Rivian founder and chief executive RJ Scaringe says the company is only months away from rolling out a supervised self-driving feature that he likens directly to Tesla‘s Full Self-Driving.
Speaking with host Jeff Berman at a live Masters of Scale, Scaringe put a near-term date on the capability and measured it against the segment’s benchmark.
“Later this year, we’ll have full supervised point-to-point, which will be very similar to Tesla‘s FSD,” Scaringe said. “That will roll out to all of our Gen 2 vehicles and, of course, R2.”
Point-to-point — entering a destination and having the vehicle drive the full route while the driver supervises — is the headline capability of FSD, the most widely deployed consumer system of its kind.
That feature is the first rung of a longer ladder. Scaringe said the system would go unsupervised the following year.
“Next year, we’ll allow it to go unsupervised, so you can take your eyes off the road,” he said, describing eyes-off capability in 2027.
After that, he said, vehicles would gain full capability to drive with no one aboard — the basis for a robotaxi business Rivian plans to launch with Uber, deploying 50,000 robotaxi versions of the R2 and beginning paid rides in 2028.
He cast the ride-hailing company as the distribution partner that lets Rivian concentrate on the technology.
“We took the decision to partner with Uber so we could focus on the tech and leverage them for their access to a big distribution channel,” Scaringe said, calling Uber “a category of one.” Here too the company is chasing, as Tesla already runs a small unsupervised robotaxi fleet in Austin, Texas.
How Bold the FSD Comparison Is
A “very similar to FSD” claim sets a high bar, because the system it invokes has expanded well beyond where Rivian‘s sits today.
Rivian‘s Autonomy platform is a Level 2 driver-assistance system available only in the US, where the driver remains fully responsible.
Its Universal Hands-Free feature works hands-free on roads with clear markings but does not stop or slow for traffic lights or stop signs, and keeps the driver’s eyes on the road.
Tesla‘s FSD Supervised — also considered a Level 2 product — has been spreading quickly.
The system won approval in five European countries in roughly two months, each through national recognition of a Dutch type approval issued in April: the Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark and Belgium, with further nations expected to follow in the coming weeks.
Tesla now offers FSD (Supervised) in about a dozen markets worldwide — including the US, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and China (limited version) — and as of mid-June the system can be used continuously across approved European borders without a manual handover at the frontier.
On the last day of 2025, a Tesla owner completed what was billed as the first zero-intervention coast-to-coast drive across the US, covering 2,732 miles on FSD without a single disengagement.
Last month, the same driver led a team that drove a Model 3 across Canada from Vancouver to Halifax — 3,760 miles on FSD version 14.3.3 — reporting zero disengagements, including parking at Superchargers.
Rivian began public customer deliveries of the R2 on June 9, opening orders to reservation holders and shipping its new RivianOS 2.0 operating system on the vehicle.
The first R2 SUVs, which entered saleable production in late April, launched with the current Gen 2 R1 hardware, while the custom silicon and lidar sensor needed for eyes-off and unsupervised driving are not due until later in 2026.
Rivian has guided for 62,000 to 67,000 total deliveries in 2026, of which the R2 is expected to account for about 20,000 to 25,000 units.
Building the Case for Catching Up
The company replaced an early rules-based planner — built around a Mobileye front camera and hand-written if-then logic — with a large, in-house neural network trained on fleet data, first deployed on Gen 2 vehicles about 18 months ago.
“[We’re] building a large multi-billion parameter model, a foundation model… that we’re training with the benefit of all the data coming off of our vehicles,” Scaringe said.
Rivian has said autonomy now consumes the vast majority of its research budget, implying more than $229 million in the first quarter of 2026 alone, and it detailed custom silicon and a lidar sensor at its first Autonomy and AI Day in December — hardware that, unlike Tesla‘s camera-only approach, adds lidar for redundancy.
Scaringe argued the pace of progress is widely underestimated.
“The rate of change we’re going to see over the next five years, say between 2026 and 2031, is demonstrably different than the rate of change we’ve seen over the last five years,” he said.
Whether that pace justifies the FSD comparison will become clear within months.
Rivian‘s hands-free expansion has widened the roads its vehicles can cover, but matching FSD will mean delivering point-to-point driving that holds up beyond the marked highways its current system is confined to.
