In the cafeteria of Rivian’s Palo Alto office, the robot bypasses a shelf decorated with cold canned coffee until it runs out. Five minutes later, as the man carefully pushed the droid out of everyone’s way, the words “Stuck” flashed yellow on the poor droid’s screen.
It’s an inauspicious start to Rivian’s Autonomy & AI Day, which showcases the company’s plans to make its vehicles self-driving. Rivian didn’t create the cafeteria robot and isn’t responsible for its capabilities, but its weaknesses had a familiar message. That means this is difficult.
I was reminded of that message a few hours later, sitting in a 2025 R1S SUV during a 15-minute demo of Rivian’s new self-proclaimed “large driving model.”
Equipped with self-driving software, the EV carried me and two other Rivian employees on a switchback route near the company’s campus. As I passed Tesla’s engineering offices, I noticed a Model S in front of me slowly heading toward a rival company’s lot. R1S eventually realized this too and slammed on the brakes just before a Rivian employee was about to intervene.
There was actually one breakaway during my demo drive. The employee in the driver’s seat changed hands when passing through a section with one lane in each direction due to tree felling. Overall minor content. But that wasn’t unusual. I found that it was unlocked in multiple other demo rides as well.
The rest of the drive worked well enough for software that wasn’t ready to ship. That’s how Tesla developed fully autonomous driving (with supervision), especially considering Rivian abandoned its old rules-based driver assistance systems and took an end-to-end approach. I stopped at traffic lights, turned around, and slowed down at speed bumps, all without any programmed rules telling me to do these things.
2021 will be a quiet turning point
Rivian’s old system was “everything very deterministic, everything was very structured,” CEO RJ Scaringe said in an interview Thursday. “Everything the vehicle did was the result of a predetermined control strategy written by humans.”
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Scaringe said Rivian saw transformer-based artificial intelligence starting to take off in 2021 and quietly “restructured the team and said, let’s start with a clean slate and design a self-driving platform for an AI-centric world.”
After “spending a lot of time in the basement,” Rivian introduced new radical driving software in 2024 for its second-generation R1 vehicles that use Nvidia’s Orin processors.
Scaringe said the company only recently started seeing dramatic progress “when data really started coming in.”
Rivian is betting that it will be able to train large-scale driving models (LDMs) based on fleet data so quickly that it will be able to deploy what it calls “universal hands-free” driving in early 2026. That means Rivian owners will be able to take their hands off the wheel (as long as there’s a visible paint line) on 3.5 million miles of roads in the U.S. and Canada. In late 2026, Rivian plans to allow “point-to-point” driving, a consumer version of the demo it received Thursday.
Challenge from “taking your eyes off” to “taking your hands off”
After Rivian begins shipping its smaller, more affordable R2 SUV, it plans to phase out its Nvidia chips by the end of 2026 and equip those vehicles with a new custom autonomous computer announced Thursday. This computer and LIDAR sensors will finally allow drivers to take their hands and eyes off the road. True autonomy, where the driver doesn’t have to worry about regaining control of the vehicle, goes much beyond that and depends largely on how quickly Rivian can train the LDM.
This rollout poses short-term challenges for Rivian. The new autonomy computer and lidar won’t be completed until several months after R2 launches. If a customer wants a vehicle that can handle eye-off driving (or better), they will have to wait. But the R2 is a critical product for Rivian, and they need to make sure it sells well, especially with declining sales of first-generation cars.
“When technology advances this quickly, there’s always going to be some level of obsolescence, so what we want to do here is really communicate directly about what’s going to happen,” Scaringe said. The early R2 still allows for the “point-to-point” driving that Rivian promised. It’s based on new software and you can keep your hands off it, but you can’t keep your eyes off it.
“So [if] “If you buy R2, if you buy it within the first nine months, you’re just going to be more constrained. What’s going to happen is some customers will say, ‘It’s very important to me, so I’m going to wait,'” he said. And some people say, “I want the latest and greatest now, so I’m going to buy R2 now. I’m probably going to replace it in a year or two and get the next version later.” Fortunately, there is still a lot of demand left for R2, so we believe that by being upfront about this, you can make your own decision. ”
“In a perfect world, everything would happen at the same time, but the vehicle timeline and the self-driving platform timeline are not perfectly aligned,” he said.
When I first interviewed Scaringe in 2018, before Rivian had shown us what its vehicle was like, he shared a goal that’s still rattling around in my head. He wanted Rivian’s vehicles to be able to drive themselves. “When you go hiking, you start at one point and finish at another, and a vehicle will meet you at the end of the trail.”
It was the kind of picture-perfect promise about self-driving cars that was all the rage seven years ago, but it stuck with me, at least, because it felt true to Rivian’s entire brand of ambitious adventure.
Scaringe told me Thursday that he still thinks it’s possible that Rivian will enable such use cases within the next few years. That certainly won’t happen until the company tests and builds a higher-performance R2 car, which would be at least a year in the best-case scenario.
“we could [do that]. “That hasn’t been a big focus,” he said, but that could change as the company approaches Level 4 autonomy. By then, the company will have trained the LDM on more complex roads without using guidance features such as lane markings.
“Then you ask, what is strange? [operational design domain]?Is it dirt road, off-road? Just don’t expect the Rivian to drive itself through the gates of hell in Moab.
“We’re not putting resources into autonomous rock crawling,” he said. “But in terms of getting to the trailhead? Absolutely.”
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