I hesitate to propose ulterior motives, but given there have been several seemingly obtuse objections to projection from Rivian, perhaps the CEO is concerned that, if Rivian supports projection, it will harm the perception of the value of their software stack? Related, I think they licensed their stack to VW.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"
-- Upton Sinclair
This is the CEO of Rivian's software arm -- his job is to create and sell software that runs in the car. Carplay and Android Auto effectively make him unnecessary.
If you listen to the interview, he has bold ideas about how the car should somehow be the center of one's computing ecosystem. It's ridiculous because the smartphone is already the center! And people like that! And it just makes sense! They're fighting this dumb battle because they have to. But ultimately every car manufacturer wants to get away from Carplay so they can own that tiny fraction of computing that happens on the drive to and from work.
Apple engineering manager Emily Schubert said 98% of new cars in the U.S. come
with CarPlay installed. She delivered a shocking stat: 79% of U.S. buyers would
only buy a car if it supported CarPlay.
“It’s a must-have feature when shopping for a new vehicle,” Schubert said
during a presentation of the new features.
Not only does it irritate me not having it in a practical sense, it’s also an arrogance on behalf of the manufacturer. “We can do it better than iOS/Android”, or “We have a better reason to do it”. No, and No.
I would love to buy a Rivian R2 but I will absolutely not drop that kind of money until they support CarPlay. To me - a refusal to support CarPlay is an extremely user-hostile decision.
I’m one of these buyers. I had a reservation for a Rivian, then this interview shut the door on possible
CarPlay. I canceled my reservation and bought an EV9 which I love and it has CarPlay!
Rivian is turning away potential lifetime customers because they want to force customers to pay for another cellular data plan and get their cut.
> Let me help you, [Rivian Chief Software Officer] Wassym
Casey Liss, let me help you:
Apple and Google are monopolies.
You are boot licking an invasive species trillion dollar company.
These two megacorps are trying to put their greedy tendrils into the automotive industry and extract even more money from an industry that is not healthy and very difficult to succeed at.
It's high time the governments of the world told Google and Apple to fuck off and leave both consumers and other industries alone. Told the both of them that it's time for their platforms to become an open standard.
That phones themselves must be an open standards. With open web installs without scare walls and deeply hidden settings.
The inversion of control needs to make Apple and Google the bitch here. Not the automotive industry that can't even dream of the insane margins the tech industry has.
Cars should be able to interface with any phone without having to subjugate themselves to Google and Apple. Because this is a perverted inversion of control.
> Cars should be able to interface with any phone without having to subjugate themselves to Google and Apple. Because this is a perverted inversion of control.
They want to hold you captive to subscription plans. If they allow CarPlay, it gives consumers more options for cellular connectivity, music, navigation, and other apps.
I’m with Casey on this: I will not buy a car without CarPlay. Of course, I haven’t bought a car since 2013. That one is a Tesla Model S and I think its UI is pretty decent for maps and playing audio, but I have rented enough cars since then to know that I would much prefer CarPlay support. If I had to replace my car today, I’d probably buy a Volvo EX90, which is the electric version of the XC90 Casey talks about.
When I bought a Rivian I missed CarPlay. There were a few things that really stood out.
1. Proper Voice Texting
2. Google maps for routing with (good) traffic data.
The Voice Texting just a release or two ago - its okay so far but not as good as CarPlay. Google traffic landed a while back (in Rivian's map which I prefer over Google Maps)
I'll take the voice texting for what is otherwise a very elegant and well designed UI - that keeps getting better.
Full disclosure. Even when I have a rental with CarPlay I just use Spotify and google maps. Both of which are integrated into the Rivian UI. So YMMV
I agree with the author: CarPlay is table stakes for me. Whenever an automaker says a car won't support CarPlay, I mentally cross it off my list. Which is fine, because there are plenty of other viable options.
I think what’s become more interesting/impactful for me is why they elect not to support it.
Most firms moving away from it (or who never implemented it) seem determined to either sell additional subscription services to their user base (connectivity) or sell their user base to a third-party (either as data, or eyeballs). And for a product at this price point I find myself very annoyed at the attempted payment extraction.
Either way, I’m with you. Lots of vehicle manufacturers out there that will support it.
We bought a Honda Prologue last year and didn’t even test drive the built-on-the-same-platform GM cars (e.g. the almost-identical Chevy Blazer EV) because they didn’t have CarPlay.
