Rivian CEO addresses lack of CarPlay support, relationship with Apple in new interview

While CarPlay is widely available on the majority of cars nowadays, Rivian is one of the primary holdouts (alongside Tesla and now GM). In a new interview this week on the Decoder podcast, Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe explained the company’s reasoning for not supporting CarPlay, while also touting its overall “great relationship with the Apple team.”

Will Rivian ever support CarPlay?

On Rivian’s lack of CarPlay, Scaringe explained that the company’s focus is on “creating a pure product experience.” One thing that Scaringe points out in particular is the user experience when someone is using CarPlay, but then needs to open the front trunk and is forced to jump out of CarPlay to do that:

“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.”

Even though Rivian doesn’t support CarPlay, Scaringe adds that the company is focused on adding “features that are desired within CarPlay on an a la carte basis.” This includes Apple Music, which Rivian officially announced support for (with Spatial Audio) last month:

“In order to deliver the features that are desired within CarPlay, we’re starting to do that, but on an a la carte basis. So we’re just launching Apple Music in the vehicle. We have a great relationship with the Apple team. It’s in partnership with Dolby Atmos.”

At the same time, however, Scaringe seems aware of the complaints Rivian drivers have with the first-party software implementation – particularly when it comes to mapping. This is something he says the company is working to address.

“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.”

Rivian using CarPlay, according to Scaringe, would be akin to Apple using off-the-shelf Windows software instead of developing macOS and iOS. So, even though Rivian and Apple “have a great relationship,” don’t expect CarPlay to ever come to Rivian cars:

“We have a great relationship with Apple. I think the absolute world of their products. If I put myself in Apple shoes, imagine Apple is developing a Mac, and there was someone that had a software application, let’s maybe call it Windows.

And they said, ‘we have a turnkey platform that everyone knows how to use.’ Would they have put that in their car? Would they have developed their own iOS?

We know how that played out. So as much as I love their products, there’s a reason that ironically is very consistent with Apple ethos for us to want to control the ecosystem.”

You can listen to the full interview on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

9to5Mac’s Take

While I’m on team “every carmaker should support CarPlay,” I do have to admit that Scaringe seems to be far more cognizant of what features people want than other CarPlay holdouts. The way Scaringe talks at least suggests that Rivian’s lack of CarPlay support isn’t just a subscription play.