GoKawiilToday, I’m talking with Wassym Bensaid, the chief software officer at Rivian, and the co-CEO of Rivian’s platform joint venture with Volkswagen, which everyone just calls RV Tech.
That joint venture kicked off about a year and a half ago with a nearly $6 billion investment from Volkswagen. It effectively puts Wassym in charge of the operating system and electrical architecture for every future EV from Volkswagen and its associated brands, including familiar names like Audi, but also new companies like Scout.
There’s a lot of Decoder ideas in there — I really wanted to know how that joint venture works and how it’s structured to preserve Rivian’s unique software culture, which you’ll hear Wassym talk about as the core element of the whole thing. I also wanted to know where the lines were — what parts of Rivian’s software get to be just for Rivian, and which parts of the core technology would be shared across the smaller company and the behemoth that is Volkswagen Group. And, of course, I wanted to understand how Wassym navigated the tension between the two. You know, classic Decoder bait.
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It’s also a big moment for Rivian in general right now. The company is gearing up to deliver the more affordable Rivian R2, which is the first vehicle based on this new architecture, and the company also just shipped the AI-powered Rivian Assistant in its R1 vehicles. You’ll hear Wassym talk about Assistant as the beginning of a big bet for Rivian, as it tries to create a more agentic software platform in its cars.
I actually got to spend some time with the Rivian Assistant in an R1S ahead of my conversation with Wassym, and I found it to be a fascinating experience — certainly powerful and engaging while at the same time frustrating in a lot of really interesting ways. So I had a lot of feature requests, bug reports, and questions about the future of AI and voice assistants in cars.
So I asked Wassym about all of that, and also about his statements over the years that buttons in cars are just an anomaly and of course how he’s feeling about Apple CarPlay and Android Auto these days. You’ll hear it, but spoiler alert: Don’t get your hopes up.
This is a really fun episode of Decoder — we really get into the weeds on a lot of my favorite topics to talk about here on the show.
Okay: Wassym Bensaid, chief software officer of Rivian and co-CEO of RV Tech. Here we go.
Wassym Bensaid. You’re the chief software officer at Rivian. You’re also the co-CEO of a very important software joint venture between Rivian and Volkswagen, which is straightforwardly called Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies. Welcome to Decoder.
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