Announcing our new "CLUBS" section where you can join or create a Rivian club or group! You can use this new feature to conveniently plan and discuss local events, gatherings or other club/group related topics.
So we encourage you to join (or start) special-interest and regional-based Rivian clubs at: https://www.rivianforums.com/forum/group-categories/clubs-groups.1/
NAV is the most important part for me. Do you currently own an EV that you take on occasional road trips? ICE road trips are mindless because there are gas stations at every exit. Charging infrastructure is very far away from that being the case.
I do not own an EV. But I don't see how that's relevant. I use my factory nav for roadtrips, but Apple Maps / CarPlay is easier and nicer for POI search -- such as restaurants and stores, locally. Even ignoring NAV, entirely, my main issue is audio.
It is not reasonable, imo, for a car to dictate what music service my entire family has to use. Even if I accept Spotify in a Rivian, that means I have to give up the integration with playlists when I work out, or ride my bike, or work in the garage.
Granted integrated nav that includes many of the features of Waze AND includes SOC-based routing would be awesome. But to your point above, for most people these road trips where I need to worry about SOC are "occasional." Why let that be the primary use case?
Money really has nothing to do with it. I have CP on my vehicle and still pay $600/year for data because it provides stuff CP doesn't or does it in a better way (I use the native version of NAV and Amazon Music because they are better versions).
I don't understand your sentiment though about "walled gardens". You're knocking people for using what you're describing as "walled gardens" while telling people it's okay to use the new closed standard of the Rivian. The Rivian infotainment is the one being the "walled garden". If each manufacturer did this, what would we do? Rivian forces Spotify, then Chevy turns around and pushes Pandora, and Ford turns around and pushes some other streaming service. So if you were to own all 3 in this hypothetical scenario, you'd need to either A) Own nothing but one manufacturer (walled garden), or B) Pay for multiple streaming services.
A car company can dictate whatever they want, because it's their car/product. Audio, NAV, etc. are no different than the seats, the wheels, the engine, or any other feature or component of the vehicle. This is our product and we hope you like it, that's it.
I'm confused, so now are we saying walled gardens are totally cool and they can dictate what they want? Or that walled gardens are bad and we should have open standards and options?
Because right now needing to charge away from home is the biggest headache of EV ownership. It's likely going to be the case for the entire time I own my R1T.
No disagreement that with a patchwork charging infra it's a pain. No doubt about it. But honestly... I rarely charge away from home today. Like 95% of my drives, maybe more, are handled just fine as long as I'm charged before I leave home. So in those <5% of the cases, that integrated interface would be awesome, I just don't see it as priority because it's so seldom a concern.
But I'm not being resistant to change. What I'm saying is that I pay for a streaming service already for an entire family of 5. Because of the lack of CarPlay, you're saying that I need to abandon my family plan from one large streaming company to another, with no reason other than "sorry not compatible". Whereas with AA/CP it's not an issue since there's an open app store that I can install whatever I want that is compatible with AA/CP.
Walled gardens are really only a problem when you suffer from the sunk cost. Rivian might dictate what things are allowed on their infotainment system, but there's really very little risk of me getting falling into a sunk cost fallacy of not wanting to get out. It's one of the reasons I switched to Android. Apple doesn't like playing nice with other companies unless they are getting a slice of the pie.
But how is allowing CP/AA a competing standard? Literally all other car companies (with the exception of wonderful Tesla) are allowing CP/AA. It's Rivian and Telsa that are the ones trying to make yet another standard.Walled gardens are really only a problem when you suffer from the sunk cost. Rivian might dictate what things are allowed on their infotainment system, but there's really very little risk of me getting falling into a sunk cost fallacy of not wanting to get out. It's one of the reasons I switched to Android. Apple doesn't like playing nice with other companies unless they are getting a slice of the pie.
You're not being forced, because you haven't bought the vehicle yet. It would be somewhat different if they offered CP/AA and didn't have a membership/data that they charged for, then one day said we no longer support CP/AA, but good news for $550/year you can get data in your vehicle.
It's engineering time they don't want to invest. I totally get why they are doing it the way they are. It's not just a simple software flag they can flip on to enable it.
