CarPlay has its pros and cons. I drive a Mazda and have rented enough GM and Ford vehicles to say that all of their software is consistently terrible. It's like every rectangle on the screen is built by a different team, all of whom hate each other. Different fonts, different modes of interaction, buttons that do nothing, error messages that complain about other parts of the software. So CarPlay is much better than any of those.

But at the same time I don't really use CarPlay for all that much. Music, maps, that's about it. And I also want to use the screen for some features that CarPlay doesn't handle, like checking backup or side cameras. In theory you could do even more, like if I have some engine problem why does it alert me with a few words in a tiny amount of UI in some random spot? It could give me a full explanation of what's going wrong, tell me whether it's in warranty, and offer me to schedule an appointment, right there from the screen in my car.

I haven't driven a Tesla or a Rivian so I don't know how good their software is. But it does seem like there's an opportunity to build some actually-good software here that a generic platform like CarPlay can't really do.