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Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe was recently on the Decoder Podcast hosted by Nilay Patel where RJ talked about a multitude of things but one of the biggest topics was the discussion of why Rivian lacks Apple CarPlay, a feature many Rivian owners are hopeful for.
RJ explained that Rivian focuses on creating a pure product experience and when using a product like Apple CarPlay, the experience may not be as user-friendly as one may think. Need to open the front trunk? This will require the user to exit CarPlay to use the vehicle’s native controls.
“We’ve taken the view of the digital experience in the vehicle wants to feel consistent and holistically harmonious across every touch point. In order to do that, the idea of having customers jump in or out of an application for which we don’t control and for which doesn’t have deep capabilities to leverage other parts of the vehicle experience. For example, if you’re in CarPlay and wanna open the front trunk, you have to leave the application and go to another interface. It’s not consistent with how we think about really creating a pure product experience.”
While Rivian does not have plans to support Apple CarPlay, the company is working on adding features that CarPlay owners desire on an a la carte basis including Apple Music which Rivian officially announced last month.
RJ recognizes that the biggest issue owners seem to have is around mapping which Rivian has confirmed to be working on.
“I think the biggest complaint today around the lack of CarPlay is the improvements we need to make in mapping, which are coming. But again, even in mapping, we want to be able to separately select routing, separately select base maps, separately select points of interest, overlay that with charging routing, which is really important and is highly specific to the vehicle itself and highly specific to the networks and the ratings on those networks, which we bought a route planning company to support that. We just believe that it’s such an important piece of real estate, the digital ecosystem, that it was something we want to retain.
And we recognize that it’ll take us time to fully capture every feature that’s in CarPlay. And hopefully customers are seeing that. And I think it gets often more noise than it deserves.
The other thing beyond mapping that’s coming is better integration with texting. And we know that needs to come. And it’s something that teams are actively working on.”
RJ confirmed that they have a great relationship with Apple and he is a huge fan of the products the company makes.
Long story short, don’t expect Apple CarPlay to come to Rivian unless they suddenly realize that not having is is impacting sales.
Source: 9to5Mac