SAN FRANCISCO — Electric-vehicle maker Rivian unveiled plans to bring more autonomous driving features to its electric vehicles, potentially upending conventional rules of car use and ownership.
At an event in Palo Alto, California, on Thursday, CEO RJ Scaringe laid out the company’s road map, which involves delivering enhanced driver assistance tools to existing vehicles in the coming weeks, followed by a more pronounced technical push throughout 2026 to make future EV models capable of driving without human intervention.
“The most precious thing that we all have is time,” Scaringe told gathered reporters. “I think what autonomy does is really give you some of that time back.”
The company’s first step is to bring its Universal Hands-Free system to its second-generation R1 trucks and SUVs, which first rolled off lots in 2024. Scaringe says this tool allows the company’s vehicles to self-drive on more than 3.5 million miles of paved, clearly marked roads in the United States — so long as drivers remain ready to take the wheel.
(The company’s website admits the software can’t, for example, “stop or slow down for traffic lights or stop signs.”)
In time, the company says this feature will allow for “point-to-point” — you punch in an address when you hop in, and the vehicle does its best to drive you there. Future Rivian vehicles, meanwhile, will come with a revamped stack of world-sensing cameras, radar arrays and a lidar sensor, coupled with new, custom in-house AI chips to help vehicles see and act more capably on roads, to the point where drivers can safely turn their attention to other things.
The bigger goal, Scaringe says, is to achieve what’s known as “Level 4” self-driving, where its vehicles can operate fully independently to, say, pick you up from the airport after a brain-blisteringly long flight.
Rivian plans to bundle these self-driving features into a new Autonomy+ package that will cost $2,500 up-front, or $50/month. If these tools work well, they might help the company catch up with — or possibly even leapfrog — competitors like Ford and GM, which have spent years building hands-free and autonomous driving tools into their vehicles.
More crucially for Rivian, these features could also help drum up a source of recurring revenue that might appeal to investors who have shied away from the company after its stock shed most of its value post-IPO.
The company’s full-fledged embrace of autonomous driving may wind up helping consumers who don’t fully own one of Rivian’s vehicles. Scaringe says his team’s focus has largely centered around personal uses for self-driving tech, but said his presentation that achieving fully autonomous self-driving would allow the company to “pursue opportunities in the rideshare space.”
That doesn’t mean the company is imminently preparing to take on Waymo, Zoox and Tesla’s nascent Robotaxi fleet, though Scaringe didn’t rule it out in an interview with The Washington Post. He said some kind of rideshare system — whether operated entirely by Rivian or in partnership with an existing service — is “likely,” but he didn’t elaborate further.
For his part, Scaringe seems more interested in the other ways the traditional rules of car use and ownership might change once a personal vehicle is fully capable of operating itself. What if, for instance, your car was actually a communal asset that bounced between multiple homes?
“Maybe three households own one vehicle,” he suggested, unpacking a scenario where one family only uses a car for weekends and another mostly needs it for weekdays.
“There’s all different kinds of new ways of looking at mobility that we think will happen,” Scaringe said. “Our objective is, let’s develop the tech, and depending on how societal behaviors unfold, we’re going to support all the different forms of business.”
The post Rivian unveils ambitious plan to take on autonomous driving appeared first on Washington Post.
