A couple of days ago, Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe was on The Verge‘s “Decoder” podcast. While on there, he was asked about Rivian’s decision to not support popular in-car phone-linked infotainment systems like Apple CarPlay or Android Auto. This is a decision shared with other companies, like Tesla and GM. It’s also a decision that, upon careful consideration, I have determined to be “stupid” and “inane.” There’s a good reason many, many people want systems like CarPlay, and it’s an act of colossal hubris to just dismiss all those people under the illusion that somehow Rivian and other carmakers know better, because, let’s be honest, they don’t.
Let’s take a look at what was actually said in the podcast;
Nilay Patel/Verge: The other thing I’m curious about when it comes to demand and what people are shopping for with these cars is CarPlay. Apple is very insistent that no new car buyer will buy anything except a car with CarPlay. Tesla famously doesn’t have CarPlay. Rivian famously doesn’t have CarPlay. GM is taking it out of its EVs. Are you committed to that, that you’re just going to stick with your software and your interface? Or are you open to using Apple’s next-generation CarPlay?
RJ Scaringe: You and I talked about this before. This is a question that certainly you see a lot of buzz around on the internet. Some of our customers make some noise about this. We’ve taken the view of the digital experience in the vehicle wants to feel consistent and holistically harmonious across every touchpoint. In order to do that, the idea of having customers jump in or out of an application for which we don’t control and for which doesn’t have deep capabilities to leverage other parts of the vehicle experience… for example, if you’re in CarPlay and want to open the front trunk, you have to leave the application and go to another interface. It’s not consistent with how we think about really creating a pure product experience.
It seems Scaringe’s main point is that they want the “digital experience” in their cars to be “holistically harmonious,” meaning that they want to retain control of the user experience, and not pass UX control over to anyone else, like Apple. He also mentions that using CarPlay is a problem because if you have to – and this is his example – open the front trunk, you have to leave CarPlay and go into Rivian’s interface.
Now, there are some real problems with these arguments. First off, the opening the front trunk thing: that’s Rivian’s problem, because putting a control to open a trunk inside a menu on a touchscreen is just shitty design that nobody actually wants. You know what people will do when you ask them to open the front trunk? They’ll reach around under the left side of the dash (on LHD cars) because that’s where they’ve known hood releases have been, forever.
Putting controls that open parts of the car – hatches, doors, glove boxes – on a touchscreen interface is just idiotic, and not something anybody really wants. Who asked for that? Who decided they wanted to navigate a touchscreen UX to locate where the control to open a trunk is? That’s garbage.
And here’s the other thing – the idea that people buying cars care about anything like a holistically harmonious digital experience is absolute delusional crap. Sure, RJ Scaringe (a clearly sharp guy) cares about that, and so do his UX designers, but the people who actually want to buy and use the cars? They do not give a brace of BMs about that.
People want to use the interfaces they already use and understand. They use their phones all day long; that’s the interface they want for their car’s infotainment and navigation systems, the same interface they’ve been using all day as it is, the one that already has their preferences and seamlessly knows the address they looked up before even getting in the car and has their playlists and contacts and everything, right there, ready to go.
Nobody wants to learn some dumb new UX for their car. They just don’t care, and, why should they? Plus, let’s look at these harmonious digital experiences that RJ is talking about. Here’s a walkthrough of Rivian’s new UI/UX system:
One of the things they’re most proud of is the new look, which includes 3D cell-shaded graphics provided by Epic Games, and, yes, it does look great:
Very attractive! The cell-shaded, animated illustration sure is evocative and pretty! But is this actually a good interface? Is it so good that Rivian should prevent another sort of UX from controlling things like music and navigation and texting and other infotainment features? I’m not so sure. Let’s just take a look at this screen:
The UX is nothing to write home about here. 75% of the screen is an illustration that doesn’t do jack shit and the actual controls are just a bunch of basic text-and-icon buttons in a small panel. The text is pretty small, you’d have to really focus on this if you were to try to adjust any of these things while driving, and if there’s anything actually innovative going on here, it’s incredibly well-hidden.
Really, if this UX reminds me of anything, it’s another cell-shaded, illustrated UX concept, one you may remember. It was called Microsoft Bob.
