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

Today, I’m talking with Wassym Bensaid, the chief software officer at Rivian, and the co-CEO of Rivian’s platform joint venture with Volkswagen, which everyone just calls RV Tech.

That joint venture kicked off about a year and a half ago with a nearly $6 billion investment from Volkswagen. It effectively puts Wassym 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 Wassym talk about as the core element of the whole thing. I also wanted to know where the lines were — what parts of Rivian’s software get to be just for Rivian, and which parts of the core technology would be shared across the smaller company and the behemoth that is Volkswagen Group. And, of course, I wanted to understand how Wassym navigated the tension between the two. You know, classic Decoder bait.

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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 Wassym talk about Assistant as 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 Wassym, and I found it to be a fascinating experience — certainly powerful and engaging while at the same time frustrating in a lot of really interesting ways. So I had a lot of feature requests, bug reports, and questions about the future of AI and voice assistants in cars.

So I asked Wassym about all of that, and also about his statements over the years that buttons in cars are just an anomaly and of course how he’s feeling about Apple CarPlay and Android Auto these days. You’ll hear it, but spoiler alert: Don’t get your hopes up.

This is a really fun episode of Decoder — we really get into the weeds on a lot of my favorite topics to talk about here on the show.

Okay: Wassym Bensaid, chief software officer of Rivian and co-CEO of RV Tech. Here we go.

Wassym Bensaid. 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 straightforwardly called Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies. Welcome to Decoder.

Thanks, Nilay. 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 because of this joint venture that’s building a new kind of software company that’s building a 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. So, 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 at about CarPlay. Don’t worry, we’ll come to that.

There’s also the new Rivian Assistant, which is an intelligent agent inside the car that I’ve been playing with and I want to ask you a lot of questions about. Then, there’s RV Tech, 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.

Correct.

How does that all work? What are the lines between RV Tech, where you’re the co-CEO, and your role with Rivian, and what is the boundary between the software you build in the joint venture and the software you build at Rivian?

Before we dive into RV Tech and the joint venture, I think it’s really important to talk about the overall industry landscape. The automotive industry is going through a major disruption. The amount of software content in cars with technologies like electrification, connectivity, and autonomy is significantly increasing. That is creating a big divide between traditional OEMs and new tech-forward companies.

Consumers now have much higher expectations in terms of the overall experience and convenience. Multiple OEMs have tried really hard to get software content, but it’s not easy. It requires a very different type of talent. In some cases, it requires complete cultural change because you’re not only developing software. You also need to adopt different methodologies and ways of doing things. You need to be much more agile. When you look at the industry, companies tried to do that in-house. Some of them tried to partner. Some of them tried to use Tier-1 suppliers.

A lot of recipes did not really work, and that was the genesis of the great partnership we have now with the Volkswagen Group, which has really taken the Rivian technology stack — taken the software, the electrical architecture, as well as the Rivian DNA and culture — and married it with the Volkswagen Group’s incredible scale. It truly provides a fantastic opportunity for both companies because now we have a solution that can not only underpin Rivian vehicles — as you mentioned, the R2 is the first car the joint venture is shipping — but then also, in the future, every single electric model in the VW Group. This is from your premium cars like Audi, to luxury cars with Porsche, Bentley, and Lamborghini, all the way to mass market cars.

That suddenly provides an opportunity of scale. Also, it exercises the technology in very different ways, and it puts us in a wonderful position so that we can build an architecture and operating system for the entire industry.

That question about the architecture and operating system feels very complicated. As you said, the industry is moving to software-defined vehicles, which is a great buzzword. Every car executive I talk to clearly has a different definition of what “software-defined vehicle” means. What is your definition of “software-defined vehicle”?

First of all, I hate that buzzword.

[Laughs] You brought it up.

Actually, I can’t find a better name. So, I admit that I’m also using the same for a lack of a better definition.

