My thoughts on NOT having CarPlay

[HaveBlue]

It'll be interesting to see how screen casting works when it comes

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[KBabione]

Am I the only one that read this and thought...how fast must you be driving with Waze? If you are driving on a 70MPH road and doing 11MPH over, that equates to 81 MPH. Driving 81 MPH for 3.5 hours gets you 283.5 miles. To do that same distance in only three hours, you have to be doing 94.5MPH. This is the best case scenario. If you have 15 minutes to go from your house to hit the interstate and 15 minutes from exit to her parent's house or you have to slow down due to other things traffic, you must be pushing 100MPH.

Fair enough...A couple of points in my so-called defense:

• They are exactly 200 miles from us, so a 3-hour drive has me averaging 66.7 MPH
• The highest posted speed limit is 65 MPH on the trip - PA has some 70 MPH zones, just not on the route we take
• It's only 10 minutes to a 4-lane from my house and then just 4 minutes to their house once I exit off the Taconic State Parkway
• 77 miles of the trip are in New Jersey, all on 4-6 lane highways with a posted speed of 65 MPH and following other drivers usually doing 80-85
• On holiday weekends I don't exceed the posted limit by more than 9 MPH without Waze - we drove home today and it took me 3:20 following this "limit" so, perhaps, I exaggerated a bit

Anyway, I like other alerts I get from Waze - hazard on road ahead for example. I have also seen that Waze is faster to reroute you around slowdowns than the native Rivian nav - usually involving me telling my wife to open Waze on her phone to see what it says.

On the next trip I'm going to try enabling the voice alerts on Waze and see how that goes. Thanks for the suggestions!

 

[SwampNut]

I added a third-party CarPlay unit to my Rivian mounted above the main screen. It is definitely a huge improvement over the native controls. Well worth the $200.

 

[OldGoat]

Fair enough...A couple of points in my so-called defense:

• They are exactly 200 miles from us, so a 3-hour drive has me averaging 66.7 MPH
• The highest posted speed limit is 65 MPH on the trip - PA has some 70 MPH zones, just not on the route we take
• It's only 10 minutes to a 4-lane from my house and then just 4 minutes to their house once I exit off the Taconic State Parkway
• 77 miles of the trip are in New Jersey, all on 4-6 lane highways with a posted speed of 65 MPH and following other drivers usually doing 80-85
• On holiday weekends I don't exceed the posted limit by more than 9 MPH without Waze - we drove home today and it took me 3:20 following this "limit" so, perhaps, I exaggerated a bit

Anyway, I like other alerts I get from Waze - hazard on road ahead for example. I have also seen that Waze is faster to reroute you around slowdowns than the native Rivian nav - usually involving me telling my wife to open Waze on her phone to see what it says.

On the next trip I'm going to try enabling the voice alerts on Waze and see how that goes. Thanks for the suggestions!

Yeah maybe just a bit of exaggeration ...if it is only 77 miles where the 11MPH limit impacts you, and you are driving 76MPH (11 over), it would take you pretty much exactly one hour to cover the distance. To save 30 minutes on that leg, you'd need to average over 150MPH!

That being said, I can definitely relate. We have a place that takes me ~1:50 door to door. However, if I get caught in lights, trapped behind lollygaggers in the left lane, etc. and it ends up taking a full two hours, I swear it feels like I lost a good thirty minutes getting there.

I would rather drive 30 miles out of my way to maintain a good pace, even if it means it takes longer to get there. Stupid on my part, I know, but there is an admittedly juvenile satisfaction over 'beating' the initial projected arrival time.

 

[SactownD]

The Rivian experience is not terrible, but it will never be as good as Google or Apple. Their resources are simply orders of magnitude higher. Every year there are major improvements to phone operating systems. The same cannot be said for car systems. There is also the issue that one’s phone will always be more personalized and context aware to one’s needs than the car ever can be.

 

[Mathme]

I"m not one to quibble about an extra 10-20 minutes on a road trip...so long as I'm moving all the time at or near the speed limit. Driving from South Lake Tahoe to San Jose, CA, there's the main road (hwy 50) down out of the mountains which is about 35 miles of 2-lane, and the rest is freeway Typical Drive is about 4 hours without traffic (on a holiday weekend I've seen it take 8ish). There's also another route (how 88) that is about 120 miles of 2-lane and about 4.5 hours of driving.

