At first, the reason sounds strange, but when you think about it, it makes sense why Rivian doesn’t want to bring CarPlay to its vehicles.
Rivian CEO Says the Company Wants More Control Over their Software Experiences, Hence no Apple CarPlay
It all boils down to user-experience, nothing else. According to Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe on the Decoder podcast, the reason to not bring Apple CarPlay to Rivian vehicles all boils down to the consistency of user-experience. When CarPlay comes into action, it is an entirely different experience and one that does not mix well with the overall ecosystem. Say, you want to open the trunk of the car – for that, you need to exit CarPlay and then jump into Rivian’s own menu system to perform the action. You can’t do it from CarPlay. And that is the reason why CarPlay is not coming to Rivian electric vehicles.
Rivian CEO clarifies that it has great relationship with Apple, but it wants more control over how its own operating system in the car works. Rivian does not want to toss another layer of software between which the driver keeps on jumping. Providing consistence and high quality experiences is the company’s top-most priority.
Rivian is not the only company that refuses to bring CarPlay to its vehicles. Tesla never had it and probably never will, because it has its own ecosystem and software experience, too.
I’m not against CarPlay or anything. In fact, I use it on a daily basis in my own car. What I’m against is how users are forced to use one thing and not the other. Just give CarPlay to users as a choice like many manufactures have. If they believe it’s not working for them and the software experience is inconsistent, they’ll jump to the better experience.
