The robot was launched in the cafeteria of Rivian’s Palo Alto office, a shelf decorated with packaged defective coffee – until it wasn’t. Five minutes later, man with caution of all people, the words “I’m stuck” flashed yellow on the Poor Droid’s screen.
This is the beginning for “Autonomy & ai day,” A showcase for the company’s plans to create self-driving vehicles. Rivian doesn’t make cafeteria robots and isn’t responsible for their abilities, but there’s a familiar message in foibles: This stuff is tough.
Hours later, as I rode the 2025 R1s SUV for a 15-minute tour of the new sufferer “Great driving model,” I was reminded of that message.
A god equipped with self-driving software drove me and two Rivian employees on a switchback route near the company’s campus. When we launched Tesla’s engineering office, I saw the model S in front of us slowly to transform the rival company. R1 finally notices too, braking hard before a Rivian employee almost intervenes.
During the demo drive, there was one real disengagement. The employee in the driver’s seat was taken when we passed a section on a single-lane road due to some trees. Small stuff altogether. But it’s not like it’s not rare; I connect different things Another Demo ride that already disengagement also.
The rest is quite a drive for software that is not yet ready to ship, especially when you consider that Rivian is discarding the base-based assistance approach and using a fully developed (supervised) Tesla. It stops at independent lights, handles turns, slows down to avoid bumps, all without any rules directing it to do so.
Quiet pivot in 2021
Rivian’s old system was “all very technical, and all very structured,” CEO RJ Scaringe said in an interview Thursday. “Everything the vehicle does is the result of a limited control strategy written by humans.”
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Scaringe said that when Rivian saw transformer-based intelligence in 2021, he calmly “could refer to the team and start, let’s design our driving platform for an AI-Centric world.”
After spending “a lot of time in the basement,” Rivian is launching new ground-up driving software in 2024 on its second-generation R1 vehicle, which uses Nvidia’s Orin processor.
Scaringe said the company only started to see dramatic progress “after the data really started.”
Rivian is betting that it can train a large driving model (LDM) with Fleet data quickly, so that the company will drive “which is used by Rivian in 326. In the first half of 2026, Rivian will allow “point-to-point”, or the consumer version of the demo received Thursday.
‘Eyes OFF’ to ‘Hands Off’
At the end of 2026, after Rivian has started delivering the SUV, which is cheaper, it will immerse nvidia chips and the vehicle with a new adust autonomous computer. These computers, plus Lidar Sensors, will eventually allow drivers to take their hands and eyes off the road. True autonomy – where the driver does not have to worry about controlling the vehicle – is not out there and will depend on how Rivian can train LDM.
This rollout introduces challenges close to Rivian. The new autonomy computer and Lidar won’t be ready until months after the R2 goes on sale. If customers want a vehicle that can handle eye-popping driving (or more), they’ll be waiting. But the R2 is an important product for Rivian, and the company should sell it well – especially when it wakes up driving sales of first-generation vehiclesSee rank-.
“If technology moves like that, it’s going to be some level of ocs, and what we’re trying to do here is to be very direct” about what it’s going to do, Scaringe said. The initial start will still get the promised “point-to-point” driving, which will be based on new software and will be checked by hand but not by eye.
“So (if) you buy R2 and you buy it in the first nine months, it’s only going to get bigger,” he said. “I think what’s going to happen is some customers are going to say ‘that’s really important to me, and I’m going to wait.’ And someone will say ‘I want the latest, now I’ll get R2 now, and maybe I’ll make the next version. Fortunately, I’ll get a lot, customers can make that decision. “
“In a perfect world, everything would be at the same time, but the timing of the vehicle and the timeline of the autonomy platform just don’t match,” he said.
When I First interview Scaringe in 2018, before Rivian even showed what the vehicle looks like, they showed the goal that is still relaxing in my head. He wants to make a Rivian vehicle that can drive itself: “If you go to the stairs, and you start at one point and you end at another point, you have that vehicle.”
It’s the kind of pie-in-the-subscription promise of a self-driving car that’s been raging for the past seven years, but it’s stuck with me at least through all of Rivian’s aspirational adventures.
Scaringe said Thursday that he still thinks it’s possible for Rivian to enable such use cases in the next few years. It certainly won’t happen until the company tests and builds a more useful R2 vehicle, which is at least a year away in the best-case scenario.
“We can (do it). It’s not a big focus,” he said. That can change because the company will approach 4 autonomy, from now on the company will be trained on a trickier path without guidance features like lines.
“Then, it’s like something like, what is Easy Design domain (operational domain)? Dirt roads, roads? Easy,” he said. Just don’t expect it to drive itself The Gate of Hell in Moab.
“We don’t put resources into crawling rock autonomously,” he said. “But in terms of getting the head of the road? Of course.”