Rivian‘s founder and CEO RJ Scaringe said that owners of the second generation R1T and R1S will see “giant leaps forward” in the autonomous capabilities of their EVs.
The Irvine-headquartered electric vehicle manufacturer develops its autonomy platform in-house, which started to be integrated into the second generation of the R1 models last year.
The approach has completely cut ties with what was being done with the first generation, with “different hardware, different software, much, much higher levels of compute.”
The vehicles feature a hands-free, eyes-on driving system for highway use — which is equipped with 11 cameras and five radars, and includes features like the Driving Assist and the Highway Assist.
It 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 in certain scenarios.
Speaking with robotics development company Foxglove’s Adrian Macneil at Actuate 2025, Sacringe said that “eyes-off” capabilities are “what’s coming” for Rivian owners.
“I was in a two-hour demo ride where we drove around essentially all of the Southern Peninsula, like, down in the Palo Alto area,” with the vehicle driving “completely on its own,” the CEO admitted late last week.
“We call it universal hands-free,” he added, stating that Rivian sees “eyes off, hands off, coming for a large number of miles on the road.”
Autonomy Day Updates
Rivian is expected to reveal more details on the platform on December 11, when it is set to hold its ‘Autonomy Day,’
Scaringe said “this is our chance to pull the curtains back and say, ‘here’s the hardware stack that we’re building,” adding that “there’s a lot of stuff that we’ve developed that we haven’t yet talked about externally.”
The CEO also noted that “it wouldn’t be a day like this without a proper demo.”
“It gives essentially a sneak peek of what’s going to be showing up in customer cars fairly soon,” he teased.
“So that’s hands-free everywhere, then moving hands-free, eyes-off in certain environments,” Scaringe explained, highlighting highways, which are “really important for getting your time back.”
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.
Rivian to Integrate LiDAR
A job posting published in mid-August for Rivian’s Pose Team — the group responsible for mapping, localization, and sensor calibration — confirmed the plans to integrate LiDAR.
The listing included the development of algorithms for calibrating the company’s “autonomy sensor suite, which includes cameras, IMU, lidar, and radar.”
Commenting on the discussions around the sensor method, Scaringe said that “because of the complexity of the environment, it’s inconceivable to have a vehicle without at least a 360-degree view.”
“And you can do that with cameras, but you’re still dealing with multiple sensors coming together.”
Rivian has adopted a neural net based approach, which combines both cameras and LiDAR sensors to collect data about the environment and then processes it to detect objects and decide how the car must move.
