarified that offline recording support is already available on eligible vehicles. Like Tesla's Sentry Mode, it requires owners to connect a USB drive to save incident recordings, which can be viewed on the vehicle's infotainment screen. The upcoming Connected Cameras feature will build on this by giving owners remote access to these recordings via the revamped OnStar app, allowing them to check footage without walking out to their car.
General Motors has announced plans to add a new Connected Cameras feature to its OnStar service starting next year, giving drivers a way to monitor parked vehicles remotely and capture footage of certain incidents.
Missing out on the self-driving future is a tough pill to swallow, especially as a car enthusiast. But that is what Tesla handed us on Wednesday, without a hint of mercy.
During its October 21, 2026 earnings call, Elon Musk told investors the Cybercab is meant mainly as a ride service. Further, nearly all of them will be owned and managed by Tesla.