Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons

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Support for this show comes from ServiceNow. AI is moving fast across the enterprise. But without visibility, it's just chaos. Different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways. ServiceNow turns that chaos into control. With the AI control tower, you see all your AI across the business in one place. What it's doing, what it's done, and what it's about to do. So you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge. And Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Wasim Bensayid, the Chief Software Officer at Rivian and the co-CEO of Rivian's platform joint venture with Volkswagen, which everyone just calls RVTech. That joint venture kicked off about a year and a half ago with a nearly $6 billion investment from Volkswagen. And it effectively puts Wasim in charge of the operating system and electrical architecture for every future EV from Volkswagen and its associated brands, including familiar names like Audi, but also new companies like Scout. There's a lot of Decoder ideas in there. I really wanted to know how that joint venture works and how it's structured to preserve Rivian's unique software culture, which you'll hear Wasim talk about is the core element to the entire thing. I also wanted to know where the lines were, what parts of Rivian software get to be just for Rivian and which parts of the core technology are shared across both the smaller company and the behemoth that is Volkswagen Group. And, of course, I wanted to understand how Wasim navigated the tension between the two. You know, classic Decoder bait. It's also a big moment for Rivian in general right now. The company is gearing up to deliver the more affordable Rivian R2, which is the first vehicle based on this new architecture. And the company also just shipped the AI powered Rivian assistant in its R1 vehicles. You'll hear Wasim talk about the assistant is the beginning of a big bet for Rivian as it tries to create a more agentic software platform in its cars. I actually got to spend some time with the Rivian assistant in an R1S ahead of my conversation with Wasim. And I found it to be a fascinating experience and certainly powerful and engaging. But at the same time, it's frustrating in a lot of really interesting ways. So, of course, I had a bunch of feature requests, bug reports and questions about the future of AI and assistance in cars. We talked about his prediction from just a few years ago that buttons in cars were just an anomaly. And, of course, how he's feeling about Android Auto and CarPlay these days. You'll hear it, but spoiler alert, don't get your hopes up. This is a really fun episode of Decoder. It's really in the weeds of a lot of my favorite things to talk about. Okay, Wasim Bensayid, Chief Software Officer at Rivian and co-CEO of RVTech. Here we go. Wasim Bensayid, you're the Chief Software Officer at Rivian. You're also the co-CEO of a very important software joint venture between Rivian and Volkswagen, which is just straightforwardly called Rivian Volkswagen Group Technology. Welcome to Decoder. Thanks, Neil. I'm super excited to be here. I am very excited to talk to you. I have a lot to talk to you about. It occurred to me as we were doing the prep for this episode that you're in charge of building a new kind of software for cars, but also because of the joint venture, in charge of building a new kind of software company that builds the new kind of software for cars. It is the most fractal decoder I think we've ever had. Awesome. There's a lot here. Let's start with the organization. You're the Chief Software Officer at Rivian. I think a lot of people understand what that means. You're the guy that they can yell out about CarPlay. Don't worry, we'll come to that. There's new Rivian Assistant, which is an intelligent agent inside the car that I've been playing with that I want to ask you a lot of questions about. Then there's RVTech, which is the joint venture with Volkswagen. You're building a new zonal architecture for a bunch of cars. I believe the R2 is the first car that's going to run that new architecture. How does that all work? What are the lines between RVTech and your role there, the co-CEO there, and your role with Rivian? What is the boundary between the software you build in the joint venture and the software you build at Rivian? All right, before we dive into RVTech and the joint venture, I think it's really important to talk about the overall industry landscape. The automotive industry is really going through a major disruption. The amount of software content in the cars with technologies like electrification, connectivity, autonomy, is significantly increasing. That is creating a big divide between traditional OEMs and then new tech-forward companies. Consumers now have really much higher levels of expectations in terms of the overall experience and convenience in the cars. Multiple OEMs have tried really hard to get software content, but it's not easy. It requires a very different type of talent. It requires, in some cases, really complete cultural change because you're not only developing software, but then you need to adopt different methodologies, different ways of doing things. You need to be much more agile. When you look at the industry, companies have tried to do that in-house. Some of them tried to partner. Some of them tried to use tier ones. A lot of recipes did not really work. That was really the genesis of the great partnership that we have now with the Volkswagen Group, which has really taken the Rivian technology stack, taken software, the electrical architecture, the Rivian DNA and culture as well, and then marrying that