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⚡ This Week’s Big Charge
💡 Rivian Goes All-In On Autonomy: Lidar, AI, In-House Chips And More
"This is our biggest effort within the business on technology," Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe told me and my colleague Tim Levin a few months ago. “Our biggest by dollar. By everything.” He was referring to autonomous driving, something that Rivian itself is relatively new to and not especially known for.
Not like Tesla or Waymo or even General Motors and Ford, with their popular hands-free highway driving systems. Rivian didn’t even launch a Super Cruise-like hands-free option until this past March.
But after this week, Rivian may be in the autonomy conversation a whole lot more. As the California startup works to push through a difficult year—marked by expiring electric-vehicle tax credits, costly new tariffs, and the loss of regulatory-credit revenue—it’s betting on a vertically integrated approach to autonomous driving and AI to break new ground.
And I’m especially interested in the addition of lidar, or light-based radar, to the upcoming Rivian R2—not some pricey flagship but a much more affordable, mass-market EV tipped to start at $45,000.
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🛻 What Rivian Announced Today:
The R2 won’t get lidar right away, but at the end of 2026. As we reported at InsideEVs, data collected via lidar will train AI driving models to improve its entire fleet of cars. (The older R1 platform is not getting lidar.)
Universal Hands-Free (UHF): anywhere a road has marked lines, a Rivian can operate with your hands off the wheel. That’s 3.5 million miles of roads in the U.S. and Canada.
It’s not yet as robust as Tesla’s Full Self-Driving—for now, anyway. A driver will still need to use their brake pedal at a stoplight, for example. But it’s expected to get better.
It’ll be a subscription feature called Autonomy+, launching early next year. It costs $2,500 as a one-time purchase or $49.99 per month.
The R2 is also getting Rivian’s first in-house computer chip—a huge deal in the auto industry, where such components are usually outsourced. This means Rivian is building a vertically integrated autonomy system.
Rivians are getting an in-car AI voice assistant. It will integrate with Google Calendar, so you can tell the car things like “Drive to my next appointment.”