CarPlay Is Additive

Back in March, Rivian’s Chief Software Officer, Wassym Bensaid, was interviewed by the excellent Nilay Patel for Decoder. If you’re not a Decoder listener, you should be. If you’re not a subscriber of The Verge, you should be. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about.

In this interview — which I greatly enjoyed! — Nilay grills Wassym on all manner of issues. The whole time, though, I was waiting for one topic: CarPlay.

CarPlay is a way to interact with your phone via your car’s infotainment. Our last three cars, the eldest of which was from the 2017 model year, have all had CarPlay. They make the experience of being in the car way way better. Any of the apps I really care about, and would want to interact with while on the road, have a bespoke CarPlay interface.

I literally will not buy a car that does not support CarPlay.

Most of the way through the episode, Nilay asked Wassym about CarPlay. The question was long, but the gist is this:

I hear from our readers every time I talk to a car executive that, “The reason I want CarPlay is because there’s 5,000 apps on my phone and no car OEM is ever going to support them in the built-in infotainment.”

This is when you would say, “Okay, project your phone to the center stack. The car’s driving itself. Have at it. Phone projection all day.” Do you think the tide is turning, or are you still absolutely committed to not having CarPlay in Rivian vehicles?

You can read Wassym’s full answer at the episode link, but here’s the part that stuck out to me:

The challenge with screen mirroring solutions is that they take over every single pixel in the car, and that’s not the way we see ourselves interacting with our users.

Let me help you, Wassym:

There exists a flavor of CarPlay — CarPlay Ultra — that does take over every screen of the car. Though even CarPlay Ultra has affordances for the manufacturer’s user interface to poke through. But nobody is asking for CarPlay Ultra. We’re asking for no-adjective CarPlay.

And CarPlay does not have to take up the entire screen.

Here, for example, is a photograph of my phone connected to my wife’s Volvo XC90:

See those bits above and below the CarPlay screen? That’s Volvo UI. CarPlay literally does not know that portion of the screen exists.

So, Wassym, try again.

Let’s say — for discussion — that CarPlay did take up the entire screen. No matter what. Let’s just live in Wassym’s fantasy world for a little bit.

I still have news for you: CarPlay is optional. CarPlay is additive.

Drivers don’t have to use CarPlay!!

If Rivian’s native UI is so great, then their customers… won’t use CarPlay. It’s that simple.

Nobody is asking for CarPlay to be mandatory. We just want to have it as an option.

If Rivian’s infotainment/software is that great, that’s swell! Then Rivian drivers won’t use CarPlay.

Well, unless they wish to use one of the thousands of apps that is optimized for CarPlay, but does not have a native version that can be installed directly to their Rivian.

Like, I dunno, Overcast, for example.

“But Casey, you see, the real problem is that you can use CarPlay for navigation. And fancy cars like Rivians have some of the best automated driving technology on the market. For the driver to have the best possible experience, the car needs to know the route the driver is driving.”

A paper retort! Conveniently, Apple is addressing exactly this in iOS 27.

Ultimately, the only thing I can control is myself, and I will not buy a car that does not offer CarPlay. I enjoy Rivian so much — both from afar and as someone who has driven both a R1T and R1S — that I really thought about getting on the waiting list for a R2. And I don’t even want a SUV!

But I won’t.

Because it doesn’t support CarPlay. CarPlay support is table stakes for me.

Stop being stubborn, Rivian. Stop being so intransigent and dogmatic. CarPlay is additive, and supporting CarPlay opens you up to an additional cohort of customers. Get off your high horse and ship it.

When you do, I’ll be there, waiting. I can’t wait to get in line for a R3X. 🤤