with the incredible scale that the Volkswagen Group has. It really provides a fantastic opportunity for both companies because now we can have a solution that can not only underpin the Rivian vehicles, as we mentioned, with the R2 as the first car that the joint venture is shipping, but then eventually in the future, every single electric model in the VW Group. And think about it from your premium cars, an Audi, for example, to luxury cars with Porsche, Bentley, Lamborghini, to the mass market cars. And that suddenly provides an opportunity of scale, but then also it exercises the technology in very different ways and really puts us in a wonderful position so that we can build an architecture and operating system for the entire industry. So that question of architecture and operating system, it feels very complicated. As you said, the industry is moving to software-defined vehicles, which is a great buzzword. And every car executive that I talk to very clearly has a different definition of what software-defined vehicle means. What is your definition of what software-defined vehicle means? First of all, I hate that buzzword. You brought it up. I actually, I can't find a better name, so I admit that I'm also using the same in the lack of a better definition. But think about it this way. I mean, when you look at older architecture cars, they're really an aggregation of multiple mechanical components. And then underneath that, there's, in some cases, hundreds of electronic units, which are meant, each one of them is meant to do one thing. And generally, that's actually mirroring the way those cars are built because they are developed using different tier ones and then different suppliers. And in that world, integrating an end-to-end vehicle feature requires a ton of coordination between many of those suppliers that requires very long development cycles. And that approach kind of worked in the past when the expectations of consumers were not super high in terms of end-to-end features in the cars. But I think with the advancement of EVs, with the types of user experiences that the Teslas and the Rivians and the Chinese cars are offering now, that's no longer really an option for any car manufacturer. And I'll give you just a small example. I mean, when you walk to your Rivian, and I know you're apparently having a Gen 2 quad, you have your Apple, let's say, digital key, you walk to the car, and then the car will recognize you. And then there's a lighting sequence. And then you get to the car, and your entire profile is configured. And then whether it's the seats, whether it's the steering wheel, whether it's the infotainment system, whether it's the HVAC, everything is configured for you. That sequence is probably just 15 seconds. But doing that in the traditional world requires the coordination of more than 10 different suppliers. You need to talk to the seat supplier. You need to talk to the door supplier. You need to talk to the HVAC supplier. You need to talk to the entertainment supplier. You need to talk to the security system. You need to talk to the cloud. You Technical engineering, the technical team reinforced to me, and then Carston is my partner in crime. He takes care of the operations, and then he's also the main interface to the Volkswagen group. There's a ton of complexity in terms of managing different requirements, different inputs from the brands, really doing all that arbitration so that we continue pushing towards a platform approach and then we reduce the overall complexity of the portfolio that we're supporting with the VW group. So one of the questions I have here is, you describe it as an operating system. That seems like a good framework. People understand what operating systems are. I realize car operating systems are vastly more complex than people give them credit for, but it's an operating system. Then there's expressions of the operating system. And I know that, you know, our audience, they think of the software in the car and they think of the infotainment screen and that's it. That's just one expression, right? The user interface that Rivian is running. There's going to be other expressions for Volkswagen, for Scout, I presume for Lamborghini, all running the same core operating system expressed in different ways. That is a real push and pull dynamic, right? Where do the features live? Who gets to build what feature? What are the core capabilities of the operating system and the platform versus what does Lamborghini want that it doesn't want Rivian to have? How do you make those decisions? Yeah, great question. I mean, really, first of all, I think what's important for us is to clarify the role of the joint venture. So we're responsible of the underlying electrical architecture and then the operating system. And what that means exactly is, I mean, when you look at a modern car today, pretty much every single interaction you have with the car is powered by software. And in lots of cases, you don't realize it. I mean, people tend to associate software to the infotainment, to what they see on the UI and the screen, but there's software everywhere in the car. I mean, the way the car navigates, the way the car drives, the way the car saves energy, the way the car does cabin comfort, all of that is actually managed through software. So the way to think about this is our role is to, first of all, build an electrical architecture with as less as possible of computers in the car so that we simplify the overall packaging, we simplify the overall bill of materials. This is the brains of the system. And then on top of that, we develop software that the different brands can use so that they express their own identity. And think about it in a way where we do 80%, 90% of