Meanwhile, the only thing people really want from Rivian is CarPlay / Android Auto support, lol.
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But it wasn't pushing-six-figures smitten, which is where you're at when you get a new one with customizations.
Cars used to compete on distinctions between driving experience/fuel economy/reliability/etc. In comparison, differences between electric cars is mostly superfluous. They're very interchangeable.
For the next generation of car buyers, infotainment and features are going to be the main features. And if you are handing all of that away to the tech companies, your entire company is going to just become another captive hardware partner of the tech giants.
This 1000%.
Electric cars are supposed to be simple. Give me something in a shape of a Civic, with the engine replaced with a motor and a battery good for 150 miles, and sell it for $10-12k new. Don't even need an entertainment cluster, give me a place to put a tablet or a phone and just have a bluetooth speaker.
Instead, we are getting these boutique, expensive vehicles packed full of tech, but in the end, they still fundamentally suck as cars compared to gas alternatives, especially hybrid. I got a Prius Prime for my wife last year, the car is way better than any EV on the market in terms of usability. Driving to work and back can all be done in EV mode easily, and then when you wanna go somewhere, you can keep the car above 80 mph easily and get there faster without worrying about where to charge.
I think this is more or less the pitch behind Slate (https://www.slate.auto/en), though it's more of a truck/SUV form factor.
I've been using car play for the better part of the past decade and don't know what it looks like in vehicles without it.
Illegal - backup camera is required. Speakers probably too for alerts. Also you are super naive if you think that's where actual cost is.
This is why the rest of the car has to be an already proven platform that is cheap to make.
I use Android Auto on rental cars all the time.
My daily driver is a Tesla (Model S /w MCU v2) that doesn't have it. And doesn't need it to provide a usable experience.
It’s the reason I always seek out CarPlay and why Tesla has reportedly decided it’s worth adding CarPlay to capture people like me.
The only part an EV doesn't have is the engine and gearbox. Admittedly, these are pretty major components, but it's a technology mature enough to be extremely reliable if the manufacturer cares to make it so.
But what an EV has instead is a massive battery, charging electronics, a DC-DC converter keeping the 12V battery charged, and various electric motors and actuators for the air conditioning and coolant loops. These are significant more reliable than oily engines in lab environments, but the automotive environment tests the mettle of seemingly resilient components.
1. Waze;
2. My preferred third-party podcasting app.