Rivian‘s founder and CEO RJ Scaringe participated in Morgan Stanley’s 13th Annual Laguna Conference on Thursday, in which he revealed that the EV maker is “soon” making a considerable step up in its assisted driving technology.
Speaking with analyst Adam Jonas, the chief executive revealed that Rivian will increase by “something like 50x” the number of roads in which the vehicle will be able to drive itself.
“We launched in late 2021 with our first product and Gen 1 architecture used what I call like an AV 1.0 solution. So it was a rules-based environment,” Scaringe explained.
He noted that the architecture had a “collection of different cameras,” with the front-facing camera being from autonomous driving company Mobileye, which was changed in the Gen 2 vehicles, launched about a year ago.
The CEO stated that, by then, Rivian “brought all of our perception stack in-house, we brought the compute platform in-house,” adding that they “built a data flywheel around it and really redesigned everything.”
“Not a single line of code, not a single piece of hardware were shared between Gen 1 and Gen 2,” Scaringe affirmed, adding that they “designed it around this end-to-end AI-centric approach.”
The brand’s autonomy platform is equipped with 11 cameras and five radars and covers about 130,000 miles of highways in the United States and Canada, with Rivian planning to expand the coverage and to feature advanced “hands-off, eyes-off” capability.
“That’s now starting to deliver the features that are enabled by this approach,” he said.
Rivian currently has “a hands-free highway self-driving feature, that’s soon going to be expanded to hands-free everywhere,” according to Scaringe.
The brand’s founder added that “it’s something like 50x increase in the number of roads that the vehicle is now going to be able to drive on driving itself.”
“And then we go from hands-free everywhere to hands-free and some unique situations where eyes off,” he anticipated, “So hands-free, eyes off.”
That will then be expanded to “turn by turn” and “address to address,” with the CEO noting that “then it’s just further and further removing the need of the driver to do any driving.”
“And so you expand the operating design domain to include every type of road, every environment,” Scaringe said.
Rivian‘s chief admitted that there are “more challenging things like rain.” However, he pointed to the brand’s Autonomy Day event for a demonstration of what’s to come.
The event was not officially scheduled yet. It is expected to be held during this Fall.
Scaringe said that these features are something that Rivian will be focusing on for next year.
“Not yet today, but certainly by 2027 and 2028, this starts to become a really important consideration for purchase,” the CEO mentioned. “And if done well, it can completely unlock massive pools of demand relative to the competitive set.”
Earlier this year, Rivian extended the free-trial of the ‘Autonomy Platform+‘ until “late 2025,” an upgrade from the standard (free) Rivian Autonomy Platform for Gen 2 vehicles.
The standard free version offers highway assist, adaptive cruise control, automatic high beams, lane keeping, blind spot monitoring, forward collision warnings, and more.
The Autonomy Platform+ currently includes the Lane Change on Command feature — which lets the driver signal for the vehicle to find the right moment to change lanes — and the Enhanced Highway Assist (EHA) — which supports hands-free driving on major highways.