But think about it this way. When you look at the older architecture in cars, it’s really an aggregation of multiple mechanical components. Underneath that, there are, in some cases, hundreds of electronic units, and each one of them is meant to do one thing. That’s actually mirroring the way those cars are built because they are developed using different Tier-1s and other suppliers.

In that world, integrating an end-to-end vehicle feature requires a ton of coordination between many of those suppliers. It requires very long development cycles. That approach kind of worked in the past when the expectations of consumers were not super high in terms of those end-to-end features. But I think with the advancement of EVs and with the types of user experiences that Tesla, Rivian,, and the Chinese cars are offering now, that’s no longer an option for any car manufacturer.

I’ll give you a small example. When you walk to Rivian — and I know you’re currently testing a [Rivian R1] Gen 2 Quad — let’s say you have your Apple digital key. You walk to the car and then the car recognizes you. Then, there’s a lighting sequence, and your entire profile is configured. Whether it’s the seats, the steering wheel, the infotainment system, the HVAC, everything is configured for you.

That sequence takes probably just 15 seconds, but doing that in the traditional world requires the coordination of more than 10 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 infotainment supplier. You need to talk to the security system. You need to talk to the cloud. You need to talk to the third party for the digital key. Just imagine that you want to slightly change that sequence for whatever reason. You have to go through another cycle of changes.

This is why that old model really doesn’t work anymore. Cars are now integrated systems with what we call “zonal computers.” We think about them as general-purpose, powerful compute that we place in the middle of the car, and they become the centralized brain of those different functions. The more software you can move on those zonals, the more it can provide control over those end-to-end features for the customers.

So, this is the pitch that every pure-play car startup has been making for a long time, right? The way that the OEMs built cars was done, and you shouldn’t have 1,200 ECUs from 1,200 different suppliers. That was fine for gas cars that were pretty dumb, where the only computer was like my old Pioneer head unit that had a fold-out screen. By the way, I love that head unit, if you could bring that back. I have fond teenage memories of my dumb old car with that head unit.

Now, the whole car is a computer, and you expect a lot of things to happen but that integration is too hard. What I would say broadly is that legacy OEMs have known this for years. They have been on their own journey to solve this problem, to cut down on the number of ECUs.

Ford CEO Jim Farley was on the show five years ago saying things like, “Too many ECUs; we’re going to cut it down.” Volkswagen, in particular, had its own giant project to do this that failed. I think there’s enough distance. You’re a year and a half into the new joint venture, and we can say Volkswagen’s CARIAD failed.

Why do you think the new joint venture and the infusion of Rivian culture is going to be successful when Volkswagen’s attempt to do it on its own did not net any positive results?

You’re getting me in trouble, Nilay.

That’s what I do.

What I personally appreciate about the Volkswagen Group’s decision is the recognition that developing what are called software-defined vehicles requires a complete, clean-sheet approach. You cannot approach it with Band-Aids and by having some level of software content in the car. As you said, the Volkswagen Group has tried. Actually, it has tried twice. But deep inside, there are two things that are really important here. One is that you need the right talent who are able to develop true software. Not abstracted functions like what the automotive industry is using — you have probably heard about AUTOSAR — but a true, hard-coded operating system.

Then, you also need a deep cultural change with a very different way of approaching the car and its overall development. The traditional model said that cars were defined many, many years in advance. People claim they know about software features four or five years in advance, and then it’s a very fixed waterfall approach. The way we design cars at Rivian is that we actually design the car around the electrical architecture, the software, and the adaptability of the software. So, software and technology have been at the table since very early on. It actually impacts the overall packaging of the car. We really use that platform and that operating system mindset so that we have a car that can evolve over time and get better and better for our customers.

Such changes are so deep that to do it well, you either need to have the right partner or you go with a clean-sheet approach. I think the Volkswagen Group has made the right decision to partner with Rivian in this case and to not only embrace the technology that we built from the ground up but to also embrace the culture, the approach, and the DNA of Rivian as a company.

How is the joint venture str

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