Rivian began rolling out Rivian OS 2 to its R1T and R1S vehicles on Friday, bringing the operating system (OS) that debuted on the R2 in June to both generations of its original models and putting the company’s entire passenger fleet on a single software platform for the first time.
“Rivian OS 2 starts rolling out on R1 today,” Chief Software Officer Wassym Bensaid wrote on X. “Rebuilt from the ground up with new design language.”
The release arrives as over-the-air update 2026.31 and reaches first-generation R1 vehicles built from 2021 as well as the second-generation trucks and SUVs introduced in 2024.
Bensaid said in February and again in May that the R1 would get the system “later this year.”
What the Video Shows
Bensaid’s post carries a 46-second animation that walks through the system as a single road trip from Palo Alto to the Tuolumne Meadows campground in Yosemite.
In the car, the sequence moves through the drive selector, a media player, and an assisted-driving ‘Universal Hands-Free.’ Drive modes — All Purpose, Sport, Conserve and Snow — are switched from a control on the steering wheel.
The video also shows a weather panel, a search bar that finds the interior lighting controls, a colour palette for accent lighting, a pitch-and-roll gauge reading 39 degrees on the approach, and the campground marked as reached.
The operating system is the one the R2 has shipped with since deliveries began on June 9: a redesigned interface built on Unreal Engine 5, an on-device language model behind the assistant, and a layout Bensaid describes as faster and more intuitive than the software it replaces.
The release notes, which EV reported when they surfaced last week, describe a vertical status bar replacing the old horizontal one, quick controls and the media player that can be moved to either side of the centre display so the driver need not reach across it, a trip panel on the driver display, and a rebuilt Settings app with universal search.
The media app gains list views for podcasts and audiobooks and support for Apple Music, Spotify, TuneIn and TIDAL.
The weather panel is a Connect+ subscription feature. Two items are generation-specific: updated top-of-charge current thresholds to improve 12-volt battery management on first-generation vehicles, and the digital-key door-lock fix on second-generation ones.
The same update carries real-time Waze alerts into the native navigation on both R1 and R2, starting with speed cameras and police reports, with Bensaid having promised more data to follow.
For the R2 the release adds locking glove boxes, a driver-focused vent mode, and fixes to digital key pairing, including one for a condition that let the vehicle lock with a key still inside.
The Hardware It Has to Span
Porting one operating system across the fleet is a larger engineering task than the announcement suggests, because the three vehicle types it now covers run on very different electronics.
First-generation R1 vehicles use a domain-based architecture with 17 electronic control units. The second generation consolidated that to a seven-unit zonal layout and added dual Nvidia Drive AGX Orin processors, roughly ten times the processing power.
The R2 shares the zonal layout but adds a further 200 sparse TOPS of dedicated cabin compute — the layer that powers the assistant, the interface and the on-device model, and the headroom Rivian OS 2 was designed around.
Rivian has not detailed which features will be available on first-generation hardware and which will not. Bensaid’s August confirmation that Gen 1 would be included at all settled a question owners had been asking since May, when the assumption was that pre-2024 vehicles would stay on the old stack.
The Cadence Behind It
Update 2026.31 is the fifth R1 feature release of 2026, after 2026.03 in January, 2026.07 in April, 2026.15 in May and 2026.23 in August. Rivian shipped 11 over-the-air updates in 2025, a figure Bensaid cited at his May AMA, so the pace this year has been about two-thirds of last year’s.
The slower rhythm reflects where the software team’s attention has been.
Bensaid launched the R2 in June without several familiar features to protect quality and committed to restoring them monthly.
The first R2 update, in July, added Launch Mode, Pet Comfort, Gear Guard, garage-door pairing and a hotspot, and the second brought it close to parity with the R1.
With one core operating system, a feature built for one vehicle ships to all of them, and the team stops maintaining two codebases for a lineup that is about to grow further with the R3.
