Rivian software chief says drivers do not need CarPlay anymore

Rivian’s software chief is making a blunt case for control: the best in-car experience, he argues, should live inside the vehicle itself, not be handed over to Apple CarPlay or a dashboard crowded with buttons. That position goes to the heart of a much larger fight in the auto industry, where carmakers are weighing brand control and software revenue against the convenience drivers say they want most.

Wassym Bensaid, Rivian’s chief software officer and co-CEO of the company’s joint venture with Volkswagen Group, has helped build a software strategy that leans hard into in-house design. Rivian says its architecture was developed entirely internally and was built as a complete end-to-end system that supports over-the-air updates across the vehicle’s computers. The company’s latest push reinforces that approach: Rivian Assistant, its AI-powered voice tool, was launched in 2026 and is built directly into the vehicle rather than mirroring a phone screen. It is rolling out to Gen 1 and Gen 2 R1 vehicles with Connect+.

That philosophy matters far beyond Rivian’s own trucks and SUVs. Rivian and Volkswagen Group announced their joint venture in November 2024 with a total deal size of up to $5.8 billion, including an initial $1 billion convertible note investment from Volkswagen. The venture, publicly branded Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies and legally named Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technology, LLC, was set up initially in Palo Alto, California, with three additional sites planned in North America and Europe. Bensaid and Volkswagen Group’s Carsten Helbing are serving as co-CEOs, and engineers from both companies are joining the effort.

The stakes are sizable because the venture is not just a partnership for one product cycle. Rivian and Volkswagen have said the first Volkswagen models using Rivian technology are expected to launch in 2027, giving the automaker a new software backbone at a time when vehicles are increasingly judged as much by their operating systems as by horsepower or range. A media event around the venture’s first anniversary in 2025 suggested the technology could eventually be licensed more widely, raising the possibility that Rivian’s software stack could influence other automakers as well.

That is why Bensaid’s skepticism about CarPlay and physical buttons matters. Rivian is not simply arguing for a cleaner cabin design. It is arguing that automakers should own the digital layer that shapes navigation, voice control, vehicle settings and future upgrades. The question for the industry is whether that control produces better cars, or just more closed ones.