Rivian’s founder and Chief Executive Officer RJ Scaringe said the company will hold a second Autonomy and AI Day near the end of the year and use it to roll out new features, with point-to-point driving the first he described.
“We’re going to announce the specific date, but we’re going to have an Autonomy and AI Day that we have near the end of this year, similar to what we did last year,” Scaringe said at Morgan Stanley’s Laguna Conference on Tuesday.
He described the event as “an anchor point to then roll out some of these new features that we’re really excited about.”
The year-end timing for point-to-point is unchanged. Scaringe said the launch was on track for year end on the second-quarter earnings call on July 30, when he first disclosed plans for a second Autonomy Day, and Rivian’s autonomy chief James Philbin restated it at a Goldman Sachs conference on September 8.
Rivian’s own website is narrower than either executive. It describes a limited point-to-point rollout later this year, with widespread availability in 2027.
The first was held at Rivian’s Palo Alto offices on December 11, 2025.
What Point-to-Point Means
Scaringe defined it for the audience. “You get into the vehicle, you type the address of your intended destination into the screen and say go. And the car does everything from there forward. So it pulls the car out of a garage or out of a parking spot, drives to the final destination, finds a parking spot at the final destination.”
It remains supervised. “Your hands are off the wheel, but your eyes are still on the road most of the time,” he said. “You can look down, be distracted for a bit, but you can’t take a nap. You can’t watch a movie.”
Beyond it, he said, are eyes-off driving and then Level 4, “which is you don’t even need to be in the car.”
He put that progression over the next two to three years, “with 2028 being a really important year for us where we start to deploy the Level 4 version, which is this robotaxi version.” Rivian and Uber announced a deal for a robotaxi R2 in late 2028.
On the July 30 call Scaringe had said hands-off, eyes-off capability would arrive in 2027.
One Model for Every Level
Scaringe said Rivian trains a single foundation model, which it calls the Large Driving Model, for all levels of autonomy rather than separate models for driver assistance and full self-driving.
“There’s only one model,” he said. “We don’t build an LDM for Level 2 plus plus and an LDM for Level 4. It’s one big model.”
The difference between supervised and unsupervised driving, he said, is “just how confident we are in the system such that we allow you as the operator to cease to be part of the operational control of the vehicle.”
Asked whether the Uber robotaxi programme is required to reach eyes-off driving for personal vehicles, he said it is part of the same continuum rather than a prerequisite.
The Hardware
Scaringe said the R2 carries five radars, and that Rivian will “soon” launch a LiDAR sensor that turns every equipped vehicle into part of a ground-truth data collection fleet for training the model.
The R2’s autonomy stack, as detailed last December, carries eleven exterior cameras and five radars, one forward-facing and four at the corners. The company said in July that third-generation hardware, including LiDAR, is due by the end of 2026.
Point-to-point is due on both the current second-generation hardware and the third, so early R2s built without LiDAR are expected to receive it.
Rivian’s Autonomy+ subscription, at $2,500 one-time or $49.99 a month, launched in early 2026. Philbin said on September 8 that take rates were tracking better than expected.
The Market Argument
Scaringe said most buyers do not yet choose cars on autonomy. “The vast majority of customers buying new cars in the United States today are not making those purchase decisions around autonomy,” he said.
“As autonomy becomes more capable, this becomes a very important purchase criteria because you start to get your time back,” the founder added.
He said Rivian believes Level 4 capability will remain scarce and carry pricing power. “The number of companies that will likely have it is certainly less than the number of fingers on hand,” he said. On software-defined architecture, he said “today, two companies do that outside of China, Tesla and Rivian.”
