A first public demo drive of Rivian‘s new autonomy platform captured multiple errors including an attempted red light violation and a failure to stop for a pedestrian.
Rivian gave the YouTuber channel Gjeebs early access to a demo ride of the development software on Wednesday — a day before its Autonomy and AI event — using a Gen 2 R1S tri-motor in Palo Alto.
The YouTuber rode in the passenger seat while a certified Rivian test driver operated the vehicle, with a company executive, Kevin, in the back seat explaining the technology.
The video, posted by the Gjeebs channel with over 250,000 subscribers, garnered 40,000 views in less than 24 hours.
Rivian unveiled on Thursday its next step in autonomy as Tesla, the leader in consumer vehicle autonomy in the United States, has been accelerating the rollout of software updates to its supervised Full Self-Driving technology.
Piper Sandler said earlier this week that FSDTracker data shows Tesla’s FSD version 14.1 delivered a more than 20-fold improvement in miles between critical disengagements, jumping from 441 miles to over 9,200 miles — the most significant improvement in four years of data collection.
Mistakes
At the 4:03 mark, the vehicle ran through a red light, with the Rivian executive acknowledging it before the safety driver intervened by braking the car.
“So there’s an intervention there,” the executive explained. “This is trained on human driving. Obviously, some humans in the driving seat will run the red light. So we’re like, we don’t want to run the red light on camera.
“We’re playing it safe,” he added. “But we’ll turn it right back on as soon as we turn,” Kevin said, referring to the activation of the autonomy system.
The executive said the vehicles can now learn what the road structure is and then drive on it, adding that the company has mapped over 3 million miles.
The test drive documented additional concerning moments. At 9:13, the system failed to stop for a pedestrian, prompting another intervention.
“Watch out for this guy,” Kevin warned before the safety driver took over. “We’re playing it very safe here. The car is actually trained for pedestrians, but we just don’t want to give anyone a bad impression.”
The video captured further errors throughout the drive. At 11:41 and again at 13:02, the vehicle pulled into the wrong lane after completing turns.
Development Build, Not Consumer Release
The Rivian executive emphasized throughout the drive that this was a development build, not the software that will ship to customers.
“You are a development test driver,” the executive told the YouTuber. “This is not a feature we’re shipping in December. We’re shipping something else that’s really exciting in December.”
The executive explained the system runs on a neural network trained end-to-end on human driving behavior rather than hand-coded rules.
“The big takeaway here is that this is really trained off of human driving behavior,” he said. “It’s not like hundreds of hand-coded rules, but really like let’s teach a car how to drive and see what happens both in simulation and on the road.”
Autonomy+ Launching February 2026
Despite the development challenges shown in the video, Rivian announced at Thursday’s event that its Autonomy+ subscription will launch in February 2026, priced at $49.99 per month or $2,500 as a one-time lifetime upgrade.
All vehicle deliveries will include a 60-day trial of the feature. Lifetime upgrades remain with the vehicle upon ownership transfer and remain available during the lifetime of feature support for the hardware on the vehicle at delivery.
The package includes Universal Hands-Free driving on more than 3.5 million miles of roads across North America.
