Interesting contrast to all this tech is that my wife liked the Rivian, but when I told her they won’t do car play that interest went to 0. Can CarPlay not play nice with these things or do they want to keep all the tech dollars to themselves?
Direct quote from RJ Scaringe, founder/CEO of Rivian:
> This is a decision. It's generated, I said there's many millions of decisions, many of them will never get noticed and they're just under the surface. One of those decisions that's been noticed quite a bit is the fact that we've intentionally not included CarPlay in the vehicle. And that's not to say we don't think a close partnership with Apple is important. So we have Apple Music integration, we have a bunch of Apple integrations that are yet to come, we have a great relationship with the team at Apple. But it was more to say, we just felt and continue to feel very strongly about creating a consistent, fully integrated digital experience where you're not jumping between apps, let's say from a CarPlay app back to the vehicle app. And it's quite jarring when you don't have, let's say vehicle level controls when you're in the CarPlay environment. That view we've had since the early, early days. I think that's going to become even more important and more true in a world of integrated AI.
I can think of an easy way to have the controls accessible no matter what's going on on the touchscreen, but then again that's probably what disqualifies me from being the CEO of a big car company.
Take that idea of buttons and knobs and just replace it with another ipad. Make it revolutionary, put the ipad in the middle of the steering wheel, boom.
What about several mini ipads, each dedicated to a single function? We could use OLED displays and pre-burn-in their function at the factory as a label, and leave the display off, except for maybe a single LED, to save power. We could also add some sort of haptic feedback on user interaction with each mini ipad...
make the steering wheel an ipad and swipe to turn!
You could really future-proof the car if you replace the windshield with an ipad. then you can overlay ads on reality just like they do in soccer games.
Rivian's infotainment system uses Google Maps which I am not a big fan of. I wish they would support CarPlay in addition to everything else, so that I wouldn't lose my maps.
I prefer Google Maps. Apple Maps lead me astray too often and though they are better than they used to be they still give weird directions (such as using more obscure state route names for roads rather than the dominant Interstate Higway name).
CarPlay would be a complete non-issue for me, its absence would even be a positive. I just use my phone anyway; integrating it with the car is just added hassle and one less thing I have to worry about remaining compatible 5-10 years from now.
I see CarPlay (and CarPlay Ultra) as being for auto makers who don't want to put in all the effort to design and drive a good proprietary UI (CarPlay is a godsend in cars with crappy UI, i.e. most of them).
Rivian is a luxury vehicle brand with a first-class UI/UX. I imagine going with their own first-class UI and CarPlay Ultra would be a mess; two separate interfaces for the same controls, but laid out differently. Makes a lot more sense they'd be working with Apple to integrate more Apple features into their own UI, rather than having to maintain two separate first-class UIs that are bound to have discrepancies.
And there's the more obvious answer that they want the entire driving experience to feel like a Rivian experience, given how important that's been for luxury EVs on the software side. Supporting a canned OS would make the vehicle "feel" the same as every other car that also supports it.
You'll need to spend an additional $1500 over 10 years for Rivian Connect+ to use music streaming services on their infotainment system. No additional cellular costs for using CarPlay or Android Auto.
Bullshit response. It would cost Rivian nothing to allow Apple (and Android) devices to use the monitor in the car as a second screen to be able to play music and whatnot, they just don’t want to to increase vendor lock in.
They could easily make their screen compatible with Carplay/Android Auto and provide whatever experience Rivian wants to at the same time, and they could let the drivers choose which to use.
And I write this as someone with a Model Y who does not miss Carplay (although it would be nice to have).
It’s not a bullshit response. It’s hidden in swathes of typical CEO bullshit corp-speak, but underneath that he’s clear that they’ve made the deliberate decision to be responsible for the full infotainment UX/UI, despite the trade-offs this brings.
We may both disagree with their decision, but that doesn’t mean the explanation is bullshit.
And to be fair, as you point out, if they do a really good job with the UI/UX (as Tesla have mostly done) then you’ll probably not miss CarPlay most of the time.
Could they? I've been told Apple certifies every car before they allow carplay and this costs a lot. I can't verify (the people who tell me this are under NDA and so won't speak on the record)
Car companies are notorious for having awful software, awful update systems, and awful software teams. So much so that people have come to think that if a car doesn't have CarPlay, that it probably sucks to interface with (which is a safe assumption). Even Tesla is working on adding CarPlay, despite having good software. A lot of people refuse to even consider the idea of a car without CarPlay, and the car companies are to blame
I was hesitant buying my Tesla this year (first one) as I really liked having CarPlay in my prior car (Jeep). But after having it a while, it's really a non-issue. The Tesla Apple Music app is pretty good. Their maps and navigation is pretty good (and integrated with FSD). And I can easily just use the bluetooth connection for a couple other minor things I occasionally use.
I’ll start off by saying that the model Y is one of the best mid-level cars I’ve driven so the issues I mention below are worth the tradeoffs to me.
In my experience, Tesla navigation can be pretty bad when navigating my large urban city. During peak traffic times it often tries to send me down roads that are notoriously known for traffic backing up. Most times when I end up following those suggested routes, my ETA essentially becomes meaningless.
I’ve found Google, Waze, and Apple maps to be a lot better in this respect.
I do miss having CarPlay. That’s not to say I think the music integration you mentioned is bad, but I find the overall UI in my model Y to be a bit confusing - and the lower icons seem to sometimes randomly change from what I have them set as.
Same. I love the tesla model y, but it's not perfect. The screen UI is pretty good for the most part, enough that I don't think about carplay too often.
But I do tend to stream audio from my phone more than from the tesla UI, and so I do miss carplay when I think about it.
> Their maps and navigation is pretty good (and integrated with FSD)
I got a loaner with fsd and tried it out.
There was this one trip I took to a store and for some reason, the nav route detoured off the road to the next street over, then joined back with the route.
I think this is a thing nav systems do and people just ignore it and go the right way.
In 6 years I don’t want your laggy legacy system with unsupported apps. I want my new phone to power the experience. Most of my experience in a car is digital, the physical needs to do its best to get out of the way. I hope Rivian fails for missing this obvious point.
