With rumors that Tesla might be planning to add CarPlay in some capacity to its vehicles, Rivian’s CEO and founder RJ Scaringe continues to deny his company will ever add a layer of CarPlay to its vehicles. In fact, he even recently joked about Tesla’s potential capitulation. Over the years, several carmakers have gone back and forth over supporting or ditching CarPlay, but Tesla and Rivian have -– for now -– maintained their positions of avoiding CarPlay in order to offer a “superior” experience between their own hardware and software.
Of course, that doesn’t mean Rivian is ignoring Apple’s technologies altogether. The carmaker has integrated Apple Music and, more recently, announced iPhone Car Key support for the second generation of its cars, allowing owners to use their iPhone to open the vehicle’s doors or start the engine. Even though Rivian continues to court Apple fans with new features, CarPlay is still out of reach. However, Rivian customers don’t seem to be especially concerned.
Rivian says that AI is to blame
In an interview with Stratechery during Rivian’s Autonomy and AI Day, Scaringe said the main reason why Rivian won’t adopt CarPlay is due to AI, along with the importance of Rivian being able to control the full experience. He noted that customers don’t care about the agents working under the hood when users issue a request as simple as “tell me what’s on my schedule for later today.”
However, customers do care about the information they end up receiving, and that’s when the interface becomes important. Scaringe says: “As we’ve thought about this, inserting any sort of abstraction layer or aggregation layer that’s not our own just is extremely risky, and you start to build dependencies on that that are hard to reverse.”
The CEO also talked about the possibility of integrating a CarPlay interface inside Rivian’s software, which is something Tesla is reportedly doing. Scaringe calls this screen in a screen “a poor UI, and a poor user experience,” and drivers are used to “such bad UI that the life raft to escape the horrible UI that is embedded in the car is CarPlay.”
Do Rivian drivers care about CarPlay?
While saying “no” to CarPlay has backfired for a few carmaker CEOs, RJ Scaringe isn’t worried about that. The main reason is due to the hardware and software integration between Rivian’s vehicle and infotainment system. Besides that, the company has been quick to add new features, including Google Maps and natively integrated Apple Music. He says that it will soon integrate AI with ChatGPT and Gemini, as these AIs will be responsible for “portions” of the system.
More importantly, he claims that both Rivian and Tesla drivers aren’t worried about CarPlay. He suggests this is a unfounded fear of new buyers, as those who buy these EVs are more than happy with the infotainment systems they offer: “I also think that people that are in Teslas and Rivians that are actually driving it, the number of people that actually complain about it is very low. The number of people that say they’re not buying Rivian because of CarPlay is a higher number, but once you get into it, you’re like, ‘Oh, what was I worried about?'”
With that said, you shouldn’t expect CarPlay to come to Rivian vehicles in any capacity any time soon. Still, users should continue to get key features that iPhone and Android users expect in modern vehicles, in addition to plenty of AI.