the hard work, and then we provide customization hooks so that an Audi drives like an Audi and then a Lamborghini presents a different UI than a Rivian. But then what's happening under the hood, what's happening behind the scenes is based on the same platform. When you think about that underlying electrical architecture and the zonal computers where we cut down the number of computers but have fewer, more powerful computers, one of the things that it seems like an obvious opportunity for Rivian and maybe way more complicated for Volkswagen is that you have a big battery that can just power those computers all the time. They can be online, they can be functional, they can be available. Volkswagen also makes gas cars and I think hybrids. There's some pendulum swing in the industry between electrics and gas vehicles, particularly here in the United States. Is that a challenge or are you just not thinking about their gas cars at all? The scope of the joint venture for the time being is really powering all the electric vehicles. I mean, this is the agreement that we have with Volkswagen. And honestly, a big part of it is one of the main reasons personally I joined Rivian is I joined Rivian for the mission. And I think the joint venture provides us with an extraordinary opportunity so that we can get this technology to accelerate electrification into many more cars around the world. One of the first products that we're building with the Volkswagen group is the ID.1, which is taking our technology to a mass market vehicle. I mean, this is a car that we'll sell for less than $25,000 and really opening the technology, opening that rich feature set to many more consumers around the world. Now, can the technology be used for non-EVs? Can it be used for hybrids or ICEs? Obviously, the answer is yes, but for the time being, this is not the priority of the joint venture. How big is RVTech? How many people? We're about 1,500 people. And then how is that split between Rivian folks or Volkswagen folks? Is it employees of both companies or are they employees of RVTech? They are employees of RVTech. Actually, we started with about 800, 900 developers coming from Rivian. And then we had about 150 colleagues who joined us from the Volkswagen group. And then the rest, this is developers and engineers that we hired in the past 18 months. So everybody's RVTech. The reason I ask that is you mentioned at the very beginning that it's an infusion of Rivian's culture, but now they're not Rivian employees. But then you were also the chief software officer of Rivian. How does that culture persist if the thing is its own entity and it's not as directly connected to Rivian or they're not Rivian employees? I think the way I broadly define my job and probably my priority number one is help the company grow and build on our two main assets. And I think our two main assets is one, technology, and two, our people and culture. Technology, I think we have a wonderful opportunity now by taking that technology into many more cars across a wide range of portfolio and trims. And then culture, that's my daily obsession, which is really making sure that we continue to have the same DNA of agility, being nimble, prioritizing action, quick decision making, and really iterating really fast so that we are at the forefront of innovation. One of the things I asked that is, you know, there's Rivian decisions and maybe Volkswagen won't make. At Rivian's right now, they run Unreal Engine, right, as the graphics and the infotainment. It's really fun. I'm not sure that every single Volkswagen is going to run Unreal Engine, right? That's a decision that feels like, at least as I understand it, the different brands can make for themselves. But you're the chief software officer at Rivian. You're like, we need better support for the Unreal Engine interface. And then maybe the platform doesn't want that. And you wear that hat too. How do you reconcile those tensions? Does Rivian's needs always win? What wins is, how can we do the software in a way that allows different expressions? And I think in this case, Rivian's interface will show up through Unreal Engine, but then we need to have hooks in our framework so that, back to your question, and I know you will ask me that, Volkswagen cars can have CarPlay. And the team will develop that even though Rivian will not adopt CarPlay. So it's really about creating those different hooks into the operating system so that we allow different ways to express the user interface. It strikes me, just talking to you about this, that there aren't a lot of models in an industry as big as the auto industry like this where the big player is letting the smaller company define the culture and the opportunity, define the architecture, which will define its roadmap in the future. What things have you looked at that are similar that you say, that's successful, we should build the model based on this and operate like this? And what versions of this have failed that you've looked at where you're like, I want to avoid those mistakes? Yeah, great question. And I think lots of people look at joint ventures and I think there is probably many more failure stories than success stories. And this has been really one of the guiding principles. And we spent a lot of time discussing with the VW leadership before we engage in such partnership. Now, really what made RJ and myself lean heavily into this partnership is, one, the opportunity, and then two, the honest and constructive partnership from the Volkswagen group leadership. I mean, first of all, we are talking about taking the Rivian technology into the second largest OEM in the world. This is by far the biggest licensing deal in the automotive industry. And as RJ and I started the discussions with Oliver Blumer, his number one priority was, we need to keep the Rivian way of doing things. We realize that you are bringing not only a software IP, you are bringing not only an electronics IP, but you are bringing a different process. You are bringing a different culture. And we need that change from the inside for the VW group. And I think across the past 18 months, I mean, obviously, in some cases, there are daily tensions. I mean, there are cases where, as you mentioned, one brand might request a different requirement than another brand. But what really helped us to continue is that support that we have from the highest levels of the leadership in the Volkswagen group to really help drive that transformation and that cultural change of the group. