Rivian has moved its second Autonomy & AI Day from San Francisco to its Palo Alto, California, office, according to an updated invitation email sent to guests and seen by EV on Thursday.
The event remains on Wednesday, December 9. “What’s changed is the location: we’re now hosting at Rivian’s Palo Alto Office, 607 Hansen Way, Palo Alto, CA 94304,” the invitation says.
Rivian had told guests in October that it would hold the event at its Fell Street space in San Francisco. It did not give a reason for the change in the invitation.
The EV maker had not announced the new venue publicly by Thursday afternoon, and its public event page lists no location.
The move takes the event back to Palo Alto, where Rivian held its first Autonomy & AI Day in December 2025.
The Invitation
The updated invitation lists Chief Executive Officer RJ Scaringe and “Rivian leadership” as speakers.
It promises “demos of new driver experiences” and “live announcements,” without naming any feature.
The invitation also adds a separate “Early Access” item, inviting guests to “be one of the first to see what’s next with Rivian Autonomy” on Tuesday, December 8, the day before the main event, with “details to come.”
The email does not give a start time or an agenda.
Rivian’s public event page says the event will be livestreamed and lists four speakers: Scaringe, Chief Software Officer Wassym Bensaid, Senior VP of Autonomy and AI James Philbin, and Senior VP of Electrical Hardware Vidya Rajagopalan.
It promises keynote sessions on “our progress and plans for autonomy and AI,” product demos to “preview new features and experiences across Rivian’s software suite,” and a session on “upcoming partnerships.”
Rivian first disclosed the date and the city on October 1, in a save-the-date that named San Francisco but no venue.
A week later, an invitation promising “brand new demos” placed the event at Rivian’s space at 340 Fell Street in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley neighborhood.
Rivian describes that site as its San Francisco flagship, housed in a restored auto body shop that dates to the 1920s. It opened in January 2025 and is open to the public daily, with folding doors onto the street.
Point-to-Point in Focus
Scaringe said in September that Rivian would use the event as “an anchor point to then roll out some of these new features that we’re really excited about,” naming point-to-point driving first.
“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,” he said at Morgan Stanley’s Laguna Conference on September 15.
In October, Rivian opened an invitation-only Autonomy Early Access Program that will put its Point-to-Point hands-free driving feature in the hands of a limited group of owners in December, ahead of a broad release targeted for 2027. It opened applications for the program on October 19.
The program is open to U.S. owners of second-generation R1 and R2 vehicles with an active Autonomy+ subscription, with selection starting in California and Florida, Rivian said on its website.
The invitation does not say whether the December 8 “Early Access” preview is linked to that program.
Rivian has kept the Autonomy+ price at $2,500 as a one-time purchase on the 2027 R1, or $49.99 a month.
Last Year’s Event
At its first Autonomy & AI Day on December 11, 2025, Rivian unveiled the Rivian Autonomy Processor, or RAP1, a custom 5-nanometer chip designed to replace Nvidia technology in future vehicles, starting with the R2.
It said it would add LiDAR to the R2, alongside 11 cameras and five radars.
“Starting in late 2026, our Gen 3 autonomy platform will include 65 megapixels of cameras, a robust radar array, and a front-facing long-range LiDAR,” Scaringe said on stage at the time.
Rivian also announced Universal Hands-Free, extending hands-free driving to 3.5 million miles of roads in the U.S. and Canada for second-generation R1 vehicles, and introduced a Large Driving Model trained like a large language model.
It described “a clear trajectory including point-to-point, eyes off and personal L4” in a press release that day, without attaching a date to any of the three.
Universal Hands-Free reached owners in a software update a week later, and the Rivian Assistant promised for early 2026 arrived in May.
Rivian’s shares fell more than 6% on the day of last year’s event.
AI Software
This year’s event follows a move to sell parts of Rivian’s AI work to other carmakers.
In its third-quarter earnings presentation on October 29, Rivian said it had expanded its software joint venture with Volkswagen Group to license elements of its AI voice assistant.
“We also expanded our Volkswagen joint venture, licensing elements of our AI Voice Assistant technology as part of the broader electrical architecture and software partnership,” the company said.
Rivian raised its 2026 delivery outlook to 67,000 to 70,000 vehicles in the same presentation, from 65,000 to 70,000.
The hardware Rivian unveiled last year also underpins a robotaxi agreement it signed with Uber in March, worth up to $1.25 billion in investment.
