Just offer it and if the customer doesn't want to use it, they will not.
The latter suggestion is IMHO a really bad idea for companies the size of rivian. it would cost a lot of time and energy to integrate carplay and android auto very very well. Most cars are already a mishmash of software pieces, so replacing 60% of that with a simple carplay integration might buy them a lot. My wife's car is the first model year from that manufacturer with carplay and it's just horribly done. Duplicate voice assistants, and carplay only uses 75% of the screen (this is not fixed by the software changes in ios26 around this. This is the manufacturer not giving a shit) just to start. Despite all that it is still better than the smorgasbord of shit that it is without carplay. That is not true of rivian. It is already good software that is well integrated. if they moved, the same has to remain true. The upfront cost of moving would be large, not provide tons of benefit to existing customers (it's not in the top 5 for most owners), and they aren't large enough to have parallel software teams, so it would slow down development on things owners and near-purchasers care more about.
In the end good product development is at least as much about saying no as it is about saying yes.
saying yes to everything and making them all options does not actually make for good products (or softwaare)
in the end, they seem pretty good about holding themselves accountable to whether they’re succeeding in their various bets or not. and doing something reasonable with that info. As long as they continur that I'm not too worried, because it’ll lead to the CarPlay if it needs to.
This can't possibly be true. CarPlay and Android Auto are just an MPEG video stream to the car's display, plus a simple API to send taps back to the phone. Hell, you can buy a complete CarPlay/AA head unit for $200 at Best Buy.
I mean, if it is true that Rivian can't even grab an OSS video decoder and run it on their system... that makes VW's due-diligence (before throwing billions of dollars at Rivian for software) look very shaky.
As i said, that would constitute really shitty integration for rivian, becuase that isn't what their center console was like.
In rivians case you would now have a massive ton of center console functionality and driving display that worked and looked differently from the apps piece (2x differently if they did both carplay and android auto).
If you wanted it to look and act right WRT to the rest of the car you would have to do the carplay ultra thing, and write ios apps for your other functionality so that it actually all felt the same. Do the same for android auto, too.
Its the same with tesla.
Can I just suggest you spend 5 minutes looking at one (you don't have to drive it) and then see if you think replacing 40% of the center console functionality with something that looks and acts very different than the rest of the car would really qualify as "good integration".
None of what i referred to as the cost is the literal technical cost of displaying the video stream (Their UI is built in unreal and they have plenty of gpu power, so this part is trivial for sure), but instead, of building out the apps, functionality, and other pieces necessary to make the car software look and act coherently.
The reason VW threw money at them, other than wanting a hedge against Tesla, is precisely because VW has shitty software that feels and acts like a mess (my wife's car is a VWAG car, but not a VW), and Rivian doesn't. In VW's case, i'm sure all the pieces are written by different suppliers, so i can forgive them a little bit, but still, it's a mess.
It's ironic then to suggest that they didn't do their diligence because you think it's as easy as just displaying the video stream to make it good, when VW is paying rivian for precisely the opposite!
It's also interesting to try to discuss this with folks who have strong opinions but don't appear to have ever used one.
Overall, the best way i could put it is: Imagine you have an ipad, but you have to use a bunch of apps that are only available in android all the time. So 60% of your ipad screen is taken up by an android emulator that runs all the time. The other 40% of the screen is IOS. The two pieces know nothing about each other.
Do you believe this would be a good experience? I don't.
Would it suddenly be good if you could make the android emulator full screen? No, that wouldn't change a lot for me, though it would probably be better in the relative sense.
It would be good when i didn't have to run the android emulator, and all of my apps felt like they aren't fighting each other or ignoring each other :)
I have many complaints about the MMI system, but wireless CarPlay isn’t one of them.
That aside, what about safely messaging people, listening to my audiobooks/podcasts in my app of choice, and interacting with the apps and shortcuts on my phone through Siri?
It's the wrong choice IMO.
To be clear, I know Bluetooth audio is available. But having everything on the screen makes it easier.
I can't speak for Rivan's dev team's plans, but all the big car manufacturers have a voice command feature. How well it works is a different question. Siri is....how do I say this politely. Siri is best used in very specific circumstances for specific tasks. I can't imagine Rivian isn't looking to compete with the features Siri offers in those particular circumstances.
If it were GM or a different legacy automaker we were discussing here, I'd have different things to say, but Rivian isn't one of the big three.
CarPlay is purely additive.
As much as I complain about all the crap Apple gets wrong, no car manufacturer will beat them on UI or the choice of apps.
Er, what? My EV integrates with CarPlay. Apple Maps does route planning (including charging stops) based on the car's current and projected SoC. It even automatically updates the charging plan on the fly if/when conditions change.
CarPlay literally already does all the things you claim it can't do. On cars not built by Rivian, of course.
I can barely get my phone to reliably pair with my Ford, but my Tesla always picks up me as the driver and just does everything correctly. Rivian needs to offer me that same level of polish to be competitive.
Shame Rivian won't be on my list of cars to try due to the lack of Android Auto.
Now, I hope VAG won't carry over the same mistake (actually, I think them trying to use Rivian's software is going to fail spectacularly, and we won't see it happening, but that's for a different discussion).
netsharc•4mo ago
But, "AI in cars" is interesting. I guess it's already possible to build a clone of the KITT computer from the Knight Rider using LLM. (Is this a millennial reference, or a boomer one?). Although I wonder what features would make it more than a gimmick. Something like, "Michael, that Tesla has been following us for more than 15 miles. I ran the plates and it's..."
fzzzy•4mo ago