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just difficult. Sometimes it can be truly intimidating. You're putting in all this time and energy without knowing for sure if it's going to pay off. But there's always another way to look at it. What if it does work? What if your gut has been right the whole time? That's where Shopify comes in. Shopify powers millions of businesses around the world and accounts for nearly 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. Everything from established names like Allbirds and Heinz to brand new businesses just starting out. Their design tools make it easy to build exactly the kind of online presence you're imagining with hundreds of templates ready to go. And with built-in marketing features, you can spin up email and social campaigns in just a Whether we should basically just use a third-party AI solution or develop our own solution, and there's a ton of tension because you look at the investments in the AI world and you would think that with everything which is happening, this is obviously a hard problem to solve. Now, it was really clear for me, given the opportunity, given how transformative this is for the entire user experience, that we really need to own our destiny in terms of having a platform that allows us choice, that allows us to change foundation models as we wish and own that integration layer that allows us to power the entire car operating system. So this is Rivian Assistant. I've been playing with it for a few days now. I've had truly had some searching conversations with it. Just to push the boundary of what it can do. It's super interesting to have a car where, you know, even in the interface, it does the wavy line in the main screen. It's very much the car is running its assistant, not an overlay. You can tell that the assistant kind of go and address lots of parts of the car. And then there are places where it can't or it won't. And it actually, I think one of the most interesting things about it is that it won't tell you why it can't do things. It is insistent that it won't tell you why it can't do things. Don't worry, I have very specific questions about that. But it strikes me that this is a natural evolution of, okay, the whole car is run by a finite set of computers and that means our system can just run around and talk to those computers and talk to the functions of those computers control in a way that, I don't know, if you tried to glue an assistant onto, I have a Cadillac EV. If you tried to glue an assistant onto that, it has to like go talk to its ECUs. Like it's just very obvious that something else is happening with Google Assistant in that car. That's the opportunity. The assistant can talk to the whole car. Then there are places where it just can't for some reason. I'll give you one example. It just struck me as very odd. I was driving in the rain and I said, hey, turn on the back window wiper and it just won't. And I thought, is that a safety reason? Is that you just don't know how to do it? You're like lost in the zonal architecture. And I asked it and said, I can't tell you why I can't do these things, but here's where the button is, which is really interesting for an assistant car to do. It said, I'm not going to do it for you, but the button is on the stock. Push the button. How do you make those decisions in the context of an assistant of what it can and cannot do? Awesome. So there's a lot of things here. I mean, first of all, I think you described it really, really well. Our approach, our philosophy for the Rivian Assistant is not just put a chatbot and then slap it on top of the UI. It's really developing what will become the connective tissue that enables our users to interact with pretty much every single feature in the car. And even more than that, bring their own personal digital ecosystem in the car through the Agentic integration. Now, to your question, what it can do and then what it cannot do. Us controlling the wiper, it's obviously possible. And I'm sure that you have seen that it can do way more. It can change your drive modes. It can change your ride height. Right. I could raise and lower the car at 55 miles an hour with the air suspension, which was cool. And it was like the slowest low rider experience you could possibly have. And then I couldn't turn on the wiper. So what is the split? Yeah. And that's honestly, that's one of my favorite features. And the way I like to interact with it is I don't tell it to change the ride height. I tell it, okay, give me drive mode with more pep. And then it does it and it changes to sport mode. I mean, this is really the magic of having that true conversational experience. Now, the reason it does not do wiper is by design, we actually block a number of features which are safety related. And cars are obviously homologated, regulated. So everything related to wipers, things related to windshield controls, things related to highway assistance, those are regulated functions, which