GoKawiilCarPlay is Additive Thursday, 2 July 2026
Back in March, Rivian’s Chief Software Officer, Wassym Bensaid, was interviewed by the excellent Nilay Patel for Decoder. If you’re not a Decoder listener, you should be. If you’re not a subscriber of The Verge, you should be. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about.
In this interview — which I greatly enjoyed! — Nilay grills Wassym on all manner of issues. The whole time, though, I was waiting for one topic: CarPlay.
CarPlay is a way to interact with your phone via your car’s infotainment. Our last three cars, the eldest of which was from the 2017 model year, have all had CarPlay. They make the experience of being in the car way way better. Any of the apps I really care about, and would want to interact with while on the road, have a bespoke CarPlay interface.
I literally will not buy a car that does not support CarPlay.
Most of the way through the episode, Nilay asked Wassym about CarPlay. The question was long, but the gist is this:
I hear from our readers every time I talk to a car executive that, “The reason I want CarPlay is because there’s 5,000 apps on my phone and no car OEM is ever going to support them in the built-in infotainment.” This is when you would say, “Okay, project your phone to the center stack. The car’s driving itself. Have at it. Phone projection all day.” Do you think the tide is turning, or are you still absolutely committed to not having CarPlay in Rivian vehicles?
You can read Wassym’s full answer at the episode link, but here’s the part that stuck out to me:
The challenge with screen mirroring solutions is that they take over every single pixel in the car, and that’s not the way we see ourselves interacting with our users.
Let me help you, Wassym:
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