At least in Bob the buttons were made to look like objects in the environment, instead of on some gray floating panel. But nobody liked Microsoft Bob.
The black strips on the top and bottom remain there regardless of whatever main interface is on screen, and I’d imagine that could be retained even if the main area of the screen was running Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, so things like climate controls and other always-available controls (even opening trunks, if you insist on having it on a touchscreen) should be accessible even with something not holistically harmonious on the main screen.
There’s so much hubris here, as these carmakers all are so sure they’re making incredible digital user experiences people are just thrilled to have. They’re not. Here’s another example from this Rivian video:
What we’re looking at here is actually two things: the Rivian interface for controlling the direction the HVAC vents blow and a visual reminder of how misguided and wrong it is to put some controls on a digital touchscreen.
HVAC vent direction should never be controlled on a touchscreen: the very concept is too idiotic. Simple control vanes and knobs on the vents themselves work immediately, intuitively, and can be adjusted any time at all, independently of what may be on a touchscreen. They require no additional servo motors or wiring or software. They’re a solved problem.
This interface is an abject failure, and you can tell that by this simple clue: it’s a picture of the dashboard that you’re already looking right at. The little picture of the steering wheel is inches from the actual steering wheel. They’re simulating moving physical vent controls by having you move simulated, drawn vents on the screen, when they could have eliminated all of this by just letting your same fingers move the vents directly. It’s like a joke. The people that design this and think it’s just great have no business telling anyone what UX they can or can’t use in their own cars.
I should note that Rivian is not alone with this inane idea; plenty of other carmakers do the same thing, controlling HVAC vents via the touchscreen, including Tesla, whose implementation is especially fussy and stupid:
There are a number of articles out there already defending Scaringe’s take, including one from my beloved ex-editor, Patrick George. Patrick is great, but boy do I not agree with him, here. One of Patrick’s main points is that carmakers’ software is getting better and better, and while he may certainly be right about this, it just doesn’t matter.
He uses the Mercedes-Benz Hyperscreen system as an example of how much carmaker UX systems and software have leapfrogged systems like CarPlay and Android Auto, but the honest truth is that when most people see something like this:
…the reaction isn’t one of fascination and excitement, but rather a ragged sigh of dismay at the thought of having to figure out what all of that is and what it does when all they want to do is listen to their damn Spotify playlist and get directions to that new Peruvian-Dutch fusion restaurant where they’re meeting everybody.
Patrick compares that Hyperscreen experience to CarPlay, and comes up with this conclusion:
I can’t imagine wanting to swap that experience for the same set of Apple icons I’ve seen since the Obama years.
…but his conclusion is completely wrong. People want the same set of icons they already know and understand. People want something that just works, that they already understand, that has become second nature to them. Swapping those out for some other set of unfamiliar icons that do basically the same shit in just a different, more blue-glowy way is of interest to nobody, and I suspect deep down that includes Patrick, too.
Nobody gives a shit about their car’s unique software or UX or digital experience or whatever you want to call it if they have the option of just using the system they already know, already have set up, and already are using. There’s a reason a full third of car buyers consider the lack of Android Auto or CarPlay a dealbreaker when it comes to picking a new car.
We’ve already seen how this works for years, as people will stick with the phone ecosystem they’re used to even if the other side has better hardware or features. If you started with an iPhone, you’re far more likely to stick with what you know than switch to Android, for example, even if there’s some new Android phone with a better camera or whatever.
People can come up to you and say, hey, we have a new phone with better features and battery life and smells better than your iPhone, but most iPhone people would say, ah, I don’t really care, I just want to stick with my iPhone. People are invested in what they know.
It’s absolutely fine that people treat CarPlay or Android Auto as a dealbreaker for a new car. It’s what works for them, and what they want, and for Rivian or Tesla or GM or whomever to ignore what buyers clearly want because of what essentially comes down to corporate ego is just absurd.
Nobody gives a shit about any carmaker’s unique, bespoke “digital experiences” when it comes to doing the shit they already do a thousand times a day on their phones. They just want to do it the same way, just on their car. We’re all tired, and we just want to listen to our damn podcasts, send our damn texts, get our damn directions, and if we never see any of your cell-shaded animations done in collaboration with Epic Games then I think, somehow, we’ll all live.