today through our framework, we block them for safety reasons. And safety is really one of the core tenets in how we develop the entire experience. So the other one that struck me, you know, cars have rear seat sensors. We have kids. So every time I get out of my car, it reminds me there might be a kid in the backseat because it has sensed the weight in the backseat. I think this is one of the funniest sensors any car can have because the car seat is always in the backseat. So it's always reminding me that the kid might be in the car. So I asked it, is anyone in the backseat? And it, maybe this is just a bug, but it said, I'll find out. And then it said, I can't access that sensor. And I said, what sensor are you trying to access? And it refused. And I probably had a five-minute argument with your assistant about why it wouldn't tell me what sensor it was trying to access. The reason I'm asking this is not because it's a bug or I really needed to know if anyone in a car seat at the time. I'm just very curious, as you think about building the assistant that can access all of the sensors and the architecture of how that might work and how we might interact with cars. There's just a moment where maybe it's for safety reasons or maybe it just can't, doesn't work right now in the version I have, where the LLM has to go talk to another computer and that computer has to give it permission. And I don't know if anyone in any part of the tech industry has figured out exactly how that should work. And I'm just wondering what your point of view is. Yeah. And I think in this specific case, it should have actually told you what's in the backseat. So that's a bug. That's on me. No, it was like, I'm not telling you what sensor I'm trying to use. I was like, why? And it was like, I just, I'm not going to tell you what sensor I'm trying to get to. Yeah. That one is on me. And I think I will give you to hear it that, I mean, we have it in-house and then we'll be able to calibrate that answer and then we'll fix the bug for you and send you a new TI next time. That's very good. Every time we get a car executive on the show, I just complain about the experiences I have. It's perfect. But that piece where it's, how do you talk to the computer and what permission does that other computer give you? Every assistant at every level is running into that specific barrier. And I'm just curious what you think the answer is. Yeah. I mean, pretty much. I think if you think about our architecture this way, the assistant has deep integration into the entire vehicle operating system. So in theory, I mean, with the integrations that we have built, unless we have a bug like the one that you have, you should be able to do everything. The only functions which are not allowed are functions which are safety related because obviously of the homologation reasons, but then also functions where we think that the level of reliability that we can get from the LLMs does not make us comfortable to expose them to the end users. But that's really like the beauty of the internal in-house orchestration layer that we have built where we have a ton of guardrails, which allow us to control which functions are exposed by the assistant or not. All right. You mentioned that I was going to get you in trouble. I'm going to get you in trouble again. In 2024, you said using buttons in a car is an anomaly of modern design and that, and people love buttons in their cars so that you got in trouble for saying that. But the thing you said was that voice should be the future. Okay. This is the first gesture at voice being the future. Is it good enough? Because, you know, we're right on the cusp of, are these things actually good enough to build the kinds of products people want? I think we are on the cusp of something really big. And I deeply believe, like when you think about it, you're in a car, you're driving, you're focused on the road. So in theory, in theory, the primary interface with which you should be interacting with the car is actually your voice. The only reason that drivers and consumers so far did not interact with the car through voice is that, like, to put it really bluntly, the technology has been broken. And I think that's really the beauty of what we have now through the technology disruption, which is coming with the foundational models. The foundational models are providing us this wonderful opportunity so that we can truly get to a conversational experience and where drivers can interact with the car in human language. I don't need to tell the car, open the front. I can say, open the front trunk. Or actually, I can say, I have a bag in front of the car and it will actually open the front. And I think that completely changes the way you interact with the car. On top of that, we have now the opportunity with all the agentic framework so that we truly can give people their time back in the car. And I hope you tried our Google Calendar agentic integration, but you can imagine how the experience will be in the future where you're driving and then you should be able to perform operations on your calendar. You should be able to perform operations on your email. And then in the future, with the framework that we Each app and services you have, you can take actions across them. You've collected a lot of data in one place. This brings me to like a very deep sort of existential question whenever anyone talks about ambient computing in this way. Where does the logic live, right? The idea that you're going to have that interaction in your car and not at your laptop or on your phone, that seems like a big jump to me, right? The same way that when the smart speaker companies would be like, you're going to talk to your thermostat. And I'd