You will soon be able to purchase petrol inside of your car using Apple CarPlay.
Tired of standing in line at the gas station and dealing with the skyrocketing cost of gasoline? Apple may be able to help by enabling you to pay for gas using the Apple CarPlay screen while you’re driving.
According to Reuters(opens in new tab), iOS 16 now supports new app categories for “fuel and driving duties,” indicating that this functionality may have been surreptitiously introduced at WWDC 2022.” You can pay for gas and perform other duties like accessing toll road information and breakdown assistance from your car’s entertainment system.
Apple’s rules for developers (opens in new tab) Note that this change only applies to driving-related driving chores and fuelling applications; this is likely because you’re expected to use Apple Maps or one of its rivals for such duties. One illustration given is a tool to assist you track your mileage in case you need to claim the trip as an expense for work-related purposes.
Together with other practical CarPlay features like parking payment, food delivery to your vehicle, and EV charging, these new rules are a welcome addition. Although petroleum is still necessary, electric cars are becoming more and more popular, so it makes logical that Apple would want to incorporate it into CarPlay.
There is an explicit reference to the necessity for “useful functioning, “and not merely a list of gas stations in the area. Additionally, apps can only disclose a fueling station’s location if a map is included.
We can immediately come up with a few ways that fuelling apps could enhance their utility. One approach for letting customers know where to locate cheap gas is to display real-time gas prices along with a payment option on the dashboard.
You won’t have to deal with pay-at-pump methods or wait in line because of this. You might not even need to step out of your car if you reside in a state like New Jersey where there are limitations on who is allowed to use the gas pumps.
In an interview with Reuters, the 1,600-station gas station chain HF Sinclair expressed its excitement for customers to be able to buy Sinclair fuel from their car’s display.
In the meantime, Donald Friedman from P97 Networks, a provider of digital fuel payment infrastructure, told Reuters that oil firms are eager in making their apps compatible with CarPlay. However, he didn’t say which ones.
Thus, before the release of the next generation CarPlay, which can control every display in your car, there will probably be a ton of new app experiences coming to CarPlay in the near future. All that is left to do is wait and see what the developers create.