On a busy holiday weekend, I'll take the second route as it's a prettier drive, and you can pretty much set your watch to 4.5 hours with none of that silly sitting in creep-and-beep traffic on the freeways getting into the Bay Area.

I don't really need AA/CP in the Rivian however, what I would like is:

1. Maps that work. Please ditch MapBox and move to Google.
2. Apple Music & SiriusXm integration. Coming soon.
3. Text messaging. Meh...don't need it or want it. I had it in my last car and it was just a distraction. If I'm driving and you want to contact me, use my 10-digits of bliss phone number as last time I checked, that worked pretty well.
4. I refuse to Pay for Alexa, as we are already an Apple One Household. That being said, the standard version of Alexa that's free needs some serious work as Alexa can never find me directions, and only about 30% of the time does "Hey Alexa, open charge port door" work.

 

[michelin]

It's personal preference obviously, but I always felt many of the apps integrated into CarPlay weren't that useful, or the implementation was so bad that it was basically useless. I pretty much only used it for maps and Waze. I have never liked sending texts while driving so I never really tried the messaging feature.

Definitely don't need a Dunkin Donuts or Dominos Pizza app

I use the built in nav on my Kia EV6 most of the time, and yeah the only AA apps I use are mostly music and podcasts - so yeah between native Spotify app and Bluetooth connectivity I would miss AA on a Rivian but not a deal breaker

 

[Writemax]

I find the Rivian nav to be fine. I wish I could easily select alternatives routes, but the nav is fine. It is point #3 that I most want incorporated into the Nav. Text to Speech and back, like my 11 year old Subaru has.

 

[Sgt Beavis]

I think most of you know I’ve been an advocate for getting CarPlay support from Rivian, but I think I’m starting to turn the corner on the matter. Similar to the OP, I have these main reasons for wanting CP.
1. Waze
2. Apple Music
3. Messaging
4. Waze.
5. Did I mention Waze.

I NEVER use any of the other apps. They are totally meaningless to me when driving.

I don’t know if Rivian has done it yet but getting Google Maps data is going to a lot to improve navigation. It would be VERY interesting if they could come to a similar agreement with Google’s Waze division. At a minimum, I want to see speed trap reporting. But even with all that said, Rivian’s native navigation has gotten much better. I’ve only been using it to navigate to chargers so my battery gets preconditioned but that much use has shown me how much better it’s become. In the worst case, I can just leave my phone up and get police alerts while using the OEM nav.

Of course Apple Music is coming very soon. That makes me very happy. Messaging support is a safety issue IMO and I’m disappointed that Rivian hasn’t made it a higher priority. But it’ll get here and that’ll be the last big issue I have with the lack of CP support.

I’m not sure if I said it, but we REALLY could use Waze. That app has literally kept me out of jail.

 

[White Shadow]

Actually I don't think they need to offer it. If they can strike a deal with Google to port WAZE over to their console I think that would be a game changer. Most people that do use Carplay I would venture a guess mainly use it for the navigation. Rivian could do better with the navigation and drop MapBox and get something else.

If people don't buy a vehicle because it doesn't have Carplay, then those people are limited in their thinking. My main reason to starting this post was to give a perspective of not missing CP. I was in the "Must have CP" camp, but I am ok if they never add it.....if they do get it some day.....awesome.....if not.....meh.

I would suggest listening to the "Out of Spec. Podcast" when they talk about the different OS's the EV's use......extremely informative.

Having Waze would help, but it's not exactly a game changer. CP/AA offers so much more than just Waze. But the point of my comment is that this discussion keeps coming up over and over and over again on this forum. And that in itself just proves that Rivian should bite the bullet and include it in the future. I doubt they will and that's fine, but the fact of the matter is that there are a lot of people who will absolutely refuse to purchase a new vehicle that doesn't offer it.

