"It's an anomaly" ─ Rivian's head of software development about buttons in cars

Many new cars feature large touchscreen displays that take over many functions of vehicle control. This trend leaves many drivers longing for the good old buttons. However, Rivian's software development head, Wasim Bensaid, does not share this nostalgia. He believes that the use of buttons in vehicles is an "anomaly." This is reported by ITC.UA, citing Techcrunch.

"This is a bug. It’s not a feature," Bensaid said at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. "Ideally, you would want to interact with your car using your voice. The problem today is that most voice assistants are just broken."

Bensaid added that he drives an engineering vehicle "every week" equipped with an AI-based voice assistant, although he did not specify which one. Previously, he mentioned in an interview that Rivian has a "partnership that I can’t discuss yet."

"I believe that the car is actually a fantastic environment for artificial intelligence," he said, noting that latency and hallucinations remain very serious issues that need to be addressed.

Wasim Bensaid believes that modern vehicles are so feature-rich that there are challenges in implementing an interface to manage all of them. At the same time, he has great faith in the ability of AI-powered voice control to handle complex requests. For example, he said that if a driver states, "I'm hungry," the car assistant should be able to quickly direct them to the nearest restaurant they might prefer.

Bensaid mentioned that Rivian's goal is to make it possible to transfer all controls from the touchscreen to voice commands.

Before that happens, Bensaid said he remains focused on providing a personalized experience for Rivian owners—hence, CarPlay won’t be appearing anytime soon. Although he noted that the Rivian team "is still discussing it," he considers the use of CarPlay "laziness" and prefers the integration of individual applications like Apple Music.

CarPlay "takes over all the pixels on the screen, completely replacing the entire experience, and we genuinely believe that with the technological capabilities we have, we can offer a much more elegant, integrated experience," he said.