CarPlay Is Additive: Rivian's Stance on Apple's In-Car System Draws Pushback

Rivian's software chief on screen mirroring

Rivian Chief Software Officer Wassym Bensaid addressed CarPlay in a March interview with Nilay Patel on The Verge's Decoder podcast. Asked whether the automaker's position on Apple's in-car interface might change, Bensaid said the difficulty with screen-mirroring solutions is that they take over every single pixel in the car, adding that this is not how Rivian sees itself interacting with its users.

CarPlay is the system that projects a phone's apps onto a car's infotainment display. Casey Liss, writing on his blog, argues the answer conflates two different products and ignores how the feature is normally implemented.

CarPlay Ultra is not the ask

Apple does offer a version that spans a vehicle's displays: CarPlay Ultra, announced in May 2025, extends the interface across the dashboard, though it still leaves room for the manufacturer's own interface. Liss points out that nobody is asking Rivian for that. The request is for plain CarPlay, which does not have to occupy the entire display.

As evidence he posts a photo of his phone connected to a Volvo XC90: CarPlay fills roughly the top 80 percent of the screen, with Volvo's own interface visible above and below it. According to Liss, CarPlay does not even know that the rest of the screen exists.

Optional and additive

The second part of the argument is that CarPlay is optional. Drivers are not required to use it, so a manufacturer confident in its native interface should have little to fear: customers who prefer the built-in system will simply keep using it. Those who do switch tend to want apps that are optimised for CarPlay but have no native version that can be installed on the car — his example is the podcast app Overcast.

One counterargument concerns navigation. Cars with advanced driver assistance need to know the route the driver is taking, and routing through CarPlay can withhold that information. Liss notes that Apple is addressing the issue in iOS 27.

Why it matters

Liss writes that he will not buy a car without CarPlay and that the feature is table stakes for him. He says he has driven both the R1T and the R1S and thought seriously about joining the waiting list for the R2, but decided against it for that reason alone. His conclusion is commercial rather than technical: supporting CarPlay, he argues, opens the automaker to an additional cohort of customers.