People like us have got to be affecting GM’s sales by some measurable amount, right?
I’m not even that old, but I’d really love to argue to simplify the entire auto infotainment stack. I don’t even need a screen. I just bring my own by magnetically attaching my phone that I’ll use to navigate and Bluetooth music or podcasts. If CarPlay becomes the standard that allows me to not pay for whatever crappy tablet UI automakers are pushing, fine. But that doesn’t make CarPlay a necessity, it just makes it the least bad option.
A rear camera is mandatory on new cars in the US these days, and it's honestly a good idea to have them either way. This makes a screen a necessity more or less no matter what (I can't see it being implemented with a bring-your-own tablet solution).
That doesn't mean they have to ship most of the infotainment system though. They could just leave that hole there for Carplay to fill. But that would be admiring defeat, and we can't have that.
It's difficult for me to admit - because I really dislike Apple, Google, and the other predatory monopolies - but I wouldn't buy a car without CarPlay either.
Like I said, it's not because I'm a fan of Apple. Honestly, fuck Apple. Fuck their stupid walled garden and their $99/yr developer fee and their planned obsolesence and their lack of a headphone jack and everything else. But fuck Google too. And especially fuck all the car makers with their crappy infotainment software.
The truth is, I put up with an iPhone and with CarPlay simply because it is slightly less shitty than all the other shitty options.
I don't particularly care about Android Auto (I generally prefer standard bluetooth for audio, and directly setting the phone up for navigation), but if a manufacturer supports CarPlay and not Android Auto, they can get lost. I hate how Apple stuff is an assumed default.
I’m fully bought into the Apple ecosystem, and I’ve had Teslas for 8 years and we currently also have car that supports CarPlay. The CarPlay interface is overall far inferior, especially with navigation. First of all, searching for destinations is terrible on CarPlay compared to Tesla! Even worse, Apple didn’t even add multi-touch support to CarPlay until iOS 26, and the vast majority of cars (including ours) don’t support it, so you have to hunt for and tap the zoom controls, which is pretty barbaric compared to the fluid pinch and zoom gestures that work on Tesla and our other devices. Also on our CarPlay car, it never seems to know the direction the car is facing until it starts moving, which becomes incredibly frustrating navigating out of a parking lot. The final major downside is having to switch apps out of navigation to control music then switch back, whereas on Tesla (and Rivian) you can choose and control music while keeping navigation on your screen.
I have a Polestar 2, 2022 model even so it's not fresh off the lot.
CarPlay navigation shows on the instrument cluster. The speed, state of charge, etc all move to the side so the map is right in the middle for quick viewing. Then the infotainment screen can show music or the tiled music/navigation view that CarPlay supports.
Basic music controls are on the steering wheel of course, readily accessible.
The lack of multitouch is slightly annoying, but it's not something I ever use. If I ever can't see what I need on the navigation I simply look outside for the road signs, which still exist.
All of this nonsense critique is massively outweighed by 1. having a HUD (your tesla will never get one because Elon is an idiot) and 2. having carplay/android auto sync your turn-by-turn directions into that HUD.
I honestly cannot believe how bad CarPlay is — I can't believe how many rave reviews it gets, I think it's absolutely awful compared to Rivian or Tesla software.
I think this is the difference for me - I’ve decided where I’m going before I get in the car. Either I’ve planned a route (on my phone) or got a destination through a message from a friend on LINE. Either way I already have a plan.. on my phone. So having to somehow get that into the car navigation is always going to be worse than just using my phone
"The final major downside is having to switch apps out of navigation to control music then switch back". That's no longer true for CarPlay. It now has a mode where you see Maps and Music at the same time.
> I’m fully bought into the Apple ecosystem, and I’ve had Teslas for 8 years and we currently also have car that supports CarPlay. The CarPlay interface is overall far inferior, especially with navigation. First of all, searching for destinations is terrible on CarPlay compared to Tesla
Tesla and surprisingly Hyundai are outliers, the vast majority of cars have terrible infotainment systems, and them deciding to suddenly focus on it does not assure me at all.
I find Tesla’s interface to be inferior as soon as you want to use an app they haven’t built. Like my podcasts app. Or receiving / replying to a WhatsApp message. Even the built-in text message support can’t handle replying to a group text.
Personally I’d stick with Tesla’s nav and use CarPlay for media and messaging, and that’s the optionality and user choice I think this post is trying to get at.
