Rivian detailed its plans on Thursday to make its electric vehicles increasingly autonomous. This ambitious effort includes new hardware like lidar and custom silicon, and could eventually lead to an entry into the self-driving ride-hail market, according to CEO RJ Scaringe. The announcements were made at the company’s first “Autonomy & AI Day” event in Palo Alto, California.
The event shed fresh light on Rivian’s technology development, much of which had been kept under wraps as the company pushes to begin production of its more affordable R2 SUV in the first half of 2026. It also serves as a public signal to shareholders that Rivian is keeping pace with, or even exceeding, the automated-driving capabilities of rivals like Tesla, Ford, General Motors, and automakers from Europe and China.
Rivian said it will expand the hands-free version of its driver-assistance software to over 3.5 million miles of roads across the USA and Canada. This expansion, called “Universal Hands-Free,” will eventually go beyond highways to include surface streets with clearly-painted road lines. It will launch in early 2026 and be available on the company’s second-generation R1 trucks and SUVs. Rivian will charge a one-time fee of $2,500 or $49.99 per month for this capability.
CEO RJ Scaringe described a future point-to-point navigation feature. He explained that this means you could get into the vehicle at your house, plug in your destination, and the vehicle would completely drive you there. After that, Rivian plans to allow drivers to take their eyes off the road, giving people their time back to use their phone or read a book without needing to actively operate the vehicle.
Rivian’s plans extend further. The company laid out a path to enhance its capabilities all the way to what it calls “personal L4,” a reference to the Society of Automotive Engineers level where a car can operate in a particular area with no human intervention. Following that, Scaringe hinted that Rivian will look at competing with companies like Waymo in the rideshare space, though the initial focus remains on personally owned vehicles.
To accomplish these goals, Rivian has been building a “large driving model,” similar to a large language model but for real-world driving. This represents a move away from a rules-based framework for developing autonomous vehicles. The company also showed off its own custom 5nm processor, built in collaboration with Arm and TSMC.
That custom chip powers what Rivian calls its third-generation “autonomy computer,” or ACM3. The new computer can process 5 billion pixels per second and will start appearing on Rivian’s upcoming mass-market R2 SUV in late 2026. The ACM3 will be coupled with a lidar sensor at the top of the windshield to provide three-dimensional spatial data and redundant sensing, which the company says will help with real-time detection for the edge cases of driving.
A senior vice president stated that at launch in late 2026, this is expected to be the most powerful combination of sensors and inference compute in consumer vehicles in North America. The R2 is set to start shipping in the first half of 2026, meaning the initial versions will not have the ACM3 or the lidar sensor. However, the company aims to continuously improve the autonomy capabilities of its vehicles with a clear trajectory.
Rivian believes it can reach an advanced state of autonomy in many current vehicles without the new hardware, but Scaringe said the new hardware suite will enable a much higher ceiling. A vice president explained that adding lidar creates the ultimate sensing combination, providing the most comprehensive 3D model of the space the vehicle is traveling through. The goal for their onboard sensing stack is not just human level, but superhuman level.