In an effort to rival Tesla, vast AI integration is underway at Rivian with the development of its next generation EV platform, funded in part by a $5 billion partnership with Volkswagen.
At a press event in San Francisco last Thursday, CEO RJ Scaringe and Chief Software Officer, and Co-CEO of the Rivian Volkswagen Technology Joint Venture, Wassym Bensaid, shared details of the electric carmaker’s AI roadmap.
Scaringe announced the company is planning to go hands free in 2025, with eyes off the road in 2026 for Level 3 autonomy, as he described it. Level 2 being hands on the wheel, eyes on the road with driver assist, like that currently available in the Rivian Autonomy Platform with lane-changing, park assist, cruise control and collision warning. Level 3 being hands off the wheel, eyes off the road, but mind on, where drivers can text or read a book, but are in the driver’s seat ready to take control of the car, if needed. And Level 4 is robotaxi mode with hands off the wheel, eyes off the road, with no one in the driver’s seat or even in the car.
“We think there’s an enormous value to customers to having a robust, first Level 2, but importantly Level 3 in very specific domains,” Scaringe said. “Imagine a world where you leave your house, you’re still in the vehicle, but you get on the highway and you have all of your time back. You can be on your phone, writing emails. You don’t have to be looking at the road. You don’t have to be grabbing the wheel to say, I’m still here. The vehicle is capable of doing that, and that’s going to be for us. That’s absolutely on the roadmap. Something we’re hyper focused on.”
On today’s earnings call, Tesla has said it will launch its robotaxi service in Austin this June.
A Rivian you can chat with
“AI will be pervasive throughout the entire vehicle, and will unlock lots of new capabilities, whether it’s for self driving and autonomy with our end-to-end training approach or the in-cabin experience with the vehicle,” Bensaid explained.
As to when drivers will be able to ask their Rivian what a blinking red light on the dashboard means—a capability Amazon built into AWS Bedrock over a year ago, and is currently being rolled out to Volkswagens with ChatGPT integration—Bensaid responded that Rivians will soon be able to tell the driver what is happening as well as book service appointments in anticipation of problems.
“Imagine everything that you’re doing today where you’re touching the UI. In the future, you will be able to do that through voice. And when you think about it, when you’re driving, it’s really actually way safer to interact through the voice,” he said.
A cheaper Rivian
Of course, many nifty features are possible with software defined vehicles, it’s just a matter of resource allocation, Scaringe said, explaining AI-controlled massage seats are not at the top of the list, nor are extended batteries.
“If we were to say yes to all the countless great ideas, we would have a car that costs $300,000, so the magic of the product development process is to make thousands and thousands of trade offs.”
He explained that even if they got battery costs down to $60 per kilowatt-hour—a significant drop from the industry average of $115 per kilowatt-hour achieved last year, according to BloombergNEF—the cost to add range in an electric vehicle is still really high. Of Rivian’s three battery pack choices, the most popular has been their mid-sized battery pack which gets 300 plus miles of range, Scaringe said. “Customers would much rather see price come down.”
Although the company has produced 57,000 Rivians and sold little more than 51,000, its ambition is to sell millions, which a cheaper, more compact vehicle might help them achieve. By comparison, Tesla has produced more than 7 million cars and sold close to that.
To that end, Rivian is planning for growth and recently finalized a loan with the U.S. Department of Energy for up to $6.6 billion to build its Georgia plant. It also has been stepping up its pace of opening showrooms and service centers across the US.