Over 90% of new vehicles sold in the U.S. already support Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
So it is kinda expected to be there: if it is not there then a car needs to be something special. So I think buyers don’t even ask for it because they assume it will be there (and absence becomes much more noticeable than its presence).
There are a bunch of CarPlay devices on Amazon, for example, with all kinds of screens, designed for Tesla and other cars that don't support it, that cost about $200 for a nice one. Why not just buy one of those and who cares if it's natively supported?
> There exists a flavor of CarPlay — CarPlay Ultra — that does take over every screen of the car.
I wish software leaning Internet people stop framing that center console tablet as "the car". It's worse than people pointing at display monitors and calling it computers. They're just cheap complimentary tablets attached to the car. If we were to fully embrace the line of thinking that frame the touchscreen being the car, the Slate Truck cannot exist, since it lacks the car of the car. In reality it does exist, because that thing is just a tiny add-on unit of a car.
The reason why there's been zero cars with CarPlay Ultra is because those cheap tablets remote controlling features of the actual car that hosts it, like speedometer, is weird, and way too complicated, and plain unworkable, on top of being too controlling.
I'm not defending car brands, I find conversations with misunderstandings like this less than ideally productive. The 5.25" DVD drive unit is not the computer.
I imagine the Venn Diagram of Rivian buyers and Apple users is basically a circle (or one small circle inside a much larger one), this seems like a wildly obtuse position for them to take.
CarPlay is bad for the car manufacturer and is far worse than the modern car software. People who complain about loosing CarPlay are not using the new software but reacting in fear thinking the old car software will come back.
The author acts like manufacturers get CarPlay for free when it has a high cost, high constraints, and gives over most or all of the dash over to another company.
I drive a 2026 Toyota, how do I enable this new good native infotainment system of which you speak?
The one in my car sucks, and to use the most basic features (navigation, music) that cost nothing on CarPlay (beyond my phone bill) cost $15-25/month from Toyota.
> CarPlay is bad for the car manufacturer and is far worse than the modern car software.
I have a new car with actually pretty decent modern car software; far better than the decades of crap software I put up with my last car. Carplay is still better. And in another decade, Carplay will be even better and my decent car software will be the same.
(And the car software and Carplay actually play very nicely together -- it is not all or nothing)
"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."
I kept reading past this part thinking I didn't misread the title, because as he explained, a mirroring solution that takes up every pixel could potentially be addictive, and it made sense that he didn't want the UX to fundamentally change when people drive Rivian's cars. And for that, kudos.
But now I realize your case is that CarPlay is additive. Ok, great! I do wish I could use Android on my car, which is newer than your 2017 one but only features Bluetooth, music and Phone, pairing, rather than a full OS mirror.
Do I wish it had more? Yes. But am I less distracted on the road? Yes. So I would buy a Rivian.
As someone who only had 20+ year old cars and motorcycles, I don't see what's CarPlay supposed to solve? All I need is a Bluetooth-capable radio and a phone holder to display the navigation, so I can listen to my music and focus on driving. Phone doesn't need to be touched unless changing destinations. Do people seriously need to be constantly entertained while driving?
I use to think this until i got a car with carplay. Now I can’t live without it. In fact wireless carplay was a game changer. You have to experience the convenience to know what it’s like.
I have a 15 year old Mercedes. I got the old integrated CD player and radio pulled out and Alpine makes a nice dash surround and canbus support module for the steering wheel controls.
It has a 7" display where the old stuff was and wireless Android Auto.
It's pretty much like any new car as far as entertainment and maps. Plus, it's got physical buttons for everything else. I think recent cars may well be coming back to what I have on my old car.
ps. not mentioned, Anrdoid auto and Carplay are H264, later H265, video players with touch control and buttons in a return channel. The phones render the display internally and project it as video to the display. That's all. This is why much older generation displays with at least reasonable SOCs can run them near perfectly. They are not running Anrdoid themselves. In fact some of them are operating system-less SOCs that have nearly no firmware but a video player and the support for the touchscreen and buttons. Much like that crappy video player built into old TVs ten years ago.
I have them on my motorcycles too. It's way better than a phone, in that the user interface is designed to be less interactive and more focusses with larger buttons.
Maybe it’s cause I’ve never actually used it, but I really only care about a stable / well supported Bluetooth connection.
I have a holder for my phone for when I use GPS and basically never interact with it directly after it’s set. Only real interactions are media controls via the steering wheel.
