As crucial as things like touchscreens and software are to the modern automotive experience, we seldom stop to ask why everything looks so ugly.
Your average car’s touchscreen and menus likely have all the functionality of a Palm Pre, with the aesthetic appeal and artistic value of a Fort Worth outlet mall. Their menus and controls often feel haphazardly designed and look utterly forgettable. This is true even after more than a decade of in-car screen dominance and a future we’re constantly told is centered around over-the-air updates and smartphone-like tech features.
So when Rivian set out to completely overhaul its in-car software experience, its designers declared that things don’t have to be this way.
The electric startup’s latest infotainment setup features cel-shaded depictions of its trucks and SUVs, offset by animated depictions of different landscapes, bright colors, speed lines like you’d find in a Japanese manga comic and tons of “Easter eggs” in the backgrounds. New updates even give the software “costumes” inspired by classic TV shows and movies like Back to the Future and Knight Rider.
When I asked Rivian’s Chief Design Officer Jeff Hammoud why his team went this route, one word came up again and again: “Optimism.”
“We felt it was an opportunity to have a little bit of fun and create a personality around the car,” Hammoud said in a recent interview. More than that, he said, the new software interfaces reflect a philosophy inside Rivian. “We want it all to look inviting,” Hammoud said. “Our vehicles have a friendly look and that’s part of our brand… that optimism around what we're trying to do through electrification and protecting the world for our kids.”
Rivian’s new interface language went live this summer on the heavily updated 2025 R1S and R1T models and via software updates to earlier cars. They give owners an animated representation of their vehicle that spins and transforms as they adjust things like ride height settings and the various driving modes.
On another car, switching to sport mode might mean a new set of gauges on the central display or shifting the menus to a red color scheme. But on an R1S or R1T, a cartoon depiction of the car zooms onto what looks like a race track as its glowing taillights fade into a red-and-white background. Instead of pop-ups to confirm you’re in “Snow Mode” or some off-road setting, Rivian offers a shift to a charming winter landscape or the vehicle perched atop a rocky mountain. Clouds, windmills and birds move about in the backgrounds and all of these visuals take on a different character at night as well.
None of this is vital for a car to function properly, of course, and it’s highly unlikely that these animated graphics will be a make-or-break selling point. But they add a ton of something intangible—character—to Rivian’s cars, and they turn something that used to be an afterthought at best into something you actually look forward to using. And Hammoud said that a ton of effort went into devising how this ecosystem should look and feel.
“We used this idea of manga-style [or] Studio Ghibli films, those really optimistic movies where you feel like you're in another world, and really taking that into a style where we could create the different worlds of the drive modes,” Hammoud said. He’s of course referring to the famed Japanese animated classics from Hayao Miyazaki and other creators like Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service and, most recently, The Boy and the Heron. All of those are landmark animated films released to international acclaim. But Hammoud said they also share the general vibe Rivian is going for these days.
“You look at something like Akira, versus Studio Ghibli,” he said, referring to the 1980s comic and landmark animated film about a dystopian future. The latter is “a little bit more optimistic and on the friendly side of that. We want to communicate power and dynamism with the vehicle, but we still wanted to have this sort of, ‘sitting down Sunday morning watching cartoons with your kids’ vibe with it as well.”
That stands in stark contrast with another eye-catching electric vehicle designed that has a distinctly apocalyptic energy: hard angles, allegedly bulletproof stainless steel, a “Bioweapon Defense Mode.” While Hammoud didn’t mention it by name, he made clear that he, Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe and their design teams didn’t share the same philosophy.
“When you look at trucks, their faces are very aggressive, very angry, like the front ends could eat small children,” Hammoud said. “Purposely, we're like, ‘All right, well, we don't need a big grill.’ We want it to look inviting. Look at our headlight shapes. Our vehicles have a friendly look.”
Much of this was afforded by the power of the Unreal Engine, a 3D graphics software system made famous in video games that’s now making its way to the automotive world. This allowed Rivian’s artists and designers to “scale” all these new images easily without having to draw each one individually.
“It was really important to us that whatever car you have, it’s the right set of wheels and it's the right color [on the screen], so that way we're looking at is actually representative of your vehicle,” Hammoud said. “If we had to create, which is what we did in the past, an image for every single [Rivian color or option], that’s thousands and thousands of images.”
With the Unreal Engine, Hammoud said, “You put in the specifications of the vehicle, like if it's a Forest Green car with 22s, you just put that into the code, and boom, it's rendered and it updates.”
Rivian isn’t alone in trying to add a more distinctive look and character to its software experience as well as its exterior designs. Mini recently added a cartoon dog to its infotainment systems as an AI-powered virtual assistant, and several Chinese automakers are taking similar approaches. And as with those cars, Rivian’s approach goes beyond mere visuals; these functions represent new ways for drivers to interact with their cars and control their features in the software-driven vehicle era.
So does it work? Based on a recent test of a 2025 Rivian R1S, I think the answer is mostly yes. It’s fairly easy to find the functions you want and the big, bright displays represent novel ways of presenting information to the driver. That’s crucial since Rivian famously—or perhaps infamously—eschews most physical buttons and Apple CarPlay in its EVs. It also aims to do more with voice controls, although it has a ways to go there to match many competitors.
But this approach to software does show what Rivian’s made of, and why a traditional conglomerate like the Volkswagen Group sees such value in what the company does. That 2025 R1S got better while I had it, receiving an over-the-air software update that improved the energy and efficiency gauges (and put them in line with the rest of the car’s new artistic language) while correcting some issues with the stereo and adding the Halloween-themed visuals.
And until Rivian can get the upcoming R2, R3 and R3X models on the road, it’s got more in store for its current cars both through software updates and more tweaks—though Hammoud was cagey about what exactly is coming next.
“We have some new updates that are coming next year on R1 that I'm excited to share, some special editions,” Hammoud said. “I'll leave it at that.”
Contact the author: patrick.george@insideevs.com
Gallery: Rivian R1S and R1T Graphics
