CarPlay is widely available across most vehicles, with Tesla and Rivian among the most prominent holdouts. Now, Tesla is rumored to be adding support, and in a new interview Rivian’s CEO addressed criticism about its CarPlay stance.

Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe was recently interviewed by Stratechery’s Ben Thompson, and the full transcript was published today.

It’s a wide-reaching interview, with extensive discussion of Rivian’s CarPlay stance.

Scaringe has defended the company’s ‘no CarPlay’ position plenty of times before, including in October when he said “customers will appreciate” the lack of CarPlay “in the fullness of time.”

Interestingly, in today’s interview the CEO had some very positive things to say about CarPlay. In fact, he even expresses a desire for CarPlay when driving nearly any other vehicle besides a Rivian.

If I’m in a non-Rivian or non-Tesla and I get in, it’s like a disaster and I’m like, “Oh thank goodness there’s CarPlay”. It has some thoughtful UI, but we have a really thoughtful UI and the few things that are missing we’ve been adding.

In arguing against Rivian adopting CarPlay, Scaringe highlights that the company can’t give Apple full control of every function of the car, since CarPlay can’t do everything. And he doesn’t think giving CarPlay a portion of the in-car screen would be a very Apple-like move.

There are instances where you could have a screen in a screen, but then that is very — I always joke, this is something Apple would never do. They would never have a screen in a screen on their own devices. They would say, we want to have one experience and so you have one screen that’s putting up information that’s very specific to the vehicle operation that are things that are like, “Is the door open or closed?”, and then you have another that’s mapping—…It’s like you have two different UIs playing out and I just think it’s poor UI, it’s a poor user experience.

One other interesting quote comes when Thompson brings up the Tesla CarPlay rumor. He asks Scaringe if such an announcement from Tesla would “make it a little more difficult to hold your convictions.”

Maybe. As it’s always the case on these things, I think there’s people that are really used to having CarPlay and our goal is to make it such that the car is so good that they don’t even think of that. And if they were to go back to CarPlay, they’d miss having the integrated holistic experience that we can create.

Overall, Rivian is holding to its position that it can offer a superior integrated experience without CarPlay. But it will be interesting to see if a Tesla pivot changes things at all.

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