The only use cases I can see car play helping with are those who take a lot of calls/texts in their car while driving and those who listen to music and want to listen to specific songs.
So, I fully recognize this is dumb, but humans (like me!) are dumb and lazy.
The ability to just get in your car and have the phone-powered interface right there without having to take your phone out of your pocket and mount it in the holder is something I didn’t ‘niceness’ of before experiencing it.
My last car could accept a double DIN head unit but I never put one in because then I'd lose any way to control all the settings in the car. And that was a car from 2014! The integration is even tighter now.
Can anyone recommend a good aftermarket CarPlay unit manufacturer (or stand alone unit that I can mount on dash? Wary of cheating out and getting an overheating cpu or bad touch screen
I've never seen CarPlay work properly. 2026 and they still can't make a car play music without jittering like a CD. Every car brand I've rented, every iPhone I've owned, gotta turn that junk off every time.
That’s very odd. I’ve used my phones with 3 different cars regularly using CarPlay every single time I drive for literally a decade without ever experiencing that.
174 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadThis is the CEO of Rivian's software arm -- his job is to create and sell software that runs in the car. Carplay and Android Auto effectively make him unnecessary.
If you listen to the interview, he has bold ideas about how the car should somehow be the center of one's computing ecosystem. It's ridiculous because the smartphone is already the center! And people like that! And it just makes sense! They're fighting this dumb battle because they have to. But ultimately every car manufacturer wants to get away from Carplay so they can own that tiny fraction of computing that happens on the drive to and from work.
MAYBE in the rare case it has wireless CarPlay only, but can play music over USB from my phone. Maybe.
From July 2022: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/22/apple-carplay-could-be-a-tro...
I would be shocked by the number being that high because while iOS has a slim majority of the market share, it's nowhere near 79%.
Rivian is turning away potential lifetime customers because they want to force customers to pay for another cellular data plan and get their cut.
Casey Liss, let me help you:
Apple and Google are monopolies.
You are boot licking an invasive species trillion dollar company.
These two megacorps are trying to put their greedy tendrils into the automotive industry and extract even more money from an industry that is not healthy and very difficult to succeed at.
It's high time the governments of the world told Google and Apple to fuck off and leave both consumers and other industries alone. Told the both of them that it's time for their platforms to become an open standard.
That phones themselves must be an open standards. With open web installs without scare walls and deeply hidden settings.
The inversion of control needs to make Apple and Google the bitch here. Not the automotive industry that can't even dream of the insane margins the tech industry has.
Cars should be able to interface with any phone without having to subjugate themselves to Google and Apple. Because this is a perverted inversion of control.
People own cars. Not two tech titans.
Bluetooth?
1. Proper Voice Texting
2. Google maps for routing with (good) traffic data.
The Voice Texting just a release or two ago - its okay so far but not as good as CarPlay. Google traffic landed a while back (in Rivian's map which I prefer over Google Maps)
I'll take the voice texting for what is otherwise a very elegant and well designed UI - that keeps getting better.
Full disclosure. Even when I have a rental with CarPlay I just use Spotify and google maps. Both of which are integrated into the Rivian UI. So YMMV
Most firms moving away from it (or who never implemented it) seem determined to either sell additional subscription services to their user base (connectivity) or sell their user base to a third-party (either as data, or eyeballs). And for a product at this price point I find myself very annoyed at the attempted payment extraction.
Either way, I’m with you. Lots of vehicle manufacturers out there that will support it.
People like us have got to be affecting GM’s sales by some measurable amount, right?
That doesn't mean they have to ship most of the infotainment system though. They could just leave that hole there for Carplay to fill. But that would be admiring defeat, and we can't have that.
Like I said, it's not because I'm a fan of Apple. Honestly, fuck Apple. Fuck their stupid walled garden and their $99/yr developer fee and their planned obsolesence and their lack of a headphone jack and everything else. But fuck Google too. And especially fuck all the car makers with their crappy infotainment software.
The truth is, I put up with an iPhone and with CarPlay simply because it is slightly less shitty than all the other shitty options.
CarPlay navigation shows on the instrument cluster. The speed, state of charge, etc all move to the side so the map is right in the middle for quick viewing. Then the infotainment screen can show music or the tiled music/navigation view that CarPlay supports.
Basic music controls are on the steering wheel of course, readily accessible.
The lack of multitouch is slightly annoying, but it's not something I ever use. If I ever can't see what I need on the navigation I simply look outside for the road signs, which still exist.
