Aside from who will be providing the sound system (Meridian) It's been tight lipped about how Rivian's infotainment screen will be able to connect with phones. If they won't have Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, they and/or Amazon need to have something to blow people away.Has anyone seen or heard anything about the stereo/infotainment setup? Specifically interaction with Apple or Android products? Mapping, music, podcasts...etc.
This is what @JRettinger found out.I get their need to do everything in house; they want control. However, the Iphone/Android ecosystems are kind of a universal standard at this point. To have something that now needs to be updated on their side and then updated on the apple/Android side your sort of setting the user up for failure. Or making them buy another product, excluding a product. Either way at the end of the day its failure.
I had seen this speculated but never confirmed, so I emailed Rivian directly to ask if they would be supporting one or both of these. TLDR: Nope, they won't. Their answer is below, and it's definitely disappointing,
"Thanks for reaching out! Our Adventure package comes standard with Rivian Elevation 360° featuring Alexa integration.
We believe to create a fully immersive audio experience for our community, an integrated platform optimized for Rivian was best. So, we will not be offering Apple Carplay or Android Auto.
Some key benefits of Rivian Elevation 360° audio include speakers that are positioned at precise locations throughout the cabin – including four titanium dome speakers overhead – that creates a truly immersive experience. And you can take that experience anywhere you’d like with the removable Bluetooth speaker located in the center console.
We look forward to releasing more information about our infotainment systems as we move closer to production!
If you have any other questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
See you on the road soon,"
I think many of us agree. Having CarPlay and Android Auto apps as part of the Infotainment system would be the best of both worlds. Use Rivian main system for things it does well, and open AA or CP app when we want to access and control other apps residing on our phones.Wow - this is really disappointing to hear. Really surprised they are not including Apple Carplay. I get wanting to create their own integrated solution but at least provide it as an OPTION.
Sarcasm, I was using sarcasm, I'm sure they did their market research and conducted A/B tests within control groups for prospective buyers. Not sure of the technological reasons.There's plenty of technological reasons why they might not want a 'tile' for CarPlay or Android Auto in their ecosystem.
Perhaps one of the reasons they selected was security of their platform.All I think about is the world where my phone's app gets compromised, I integrate that to my vehicle, and now some malicious actor has control of my vehicle because some third party app didn't give a rip about their security controls. I'll let one of you be the guinea pig for that. To be fair, Rivian itself could be vulnerable to the same issue - compromised code pushed via OTA update and same result, but, the fewer risk surfaces you have, the less likely that is to occur. We all have different risk tolerance 🤷
Yep. CarPlay is really just one or two H.264 video streams, a few audio streams (music and voice commands) as well as some API calls to pass along user input. The phone doesn't actually execute any "code" on the car systems.Not sure what security consideration there would be with implementing CarPlay. The phone sends a video stream and the car sends x,y of the user inputs. All the apps are completely running on the phone. The phone's data is only accessible to the car insofar as it's displayed in the video stream. The interface is well-defined and not meant for data sharing.