Rivian CEO says CarPlay isn’t going to happen

Despite Apple’s claims that most consumers will only consider purchasing vehicles that support CarPlay, Rivian says it still doesn’t have any plans to adopt the iPhone mirroring system. Talking to The Verge EIC Nilay Patel in today’s episode of Decoder, Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe likened Rivian adopting CarPlay to Apple choosing to use Microsoft’s Windows operating systems instead of developing its own in-house iOS and macOS alternatives.

“We have a great relationship with Apple,” he said. “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.” CarPlay isn’t “consistent with how we think about really creating a pure product experience,” Scaringe said.

One example given by Scaringe includes CarPlay’s inability to “leverage other parts of the vehicle experience,” which would require Rivian customers to leave the app in order to do things like open the vehicle’s front trunk. “We’ve taken the view of the digital experience in the vehicle wants to feel consistent and holistically harmonious across every touchpoint,” said Scaringe. Instead, the Rivian CEO says the company will eventually add CarPlay’s most desirable features “but on an à la carte basis.”

Rivian isn’t alone in snubbing Apple CarPlay. Tesla has never adopted the feature, and General Motors made the controversial decision last year to drop support for CarPlay and Android Auto on its future EV models. Mercedes-Benz also gave similar reasons earlier this year for not adopting CarPlay. Meanwhile, Porsche and Aston Martin will be the first companies to debut the full-screen “next-generation” CarPlay experience.

Scaringe says that excluding CarPlay will allow the company to be more selective about features like routing and mapping charging points, noting that Rivian had acquired route planning app maker Iternio last year to facilitate that.

“We recognize that it’ll take us time to fully capture every feature that’s in CarPlay, and hopefully, customers are seeing that. I think it often gets more noise than it deserves,” Scaringe said in the interview. “The other thing beyond mapping that’s coming is better integration with texting. We know that needs to come, and it’s something that teams are actively working on.”