Rivian continues to believe in CarPlay: Software manager hopes for an agentic future

The American e-car manufacturer Rivian, especially known for its cooperation with Volkswagen, wants to continue to rely on its own software and not use Apple's CarPlay despite great customer demand. The same applies to Android car, confirmed software manager Wassym Bensaid at a podcast appearance in the USA. Rivian is thus retired from competitors, because now Tesla is even supposed to work on CarPlay. SpaceXAI, connected to Tesla by founder Elon Musk, had recently brought Grok's AI system into Apple vehicle integration. Of the big car manufacturers, only General Motors, CarPlay and Android Auto are currently refused.

On the way to “agentic integration”

Bensaid, who was listening to Decoder from the IT blog The Verge, had an interesting reason for the continued CarPlay abstinence. This time he was less concerned with the software consistency that Rivian wants to ensure, but about the future “deep AI integration in the car”. Because: coming agentic AI systems, the debate about CarPlay in vehicles will be “completely obsolete”.

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The users are supposed to be waiting for this. Bensaid’s idea: People no longer wanted to interact with apps, “with individual buttons, individual icons and a workflow.” Instead, the “agentic integration” that brings all this together, for example by giving several commands in one sentence and thus sending the agents away. However, the Rivian software manager has not yet been able to say when it is so far with this future.

Apparently lower CarPlay query

But also with the way CarPlay and Android Auto take over the entertainment system of the vehicle, Bensaid is not satisfied. “The challenge with such screen mirroring solutions is that they completely take every single screen in the car, and this does not correspond to our idea of how we want to interact with our users.” In fact, CarPlay currently uses the main screen as well as parts of the instrument cluster depending on the vehicle model – only with CarPlay Ultra, which has so far hardly been used, it would be described by the Rivian software manager.

Bensaid continued to say that there were “all possible surveys”. According to these, 70 percent of users would have asked CarPlay. In recent studies, however, the number fell to “less than 25 percent”. Rivian brings with his software a “high level of convenience”.