Now, I do need to acknowledge some things here: David Tracy, my co-founder at The Autopian, is insistent that I note that I am in no way smarter than the many, many smart people who develop UI/UX systems for carmakers, and of course he’s right about that. I worked in UI/UX for a long time myself, but that’s not what I currently do. They know what they’re doing.
But my argument isn’t that I somehow know better; it’s that the experts who make these systems do know better in many ways, but that has also blinded them to what people actually want, which is what they know.
David also thinks my main point is that people don’t like change, but that’s an oversimplification; people don’t like needless change, they don’t like change that doesn’t actually make anything better, and I think that’s the argument for the current carmaker-designed infotainment system interfaces.
Also, Tesla, the biggest-selling EV brand does not offer CarPlay or Android Auto (though there are third-party projects to do this, because people do want it) and that must mean something; clearly, not having CarPlay is not necessarily a hinderance to success.
So, they’re smart, I’m dumb, Tesla is a success despite all this, but what I say still stands, I think.
Carmakers need to just sit down and give people what they want, which is the same UX as on their phones. They’ve made that very clear. And also to remember that not everything needs to be on a damn touchscreen. No one’s touchscreen UX is so amazing that it’s better or easier than just moving a knob to change where air is blowing or pulling a lever that is always available to open a trunk.
It’s time to get a grip. No one cares about being “holistically harmonious,” so it’s time to just let that shit go and we’ll all pretend no one ever said something so embarrassing at all.
Deal? Good.
P R E A C H.
I doubt that any car is going to let me listen to the 100GB of music I have loaded onto my phone, or audiobooks I just have MP3s to rather than purchased from some marketplace. My phone is adaptable and versatile, and Android Auto is flexible enough to let me use PowerAmp and Smart AudioBook Player without any fuss.
The Rivian R3X looks insanely tempting but if it doesn’t have phone mirroring it’s a no-go for me.
Listed to this podcast a few days ago-one of the things RJ leaves out as do others who are pushing back on Apple car play/android auto is that OE ux/ui ranges somewhere between mediocre at best to horrible at worst-there is no good end user and customer driven argument currently being made for why I shouldn’t be allowed Android Auto/Car play. Like maybe if one of them actually had a killer user experience and they figured out how to beat car play at its own game instead of just excluding it…
And I will add my agreement that I find the various personality parts of the Rivian a bit silly and while I think there’s room for fun in design-I think this borders on distracting and wastes a lot of possible functionality. In general though (and as a designer ill admit my tastes lean towards minimalism)
100% agree with this article, and I’ve got a few more points to add:
Amen to pretty much everything you wrote. Please do not give me a touch screen control for all the manual controls that, as you put it, have been “solved”. I guess we really do need to speed up development of self-driving tech if for no other reason than to prevent everyone from driving off the road while attempting to change the direction of a single HVAC vent from left to right.
Also, holy shit that video on the vent controls for the model 3… I can’t tell if the guy is being sarcastic or has consumed so much of the Kool-Aid that his family may need to perform some sort of intervention.
If this is the future I’m really going to have to burnish my old-man-yelling-at-clouds routine and ask that we speed up the apocalypse.
More Microsoft Bob content please. But seriously, I agree that having all the car controls behind the screen is dumb. If there was a well executed example with physical buttons and a good UX that didn’t let you use carplay i might be persuaded though. But the burden of proof is very much on the carmakers to do that, and they haven’t yet.
I’m waiting for the day that EV makers charge extra to not update the UI over the air. My humble Niro has vents I move with my fingers, knobs and such with UI back-up if my whim floats that way, and carplay etc.. I get in car – I drive car.
The other serious question is: How is software security handled. If they want more and more private info stored by the car software – what is their security responsibility – now, and down the road.
I’m a UI UX designer and have worked on projects for many companies including some titans like Google and Apple.
I want big chunky knobs and clicky switches in my vehicles for the stuff I’m going to be adjusting multiple times as I drive. I do find the Android auto experience to be rather bland, but so what? The music is playing, the GPS is working fine and recognizes my voice commands, the WhatsApp messages are coming in and being read to me with little effort. Shit just works and when I’m driving that’s all that matters.