 

[defcon888]

Having Waze would help, but it's not exactly a game changer. CP/AA offers so much more than just Waze. But the point of my comment is that this discussion keeps coming up over and over and over again on this forum. And that in itself just proves that Rivian should bite the bullet and include it in the future. I doubt they will and that's fine, but the fact of the matter is that there are a lot of people who will absolutely refuse to purchase a new vehicle that doesn't offer it.

Great points. I hope my initial comment wasn't a rehash of "I wish Rivian would include CP/AA". My post was merely giving a perspective of "I didn't miss it on my daily drive". Would I like to have it?.....yes, but to me it isn't a game changer. I know there are other things/apps you can use with CP/AA but I would venture a guess (only a guess), that the majority of CP/AA users use it for WAZE (or another map program), Apple Music, messaging and PODCASTS (but you can use Spotify for that). I can see a case for wanting it if you don't subscribe to Spotify.


I do wish Rivian would make it an option perhaps, but if and when they do, I will be liking what they have to offer.

 

[Riviaenz]

Actually I don't think they need to offer it. If they can strike a deal with Google to port WAZE over to their console I think that would be a game changer. Most people that do use Carplay I would venture a guess mainly use it for the navigation. Rivian could do better with the navigation and drop MapBox and get something else.

If people don't buy a vehicle because it doesn't have Carplay, then those people are limited in their thinking. My main reason to starting this post was to give a perspective of not missing CP. I was in the "Must have CP" camp, but I am ok if they never add it.....if they do get it some day.....awesome.....if not.....meh.

I would suggest listening to the "Out of Spec. Podcast" when they talk about the different OS's the EV's use......extremely informative.

Waze isn't the only game in town. Apple Maps has offered similar functionality for years and I've relied on it just some some use Waze, for traffic incidents, speed checks, and for reporting like events. Further, Apple Maps has a much more comprehensive database of EV chargers (L2 and DCFC) than Rivian and even PlugShare. In tests Electrek and others have done also better than Google Maps. When I used CarPlay with Bolt EUV rental Apple Maps worked great at showing chargers along a route automatically. It's far more useful natively than people (usually ex Tesla) realize as they've never tried it with an EV with CarPlay.

That plus all of the countless other apps that meet other peoples' needs that would be difficult for Rivian to offer. Although I'm curious to see what they mean by "Apps via Connect+". It'll be a huge disappointment and failure/betrayal if they've been fighting against CarPlay to simply cave to Google and offer Google Play store access as a cop out. On the upside/pending better iOS support, based on previews of the next summer update, I'm curious to see what the specific Siri support features are. I hope it's more than the old screen-less CarPlay feature Apple had partnered with GM to offer years ago.

 

[UnsungZero_OldTimeAdMan]

It's personal preference obviously, but I always felt many of the apps integrated into CarPlay weren't that useful, or the implementation was so bad that it was basically useless. I pretty much only used it for maps and Waze. I have never liked sending texts while driving so I never really tried the messaging feature.

Definitely don't need a Dunkin Donuts or Dominos Pizza app

Pizza app would be incredibly dangerous. We’d all be ramming buildings.

 

[ThirteenElectrics]

I added a third-party CarPlay unit to my Rivian mounted above the main screen. It is definitely a huge improvement over the native controls. Well worth the $200.

Me too. I went with Carpodgo on both my Rivians to get the 60 FPS screen and couldn’t be more pleased. Rivian nav. still sucks and the rest of the software stack also has issues (Tidal and Bluetooth streaming especially). Voice control is also abysmal sans CarPlay.

Rivian wants to boil the ocean making their own proprietary software, but they don’t have the talent to do it, mainly because they don’t offer FAANG-level salaries for engineers. Their stock is in the gutter, so equity compensation can‘t make up for the difference.

 

[Tango45]

1. The ability to link Spotify to the user that gets in the vehicle first. As it is now, I have to log my wife out or vice versa and then we have to log into our accounts. My wife and I have totally different tastes in music.

FWIW, my solution was to establish a third (5th, really) account for the R1S which it is always logged into. This way, my wife and I can share playlists to that account and play whatever we (or the kids) want in the car without impacting our "core" accounts.

This way Spotify doesn't start pushing Taylor Swift onto your carefully-curated ICP/murdercore-heavy account.

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