Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe recently made it clear that its electric cars will not be compatible with Apple CarPlay.
In a guest appearance on MKBHD’s Waveform podcast, Scaringe responded to the question of why Rivian does not support CarPlay.
MKBHD also highlighted a statistic shared by Apple at WWDC 2022 that 79 percent of car buyers in the U.S. “would only consider a CarPlay-enabled vehicle.
Scaringe responded by saying that Rivian does not want to hand over control of its in-car system to a company like Apple, but rather wants to build its own in-car system experience, one that it can control:
Rivian still wants to play the role of arbiter or chef in the process of promoting experience upgrades, and to be able to have enough control over the car system. And that's an important part of enhancing the user experience, and we're not going to hand it off to another company.