I’ve used versions of Mercedes massive screen systems and fuck me, I hate them. I hate them so goddamn much. Why is basic shit buried in menus? Sure it’s pretty, but I’m looking out the windscreen and not at the UI. Even the relatively simple infotainment in my WL Trailhawk has far too many menus with redundant info. Really the only thing I ever do with it is put the Jeep in jack mode so I can properly hitch up my trailer. For everything else I’m in Android auto. Thankfully the Trailhawk has physical controls for just about everything you would realistically need to touch when driving it.
Hello from a fellow digital designer! And 100% agree on all the above. It’s pretty clear to me very little of this stuff is actually user driven. It’s a bummer too, as a designer and car enthusiast I’d love to see what a car company that actually tried to do an actual user driven interface that included the best mix of physical and digital controls looked like.
I think the other point Rivian, etc are missing (or more likely willfully glossing over) is that we can have both. It’s not like Apple/Google say “If you have CarPlay/Android Auto you have to have a UI from the 90s”. Rivian can make their UI as fancy and homogenous as they want and implement Android Auto and people can use whichever one they want.
Torch is right.
And the point isn’t that Torch thinks he’s a better UI/UX designer than the people at Rivian etc, it’s that those guys think they’re better than their counterparts at Apple & Google, two of the most phenomenally successful companies in the history of the world, the former of which, quite famously, centers UI/UX.
Car guys got quite a chuckle when Apple shut down its car project, but somehow don’t follow through on that thought when they decide they should get into touchscreen UI/UX design.
Let me know when somebody walks into a Rivian store and asks if they sell a phone.
Specifically speaking to the EV market, route planning is already bad in many electric cars and its terrible in Car Play and Android Auto. It does not collect battery state of charge from the car for auto route planning.
For me, all I want it to do is support my music streaming service of choice. For the controls you are correct that it’s a bad direction but it’s cheaper for the auto maker to have a single screen vs individual buttons so we likely won’t win that one unless there is legislation.
“ for example, if you’re in CarPlay and want to open the front trunk, you have to leave the application and go to another interface.”
Not if you put a frickin’ manual frunk release in the truck instead of making the infotainment screen the ONLY way to access simple things!
I’ll consider a new car without Android Auto only if their baked-in interface is as user-friendly, customizable, and most importantly, after they’ve proven they’ll keep updating it for longer than the production run of that specific model. I have no interest in getting stuck with an integral and non-replaceable infotainment system that offers nothing but outdated and/or completely dead apps.
I love Android Auto (and Apple Carplay for you iphone heathens). I get why some automakers, particularly luxury ones, despise AA and Carplay. Android and Apple democratized luxury.
Back in the day, that center stack stereo and infotainment was often how they could help justify a $20k+ bump in price from what us plebes could afford. In-dash cell phones, dvd-based navigation screens, the finest cd changer (with graphic equalizer and a dot matrix screen). This is what the snooty folks got to enjoy with their caviar and and grey poupon.
Android and Apple swooped in and gave everyone a service that is not just “as good as”, but in most respects far better than what the automanufacturers can provide. And even better, most aftermarket AA/Carplay units look somewhat stock now (and not like a Hong Kong arcade…although I do have some affection for those old head units).
I’ve got a 2012 jeep wrangler. A year ago when the CD player/auxillary input finally crapped out, I threw in a $400 sony head unit with wireless AA. 400 smackeroos. And I basically have the same navigation, music, and connectivity as a Mercedes. Fuck… I asked my car the other day to convert ounces to cups (was breaking down a chili recipe while driving home and heading to the grocery store); and my car, like pretty much every other new car, talked backed to me like I was fucking Michael in Knight Rider. Again, 400 dollareedoos.
So this isn’t just about some holistic approach to driver interface. These asshats want (i.e. need) to justify prices tags in the high five and six figures. Tough to do that when any dufus like me can walk into Bestbuy with a few benjamins and get better.
Jason you are absolutely correct. Perhaps I fully agree because I am a mechanic and I fix things with my actual hands. Give me a basic vehicle with knob based controls and no screen and I’m happy. I can mount my phone and connect it by various means and everything will simply work. No software updates, no delay when things need to sync. Works every time, all the time. For anyone who hops in the vehicle.
