On the same week that Rivian announced a robotaxi deal with Uber, a Tesla owner who tested the company’s Universal Hands-Free system called it “basically adaptive cruise control with lane assist” and said he would not recommend it to family or friends.
Devin Olsen, who runs the YouTube channel ‘Canada FSD’ and owns a 2024 Tesla Model 3 equipped with FSD version 14, tested Universal Hands-Free in a second-generation R1S over approximately 90 minutes of driving.
In a video published on both YouTube and X, he described the experience as “more stressful than manually driving.”
As of press time, the video has garnered over 100,000 views on X.
“I had numerous close calls where if I hadn’t taken over, we might’ve gotten into an accident or at least felt very close to getting in an accident,” Olsen said. “Whereas I can’t remember the last time that I had that same feeling while using Full Self-Driving.”
“This was my first time testing Rivian‘s new Universal Hands-Free, and I was honestly surprised by how it performed,” Olsen wrote on X.
Context
Rivian launched Universal Hands-Free last December via over-the-air software update 2025.46 for second-generation R1 vehicles.
The system expanded hands-free driving from 135,000 miles of pre-mapped highways to over 3.5 million miles of marked roads across the US and Canada — surpassing GM’s Super Cruise and Ford’s BlueCruise in geographic coverage.
Rivian has said point-to-point functionality will arrive later in 2026.
The system is part of Rivian‘s Autonomy+ subscription, priced at $49.99 per month or $2,500 as a one-time purchase — significantly below Tesla’s $99 monthly or $8,000 one-time fee for FSD.
Current owners are on a free trial through April 4, after which the subscription becomes mandatory.
What Went Wrong
The test documented a series of issues across highway, urban, and stop-and-go driving conditions in the Vancouver area.
Olsen described the system’s driving behaviour as “super robotic” and “very stiff,” noting that it would accelerate aggressively toward its set speed without adapting to road conditions.
On a curved section, the system disengaged with a “sharp curve ahead” warning, forcing an immediate takeover.
The system then displayed a message stating Universal Hands-Free was “unavailable until your next drive” — a lockout that Olsen bypassed by briefly shifting into park and back to drive.
The reviewer flagged multiple incidents where the system braked harshly for merging vehicles, failed to anticipate a vehicle pulling into the lane, and did not slow for a situation where Olsen felt manual intervention was necessary to avoid a collision.
“It didn’t feel like the car was going to stop. Maybe it would have slammed on the brakes at the last second, but I didn’t want to really test that out,” he said.
Lane changes were unavailable on surface streets, and the system offered no parallel parking capability.
UX and Safety Criticism
Beyond the driving behaviour, Olsen criticised the interface design and the absence of clear onboarding.
Unlike Tesla‘s FSD, which displays an explanation of capabilities and limitations when first activated, Rivian‘s system provided minimal guidance.
“There was nothing in here that made it clear what the car will and won’t do,” he said. “I was truthfully using the internet, Gemini and Google and phoning the demo guy to try and understand what to do.”
He called the name misleading. “I think it’s a bad name for what the technology is,” Olsen said. “It’s basically adaptive cruise control with lane assist unless I’m misunderstanding things. It’s not universal hands-free.”
Important Week
Olsen’s video arrives on the same day Rivian and Uber announced a partnership to deploy up to 50,000 fully autonomous R2 robotaxis across 25 cities in the US, Canada, and Europe by 2031.
Uber is investing up to $1.25 billion in Rivian, with commercial deployments in San Francisco and Miami planned for 2028.
The robotaxi programme will use Rivian’s third-generation autonomy platform on the R2 — a system equipped with LiDAR, 11 cameras, five radars, and two in-house RAP1 processors delivering 1,600 TOPS of combined compute.
That hardware is substantially more advanced than the Gen 2 R1’s camera-and-radar suite, and the software is expected to benefit from the data flywheel generated by tens of thousands of consumer vehicles.
However, the gap between Universal Hands-Free’s current capabilities — which Olsen compared to “basically adaptive cruise control with lane assist” — and the Level 4 fully autonomous driving promised for 2028 remains significant.
Olsen said he would revisit the system as it improves. “Is it gonna get better? 100%,” he said. “But this isn’t universal hands-free or anything close to that.”
Profitability
As reported on Thursday, the company has quietly delayed its profitability target due to its investment in Autonomy.
“The Company no longer expects to be adjusted EBITDA positive in 2027 due to an expected increase in R&D spend associated with the acceleration of its autonomy roadmap,” the statement read.