be like, why? I'm going to talk to my phone. I don't feel the need to talk to my thermostat in this way. Do you think people are going to do that in the car or are you going to bring assistant to the Rivian app on a phone? Can you compete with the series and Google assistance in that way? How is that all going to work? I think, actually, like the way I think about it, I think it will be both. And I think this is really the big difference between the old world where we had unique applications and then the new world where we have agentic integrations. And think about the Rivian assistant as an agent orchestrator, which has privileges because it can deeply integrate with the vehicle controls or the vehicle operating system. It understands safety, it understands which things to do, which things not to do, and nobody else can develop that better than us because we develop the entire vehicle software. But then at the same time, it has interfaces and connections to other agents. And this is just the beginning. I think, think about it in a way where in the future you can actually probably be able to bring your own personal favorite assistant and chatbot to the car, and then it can share context with the Rivian assistant. I mean, this is really the possibilities that this new world, this new type of integrations is allowing us to do. Is the Rivian assistant the kind of thing that is possible because of the RV tech software stack, and is it possible that we'll see the Rivian assistant or something just like it in Volkswagens as well, or is this special to Rivian? This is special to Rivian. Everything which is AI stack is developed uniquely for Rivian. I mean, this is Rivian's brand priority as we see cars becoming more and more AI defined, but we're in discussions so that we can have some new technologies for the Volkswagen group. Rivians are sort of famously on LTE. When I first got in this car, I saw the LTE indicator and I thought, oh, something must be wrong. And I drove around and then I realized, oh, it's just LTE. Is there any latency concern with that, especially with voice and going out in the world and doing whatever inference you need to do? So two things. One, we need to get you an R2. The R2 has 5G. There you go. It's coming soon and it's amazing. And then two, and I think you touched base really on one of the architecture considerations for the technology, which is when you look at vehicles like the Rivian R1T and the R1S, the number one request from customers was CarPlay. And at the time, like we do all sorts of survey with customers, more than 70% of customers were requesting CarPlay. In the recent survey, that number is less than 25% now because with the level of features that we have shipped to customers, with the level of end-to-end integrations, with the level of convenience that we are bringing, CarPlay is, or Android Auto to that extent, is no longer the topic of discussion. And I think what we're actually seeing right now with the advancement of AI technologies is just another reason why I deeply believe that RJ and Rivian, we made the right choice in terms of investing into our own technology and our software. Cars are moving from, as you said, the buzzy word of software defined to AI defined. And the possibilities that we have now to have such deep AI integration into the car, it will make the entire CarPlay debate in the future completely obsolete. I really believe that the way you interact with apps, which are monothreaded, single buttons, single icons, a lot of that will be now completely reshaped into a world where it will become an agentic integration that presents itself into a wholesome user experience to the user. I buy that in the big picture, but give me an example of that. And I'll just put up an idea that I get from our readers all the time, so for you to react to. There are tons of little apps. They're basically media playing apps on phones. And it's trivial to push the button and do the CarPlay app. The one that I always think about, we got an email from a reader and he said, I have a Bible app that is never going to be in-built into any... And it's made by a small developer and I love it, and that's why I need CarPlay and I'm always going to buy a car with CarPlay because of it. That is about as small of an edge case as you get, but this one customer is going to pick a car based on it. Are you going to make that developer build an agentic AI integration into the Rivian Assistant or are you just going to lose that customer to CarPlay? I mean, this is the beauty of the technology disruption in which we are today. The answer in that case does not necessarily need to be, we will build an agentic integration for that particular app. It can be, if it is like, say, a Spotify or an Apple Music, absolutely. But then if it's a small app, the answer to that could be that from the Rivian Assistant, we have an integration to your favorite voice assistant on the car and then you can ask the voice assistant on the car to play that particular app through Bluetooth audio. That is possible as we open up the framework and as we allow more integrations to bring your own digital ecosystem to the car. So you're saying I've got, we'll use Google because Gemini is more present on an Android phone than Siri is currently on an iPhone. So it is Google and they're also your partner. So you're saying you talk to Rivian Assistant, Rivian Assistant knows about your Google account and your Android phone, and it's going to go talk to Gemini and Gemini is going to go operate your phone and stream Bluetooth audio to the Rivian Assistant. In the future, all of that is possible. Is that better or worse than phone projection, right? This is like a different kind of loop than just saying, put