The 2019 Corolla will support Apple CarPlay and Amazon Alexa, Toyota announced on March 23rd.
The Corolla is slated to be the second Toyota car to feature CarPlay. Toyota announced the first, the 2019 Avalon, earlier this year.
The car manufacturer unveiled the hatchback at the New York International Auto Show. The announcement is starting to define a trend for Toyota, which has famously avoided from adding CarPlay and Android Auto to its lineup while other large car manufactures like GM and Volkswagen have added the infotainment system practically to their entire lineup of new vehicles.
The car also includes a lot of other connectivity options such as an AUX port, USB 2.0 and Qi wireless charging. Like with the 2019 Avalon, the Corolla’s Qi charging pad won’t support CarPlay, so drivers will still have to plug-in to use the feature. It also doesn’t support Android Auto, which makes Toyota one of the few brands that supports CarPlay exclusively.
A lot of cars support CarPlay, making Amazon’s Alexa digital assistant the new comer here. Toyota’s take on Alexa isn’t as integrated into the car as it is on cars from Ford, for instance. Instead, it acts as a another vocal access point for regular Alexa functions like music or to control smart home devices.
When Toyota announced the Avalon with CarPlay support they told MobileSyrup that the feature won’t be coming to Canada, but we’ve reached out again to see if the Canadian Corolla will get Carplay and Alexa support. We’ll will update this post when Toyota responds.
Update 03/26/2017 5:53: Toyota has confirmed in an email to MobileSyrup that CarPlay in the new Corolla will be coming to Canada, but the Alexa support will not.
Update 03/27/2017 9:52: Toyota has also confirmed that CarPlay will come to the 2019 Avalon in Canada as well.
