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Apple

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.

An infotainment system that doesn’t need your phone plugged in

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.

Bryan M. Wolfe / Digital Trends

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.

CarPlay isn’t going anywhere

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.

Pranob is a seasoned tech journalist with over eight years of experience covering consumer technology. His work has been…