Apple Pay Chief Suggests Digital Car Keys Could Expand to Rentals

As Apple celebrates the 10th anniversary of Apple Pay, ‌Apple Pay‌ and Apple Wallet chief Jennifer Bailey today did an interview with The Points Guy, providing some insight into current and future Apple Pay-related features like car key and ID integration in the Wallet app.

bmw car key photo
‌Apple Pay‌ wasn't an immediate hit with consumers, but Bailey said that Apple "worked really hard" to establish a "great customer experience" over the last decade. As mobile payments via ‌Apple Pay‌ have become widely available and more well-known, Apple and Bailey are focusing on expanding the capabilities of the Wallet app to make it more useful.

Back in 2020, Apple introduced support for car key, an implementation of the Digital Key standard that uses NFC. The feature is designed to allow iPhone and Apple Watch users to store a key for a compatible vehicle in the Wallet app, and multiple manufacturers have implemented support. Apple is working with more than 30 car manufacturers on car keys.

As support for car keys expands, Bailey sees a future where digital keys are available for rentals.

Being able to book a car rental, confirm your authentication and identity ... you can imagine that a car rental company is going to issue you a digital key, and that key could be used to unlock and use a car.

Some hotel chains have already implemented support for accessing a hotel room with a key stored in Wallet, so it's not hard to imagine this kind of functionality also expanding to cars at some point.

‌Apple Pay‌'s transit usage is "just fantastic," according to Bailey, and "people absolutely love it." Apple in 2022 launched Wallet support for Digital IDs and driver's licenses, and while that's taken some time to take off, Bailey is confident adoption will pick up because the option for a digital ID is "really profound."

It'll be a long-term journey like we had with Apple Pay. It's helping states understand how our approach is privacy-protected and highly secure, how we don't have the data, and how we don't keep any association with where you're presenting your ID.

Bailey told The Points Guy that Apple is only at the beginning of its "long-term vision to replace the wallet," but the core ‌Apple Pay‌ technology that kicked off the effort "is perfect."

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Top Rated Comments

GMShadow Avatar
24 weeks ago

Apple Pay wasn't an immediate hit with consumers
In fairness the initial rollout and acceptance was on the slow side - it was years before even a majority of banks in the US supported it, and many retailers dilly-dallied wherever possible.
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)
cutler Avatar
24 weeks ago
Let's just hope it works better than my recent digital hotel room key experience through OpenKey. HORRIBLE software.

Would regularly de-activate my husband's and my keys, sometimes refusing to reactivate them. Hotel had no front desk so every single time we had to call, leave a message, and wait a few minutes for someone to call us back and manually reactivate them for us. A truly infuriating experience.

Happened so many times the hotel person finally told us how to access a secret room with physical keys for every room in the hotel so we could just take one and use that.
Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)
DrJR Avatar
24 weeks ago
Like digital license/ID, I will be strongly opting out. Tired of the digital gulag.
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
H.E. Pennypacker Avatar
24 weeks ago
Hard pass for me with the digital car keys. Call me old fashioned.
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
rman0726 Avatar
24 weeks ago

Apple Pay was a big hit here in the UK pretty much from day one. I can't understand why it was so slow to take off in the USA.
It was really the outdated credit card terminals that was the issue. Retailers didn't want to buy new terminals that supported NFC when they saw little to no benefit. However, after the US finally switched in earnest to credit card chips, due to the responsibility for fraud flipping over to being the retailers problem if they swiped the card, that essentially forced retailers to update their terminals. And NFC was a side benefit of the newer terminals.
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
lovehateapple Avatar
24 weeks ago

Hard pass for me with the digital car keys. Call me old fashioned.
I kinda agree. Even though I can see the convenience of digital keys on my phone, I imagine I will feel more comfortable for a long time with having a physical key as a backup.
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)