There’s room for both I guess. But I just want to say that I installed an aftermarket head unit with wireless CarPlay on my car literally last week, and it has made my life so much better.
So many keystrokes over the betamax of the moment.
I ordered my 2015 Jeep Wrangler Rubicon specifically without NAV. In the 10 years, I’ve owned, whenever I want to upgrade the screens in my vehicle I buy a new phone. And guess what, when I drive my 2005 Mini Cooper I get the same screen! I love a whole lot about Rivian and think it is great that they do their own software as new vehicles are computers on wheels. But, just as I can emulate Windows on my Mac, I should be able to run Android Auto or ApplePlay on the Rivian R2 I may someday own. The little wheels that Rivian will put on the R2 steering wheel are very cool, but yes, there is room for vents that you can just move with your hands!
its a wonder how anyone survived driving vehicles without android auto or carplay before 2014
Usually it was by upgrading their outdated radios with one of the countless aftermarket options that could easily be put in their place.
The same way I do now, by using a phone mount bolted to the back of my MINI’s tachometer, with a single phone mount on each side, one older phone for music plugged into the Aux jack and power and the other phone with internet for navigation. Everything is just below my eye line in front of me, the phones are nice and secure, voice control with Siri or Waze takes care of anything I need and it’s easy to take the phones with me when I leave the car.
https://ibb.co/fYqmZW3
That photo linked above is 5 years old now and I have newer phones and a different gauge on the left, but you get the idea.
Well, back in the 2000’s, people used Garmin or TomTom GPS’s sitting on a little rubber mat on their dash and MP3s. Before then it was paper maps and archaic forms of physical media.
Usually this holistically harmonious design ends up being slow, bugged, ugly and crap. What a shitty take for what I considered to be a smart company.
have you used rivians newest interface?
When I get a rental car, I love that it has CarPlay so I don’t have to spend even a minute thinking about the car itself. If I wanted to buy a car I didn’t want to think about, I’d look for CarPlay too. Maybe I want a car that I do want to think about, though. Maybe I don’t want it to be just like the rental car I last drove. Seems a little ironic that a man who revels in delight at the inexhaustible variety of turn signal designs would want every single car to have an identical interface on its dashboard.
As a frequent rental-car driver, I definitely always fire up AndroidAuto the moment I get in the car. But what you (and Tesla, Rivian and GM) don’t seem to be able to understand is the concept of choice. You want to make your own bespoke UI, unique as a fresh snowflake, with blackjack and hookers? Then by all means, go right ahead, I’m sure you’ll find dozens of like-minded customers who’ll sing its praises with their very last breath on their death beds. But for the rest of us, maybe leave the option of familiar, ease-of-use and commonality well-the-fuck-alone se we can pick that one if we want to. It’s a no-brainer, really.
AMEN!
I don’t have a problem with change or innovation.
I have a problem with things not being designed with the end user and how one uses it in mind, and making simple things overly complicated.
Auto UI interface is becoming too much like phones – things being changed for the sake of ‘newness’ without actual improvement.
I agree with this so hard.
My wife and I share a car with touch screen controlled everything. She’s a fair bit shorter than I and prior to this car I’d be an infuriating exercise resetting mirrors and air vent and seat position and etc. When servos control everything, it can all be programed into your profile and every time I get in the car it automatically resets it to the way I like it. When I hop into a rental of the same make/model, it carries all that with me. On top of that, I can turn HVAC on from my phone and warm up or cool down before getting into the car, which is nice when the car internal temperature was 156*F last week. I don’t see value in adding an additional set of clicks to change what I’m listening to or change my gps. A carplay picture in picture would look disjointed and isn’t worth it just because “familiar” with it.
Looking through your list of features you like about the UX in your car, I don’t see any that REQUIRE a touchscreen. They just require a computer in the background. That computer could be tied to buttons or icons on a touchscreen, or even options in an app released by the manufacturer (which you also bring up).
It just seems like a lot of car companies have decided (wrongly IMO) that the way to tie the outputs of the system to user inputs is to use a touchscreen (which works fantastically for SOME user inputs to be fair). Part of me wonders if a lot of that is driven by purchasing and design departments wanting to streamline car interior to have less discrete components by replacing a bunch of switches and buttons with a single screen that the can just by from someone else…