I think this is the difference for me - I’ve decided where I’m going before I get in the car. Either I’ve planned a route (on my phone) or got a destination through a message from a friend on LINE. Either way I already have a plan.. on my phone. So having to somehow get that into the car navigation is always going to be worse than just using my phone
Tesla and surprisingly Hyundai are outliers, the vast majority of cars have terrible infotainment systems, and them deciding to suddenly focus on it does not assure me at all.
Personally I’d stick with Tesla’s nav and use CarPlay for media and messaging, and that’s the optionality and user choice I think this post is trying to get at.
So it is kinda expected to be there: if it is not there then a car needs to be something special. So I think buyers don’t even ask for it because they assume it will be there (and absence becomes much more noticeable than its presence).
I wish software leaning Internet people stop framing that center console tablet as "the car". It's worse than people pointing at display monitors and calling it computers. They're just cheap complimentary tablets attached to the car. If we were to fully embrace the line of thinking that frame the touchscreen being the car, the Slate Truck cannot exist, since it lacks the car of the car. In reality it does exist, because that thing is just a tiny add-on unit of a car.
The reason why there's been zero cars with CarPlay Ultra is because those cheap tablets remote controlling features of the actual car that hosts it, like speedometer, is weird, and way too complicated, and plain unworkable, on top of being too controlling.
I'm not defending car brands, I find conversations with misunderstandings like this less than ideally productive. The 5.25" DVD drive unit is not the computer.
The author acts like manufacturers get CarPlay for free when it has a high cost, high constraints, and gives over most or all of the dash over to another company.
The one in my car sucks, and to use the most basic features (navigation, music) that cost nothing on CarPlay (beyond my phone bill) cost $15-25/month from Toyota.
I have a new car with actually pretty decent modern car software; far better than the decades of crap software I put up with my last car. Carplay is still better. And in another decade, Carplay will be even better and my decent car software will be the same.
(And the car software and Carplay actually play very nicely together -- it is not all or nothing)
This is satire. I refuse to believe anything else.
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."
I kept reading past this part thinking I didn't misread the title, because as he explained, a mirroring solution that takes up every pixel could potentially be addictive, and it made sense that he didn't want the UX to fundamentally change when people drive Rivian's cars. And for that, kudos.
But now I realize your case is that CarPlay is additive. Ok, great! I do wish I could use Android on my car, which is newer than your 2017 one but only features Bluetooth, music and Phone, pairing, rather than a full OS mirror.
Do I wish it had more? Yes. But am I less distracted on the road? Yes. So I would buy a Rivian.
It's pretty much like any new car as far as entertainment and maps. Plus, it's got physical buttons for everything else. I think recent cars may well be coming back to what I have on my old car.
ps. not mentioned, Anrdoid auto and Carplay are H264, later H265, video players with touch control and buttons in a return channel. The phones render the display internally and project it as video to the display. That's all. This is why much older generation displays with at least reasonable SOCs can run them near perfectly. They are not running Anrdoid themselves. In fact some of them are operating system-less SOCs that have nearly no firmware but a video player and the support for the touchscreen and buttons. Much like that crappy video player built into old TVs ten years ago.
I have them on my motorcycles too. It's way better than a phone, in that the user interface is designed to be less interactive and more focusses with larger buttons.
I have a holder for my phone for when I use GPS and basically never interact with it directly after it’s set. Only real interactions are media controls via the steering wheel.
The only use cases I can see car play helping with are those who take a lot of calls/texts in their car while driving and those who listen to music and want to listen to specific songs.
The ability to just get in your car and have the phone-powered interface right there without having to take your phone out of your pocket and mount it in the holder is something I didn’t ‘niceness’ of before experiencing it.
This is silly. I have installed Android Auto head units into each of my last three cars. It costs a few hundred bucks and takes an afternoon.
I simply will not buy a car that won't easily accept a double DIN head unit.
My last car could accept a double DIN head unit but I never put one in because then I'd lose any way to control all the settings in the car. And that was a car from 2014! The integration is even tighter now.
Are those even a thing anymore? The vast majority of new cars have some sort of custom all-in-one dashboard display.
That way they can silence people being too vocal about what they want. The tech way.
In all seriousness though, Tesla can’t include CarPlay fast enough to make companies like rivian take a moment and actually consider carplay.
Also atp is one of the best podcasts out there
Plus various rental cars!