Wassym Bensaid doesn’t believe in physical buttons.
He is the chief software officer at Rivian and the co-CEO of RV Tech. The latter is the $6 billion joint venture with Volkswagen that kicked off roughly 18 months ago.
It’s a massive bet. Volkswagen wanted a new way to build electric cars. They got tired of the old ways failing. So they partnered with a much smaller, tech-native company. Bensaid is now responsible for the operating system and electrical architecture of every future EV in the VW Group family. Audi. Porsche. Bentley. Even Scout.
And Rivian’s new R2.
The tension here is interesting. How does a startup culture survive inside a corporate behemoth? Bensaid says the answer lies in what he calls the Rivian DNA. He isn’t just selling code. He’s selling a way of working.
We need to talk about that work. Specifically, the lines he has to draw. What software stays strictly Rivian? What gets shared?
There’s the new Rivian Assistant. It’s an AI agent inside the R1 vehicles. I tried it before this interview. It was fascinating. It was also frustrating. It feels like the beginning of a big gamble by Rivian. They want their cars to be more agentic. To anticipate what you want before you ask.
But here’s the rub. Bensaid has long said that buttons in cars are an “anomaly.” He’s skeptical of Apple CarPlay and Android Auto too. If you were holding out hope that his mind will change now that Volkswagen is involved, don’t. Spoiler: He won’t.
So why did this joint venture work when VW’s own internal software team, CARIAD, failed?
The old way was broken
Let’s get one thing straight. The car industry is undergoing a shock to its system.
Software content is exploding. Electrification, connectivity, autonomy—it all requires more code. Consumers expect a certain level of polish now. Traditional car makers struggled. They hired talent. They tried agile methods. They partnered with tier-one suppliers.
None of it worked.
The old model required coordinating 10+ suppliers for a feature that takes 15 seconds to happen. That cycle just doesn’t exist anymore.
Bensaid calls out the absurdity of the traditional model. You walk up to a modern car. It recognizes you. The lights sequence. The seat adjusts. The HVAC warms up.
That whole flow takes fifteen seconds.
In a traditional car factory? You needed permission from ten different suppliers to coordinate that moment. The seat maker. The door maker. The climate control guy. The screen team. The cloud team.
If you wanted to change the color of the lights? Start the development cycle over. Years of delay.
This is why zonal architecture matters. Instead of a thousand isolated computers (ECUs) doing one thing each, you put a few powerful general-purpose computers in the center of the car. A central brain.
It’s what Tesla did. It’s what Chinese EVs do. It’s the only way to keep up with user expectations.
Legacy car companies knew this. Ford tried to cut down their ECU count years ago. It didn’t really stick. VW tried to build it in-house. CARIAD. It was a disaster. They spent billions. They had nothing to show for it but delays.
Why did partnering with Rivian feel like the only option?
Bensaid thinks VW finally understood the mistake they were making. You can’t slap software on a car built in the 20th century. It’s a clean-sheet problem.
Culture as a feature
Volkswagen made two attempts to build their own software stack before giving up. Both failed.
The issue wasn’t just talent. It was culture.
The auto industry has been built on waterfalls. Features are planned years in advance. Rigid. Fixed. You decide what the car will do in 2028 in 2025.
Rivian designs cars around the software. The technology sits at the table from day one. It affects how the battery is packed. How the wires are run. The car is built to evolve over the air.
This is what Bensaid calls the Rivian DNA. It’s not just the code. It’s the agility.
WV’s co-CEO at the JV, Carsten Helbing (VW’s CTO), handles operations. He talks to the brands. He arbitrates the chaos. Audi wants this. Lamborghini wants that.
Bensaid runs the technical team. He builds the OS. Helbing manages the politics.
It’s a push-pull. Who owns what?
The JV owns the underpinnings. The electrical architecture. The core operating system. This is the plumbing. It powers every interaction in the car, most of which you don’t even notice.
But the surface layer? That’s up to the brands. Rivian will look like Rivian. A future Scout vehicle will look different. Lamborghini? Definitely different.
They all run on the same engine. But the dress code is distinct.
Buttons are an anomaly
So where does that leave Apple CarPlay?
Bensaid has been vocal. He hates physical buttons. He calls them an anomaly. He believes they belong to the mechanical age.
And he’s not thrilled with screen mirroring solutions either.
CarPlay puts the smartphone in charge. It turns the car’s infotainment screen into a giant iPad stand. Rivian wants to do more than mirror your phone. They want an integrated experience. That’s why the Rivian Assistant matters. It uses AI to handle commands contextually. It’s not just reading a Siri request. It’s trying to understand the car itself.
Did I like using the Assistant? Mostly.
It’s powerful. It engages you. But it breaks often. In interesting ways. Sometimes it misunderstands. Sometimes it hesitates.
Which brings us back to the core argument. If the car is a computer, shouldn’t the interface behave like software? Fluid. Responsive. Without clutter?
Bensaid seems to think yes. The buttons stay as relics. The mirrors stay as… mirrors, apparently, because they haven’t killed those yet. But everything else is digital.
This is the fractal nature of the deal. A startup’s soul inside a German giant. Will it last? We’ll see as the R2 starts arriving and VW integrates the tech across their massive fleet.
One thing is certain. The waterfall days are over.
At least for those brave enough to rebuild everything from scratch.
Are we really ready to give our phones a back seat to car AI? 🚗💨
