Rivian laid out Thursday how it plans to make its electric vehicles increasingly autonomous — an ambitious effort that includes new hardware including lidar and custom silicon and, eventually, a possible entry into the self-driving market, according to CEO RJ Scaringe.
The announcements at the company’s first Autonomy & AI Day event in Palo Alto, Calif., shed new light on Rivian’s technology development, much of which has been kept under wraps as it pushes to start production of its more affordable R2 SUV in the first half of 2026. Rivian’s event is also a very public sign. automated driving capabilities of industry rivals such as Tesla, Ford, General Motors, as well as automakers from Europe and China.
Rivian said it will expand the hands-free version of its driver assistance software to “more than 3.5 million miles of roads in the US and Canada” and eventually expand beyond highways to surface roads (with clearly painted road lines). This expanded access will be available on the company’s second-generation R1 trucks and SUVs. It’s calling the expanded capabilities “Universal Hands-Free,” and it will be released in early 2026. Rivian says it will charge a one-time fee of $2,500, or $49.99 a month.
“That means you can get into the vehicle at your house, plug in the address of where you’re going, and the vehicle will drive you all the way there,” Scaringe said Thursday, describing a point-to-point navigation feature.
After that, Rivian plans to allow drivers to take their eyes off the road. “This gives you your time back. You can be on your phone or reading a book, no longer having to be actively involved in the operation of the vehicle.”
Rivian’s driver support software won’t stop there. The electric vehicle maker unveiled plans Thursday to improve its capabilities up to what it calls “personal L4,” a nod to the level set by the Society of Automotive Engineers that means a car can operate in a specific area without human intervention.
After that, Scaringe hinted that Rivian will consider competing with players like Waymo. “While our initial focus will be on personal vehicles, which today account for the vast majority of miles driven in the United States, this also enables us to look for opportunities in the ride-share space,” he said.
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To help achieve these lofty goals, Rivian has created a “grand driving model” (think: an LLM but for real-world driving), part of a move away from a rules-based framework for autonomous vehicle development led by Tesla. The company also showed off its own custom 5nm processor, which it says will be built in collaboration with both Arm and TSMC.
This custom chip powers what Rivian refers to as a third-generation “autonomy computer,” or ACM3. The new computer can process 5 billion pixels per second and will start appearing in Rivian’s upcoming R2 SUV in late 2026.
Rivian will connect the ACM3 to a lidar sensor on the top of the windshield (from an unknown vendor) to provide “3D spatial data and redundant sensing,” which it says will help with “real-time detection for extreme driving situations.”
“We expect that when launched in late 2026 this will be the most powerful combination of sensors and inference computation in a consumer vehicle in North America,” senior vice president of electrical hardware Vidya Rajagopalan said at the event.
The R2 is set to start shipping in the first half of 2026, meaning launch versions of the SUV won’t have ACM3 or the lidar sensor. This means that early versions of the R2 without the ACM3 and lidar hardware will likely master hands-free driving. Anyone hoping to do overt or, later, unsupervised driving in a Rivian will need a vehicle with a lidar sensor.
“Adding lidar creates the ultimate sensing combination. It gives the most complete 3D model of the space the vehicle is traveling through,” vice president of autonomy and AI James Philbin said Thursday. “The goal for the embedded sensing stack is not just human level, it’s superhuman level.”
This story has been updated to reflect that Rivian will not offer clear driving in vehicles without lidar sensors.
