Rivian goes big on autonomy, with custom silicon, lidar, and a hint at robotaxis | TechCrunch

Rivian detailed 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 potential entry into the self-driving ride-hail market, according to CEO RJ Scaringe.

The announcements at the company’s first “Autonomy & AI Day” event in Palo Alto, California, shed fresh light on Rivian’s technology development, much of which has been kept undercover as it pushes to begin production of its more affordable R2 SUV in the first half of 2026. Rivian’s event is also a very public signal to shareholders that it’s keeping pace, or even exceeding, the automated-driving capabilities of industry rivals like 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 “over 3.5 million miles of roads across the USA and Canada” and will eventually expand beyond highways to surface streets (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 will launch in early 2026. Rivian says it will charge a one-time fee of $2,500 or $49.99 per month.

“What that means is you can get into the vehicle at your house, plug in the address to where you’re going, and the vehicle will completely drive you 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 needing to be actively involved in the operation of vehicle.”

Rivian’s driver assistance software won’t stop there; the EV maker laid out plans on Thursday to enhance its capabilities all the way up to what it’s calling “personal L4,” a nod to the level set by the Society of Automotive Engineers that means a car can operate in a particular area with no human intervention.

After that, Scaringe hinted that Rivian will be looking at competing with the likes of Waymo. “While our initial focus will be on personally owned vehicles, which today represent a vast majority of the miles driven in the United States, this also enables us to pursue opportunities in the ride-share space,” he said.

To help accomplish these lofty goals, Rivian has been building a “large driving model” (think: an LLM but for real-world driving), part of a move away from a rules-based framework for developing autonomous vehicles that has been 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.

That custom chip powers what Rivian is referring to as its third-generation “autonomy computer,” or ACM3. The new computer can process 5 billion pixels per second and will start showing up on Rivian’s upcoming mass-market R2 SUV in late 2026.

Rivian will couple the ACM3 with a lidar sensor at the top of the windshield (from an undisclosed supplier) to provide “three-dimensional spatial data and redundant sensing,” which it says will help with “real-time detection for the edge cases of driving.”

“We expect that at launch in late 2026 this will be the most powerful combination of sensors and inference compute in consumer vehicles 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 the launch versions of the SUV will not have ACM3 or the lidar sensor. That means early versions of the R2 without the ACM3 and lidar hardware will most likely plateau at hands-free driving. Anyone hoping to do eyes-off 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 comprehensive 3D model of the space the vehicle is traveling through,” vice president of autonomy and AI James Philbin said Thursday. “The goal for our onboard sensing stack isn’t just human level, it’s superhuman level.”

This story has been updated to reflect that Rivian will not offer eyes-off driving in vehicles without lidar sensors.