the interface here and let the user doing it. It could be possible through phone projection. I think the challenge with phone projection again is that, I mean, first of all, you have to go like as you're driving, you'll have to go through your phone. In some cases, you'll have to press like multiple buttons to get you get to the menu of your own app. The other thing is that it takes over the entire screen. And that is a degradation of the experience. Now, is the alternative solution like available right now? No, but I think the beauty of the wave of technology in which we are is that we finally have the building blocks so that we can really redefine this type of interactions and we can allow hoops now into your own personal device through a different way of interaction, rather than truly integrating end-to-end the app on the car itself or take over the entire screen from your phone. There's a third path now which is possible. I mean, obviously, I think it might be easier with Google. Again, they're your partner. But where would that connection to Google Assistant happen? Would I be like, I don't think I'm holding up my Android phone to the speaker and letting the assistants talk to each other out loud. Although that would be fun. I mean, that would be deeply hilarious to hear the two assistants just have a conversation. Like, can you please play the music app for me? Does that happen in the cloud? Does it happen locally? Where does that integration point between assistants happen? I mean, think about it as the assistant in the car would know how to talk to your, say, Gemini, your own personal assistant. And then in that case, your own personal assistant would be controlling your phone. The reason I'm asking this in this way is at some point you have one main assistant and all the other things are sort of like agents that can talk to you. And then maybe no one's ever talking to Rivian Assistant again. Right? Like, this is kind of it. You pull that thread all the way and Gemini is just doing everything for you all the time. Is that a danger or are we just nowhere close to even having to worry about that? Honestly, we don't worry about that because we know the opportunity that we have and we know the level, the breadth of capabilities that we can offer. No other assistant would be able to know as much as the Rivian Assistant about the car controls. None. Similarly, the fact that we have the surface of integration sit in our own operating system enables a ton of opportunities in terms of use cases that you cannot simply do with your phone or you cannot simply do by calling another assistant. Like, imagine, OK, I'm driving and then in the near future, we should be able with the technology to have an agentic integration with your favorite food delivery. And then you would say, OK, I need to be... The car knows exactly when you will be home. You'll say, OK, order my favorite sandwich from XYZ shop. Your account is already configured. And then the assistant will pick the destination, will get you to your favorite restaurant. All of that is integrated. You just need to do it through one voice command. Like those type of experiences where things become so seamless, where things become so easy as if you're talking to a human which connects the dots across multiple surfaces of your digital ecosystem would only be possible through such integrations. Well, Sim, we're out of time here. As you can tell, I can obviously talk to you about this forever. I don't think anyone has figured out how all this works. And it seems like you're making some big decisions. So you're going to have to come back as you've learned how this goes after this is shipped to all of your customers. And certainly when the R2 is out. There is one question that I have to ask every single Rivian person that I encounter. It is very important to me. When is the R3X coming out? It's here. You see it? When can I get one? It's, by the way, it's my favorite car. And like I keep asking RJ that question all the time. Now, you talked about decisions. You talked about trade-offs and us delivering the R2 before the R3X. You can imagine it's a big decision. It's also a hard decision because in our hearts, we all deeply want to have the R3X as soon as possible. Now, we also know that the R2 has the best ingredients to be a wildly successful car. The US needs another alternative for a great SUV for families. And this is what the R2 brings. And as we ship the R2, as we scale our volume as a company, we will earn the right so that we bring fantastic and such emotional cars like the R3X. I know that that is in one way the right answer. I'm just saying for me personally, come on, just send me one. It'll be great. That's the hard thing, though. I'll give you more feedback just like this. I will break your R3X prototype in 10,000 different ways. You'll get the bug report, so it'll be great. Tell RJ I made the offer. Awesome. I'll get one at the same time as you get it. Sounds good. Well, Sim, thank you so much for being on Decoder. This is great. Thank you. I'd like to thank Rassim for taking the time to join Decoder. And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at decoder at theverge.com. We really do read all the emails. Or hit me up directly on Threads or BlueSky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at DecoderPod. And you can watch clips on TikTok and Instagram, also at DecoderPod. That's a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Stat. It's edited by Xander Adams. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Brickmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time. Did you know if your windows are bare, indoor temperatures can go up 20 degrees? 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