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Rivian detailed Thursday how it plans to make its electric vehicles increasingly autonomous \u2014 an ambitious effort that includes new hardware, including lidar and custom silicon, and eventually, a potential entry into the self-driving ride-hail market, according to CEO RJ Scaringe.<\/p>\n
The announcements at the company\u2019s first \u201cAutonomy & AI Day\u201d event in Palo Alto, California, shed fresh light on Rivian\u2019s technology development, much of which has been kept undercover as it pushes to begin production of its more affordable R2 SUV in the first half of 2026. Rivian\u2019s event is also a very public signal to shareholders that it\u2019s keeping pace, or even exceeding, the automated-driving capabilities of industry rivals like Tesla, Ford, General Motors, as well as automakers from Europe and China.<\/p>\n
Rivian said it will expand the hands-free version of its driver-assistance software to \u201cover 3.5 million miles of roads across the USA and Canada\u201d and will eventually expand beyond highways to surface streets (with clearly painted road lines). This expanded access will be available on the company\u2019s second-generation R1 trucks and SUVs. It\u2019s calling the expanded capabilities \u201cUniversal Hands-Free\u201d and will launch in early 2026. Rivian says it will charge a one-time fee of $2,500 or $49.99 per month.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat that means is you can get into the vehicle at your house, plug in the address to where you\u2019re going, and the vehicle will completely drive you there,\u201d Scaringe said Thursday, describing a point-to-point navigation feature.<\/p>\n
After that, Rivian plans to allow drivers to take their eyes off the road. \u201cThis gives you your time back. You can be on your phone, or reading a book, no longer needing to be actively involved in the operation of vehicle.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rivian\u2019s driver assistance software won\u2019t stop there; the EV maker laid out plans on Thursday to enhance its capabilities all the way up to what it\u2019s calling \u201cpersonal L4,\u201d a nod to the level set by the Society of Automotive Engineers that means a car can operate in a particular area with no human intervention. <\/p>\n
After that, Scaringe hinted that Rivian will be looking at competing with the likes of Waymo. \u201cWhile our initial focus will be on personally owned vehicles, which today represent a vast majority of the miles driven in the United States, this also enables us to pursue opportunities in the ride-share space,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Techcrunch event<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco<\/span> To help accomplish these lofty goals, Rivian has been building a \u201clarge driving model\u201d (think: an LLM but for real-world driving), part of a move away from a rules-based framework for developing autonomous vehicles that has been led by Tesla. The company also showed off its own custom 5nm processor, which it says will be built in collaboration with both Arm and TSMC.<\/p>\n That custom chip powers what Rivian is referring to as its third-generation \u201cautonomy computer,\u201d or ACM3. The new computer can process 5 billion pixels per second and will start showing up on Rivian\u2019s upcoming mass-market R2 SUV in late 2026.<\/p>\n Rivian will couple the ACM3 with a lidar sensor at the top of the windshield (from an undisclosed supplier) to provide \u201cthree-dimensional spatial data and redundant sensing,\u201d which it says will help with \u201creal-time detection for the edge cases of driving.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe expect that at launch in late 2026 this will be the most powerful combination of sensors and inference compute in consumer vehicles in North America,\u201d senior vice president of electrical hardware Vidya Rajagopalan said at the event.<\/p>\n The R2 is set to start shipping in the first half of 2026, meaning the launch versions of the SUV will not have ACM3 or the lidar sensor. That means early versions of the R2 without the ACM3 and lidar hardware will most likely plateau at hands-free driving. Anyone hoping to do eyes-off or, later, unsupervised driving in a Rivian will need a vehicle with a lidar sensor. <\/p>\n \u201cAdding lidar creates the ultimate sensing combination. It gives the most comprehensive 3D model of the space the vehicle is traveling through,\u201d vice president of autonomy and AI James Philbin said Thursday. \u201cThe goal for our onboard sensing stack isn\u2019t just human level, it\u2019s superhuman level.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n