The robot swung through the cafeteria of Rivian’s Palo Alto office, shelves adorned with chilled canned coffee — until it didn’t. Five minutes later a man gently pushed it out of everyone’s way and the words “I’m stuck” flashed yellow on the poor droid’s screen.
It was an inauspicious start to Rivian’s “Autonomy & AI Day,” a showcase for the company’s plans to make its vehicles capable of driving themselves. Rivian doesn’t make the cafeteria robot and isn’t responsible for its capabilities, but there was a familiar message in its weaknesses: this is hard.
Hours later, driving a 2025 R1S SUV during my 15-minute demo of Rivian’s new self-described “Large Driving Model,” I was reminded of that message.
The electric car equipped with automated driving software drove myself and two Rivian employees on a switch route near the company’s campus. As we slid past Tesla’s engineering office, I noticed a Model S ahead of us, slow to turn into the rival company’s lot. The R1S eventually noticed this as well, braking hard just before the Rivian employee almost intervened.
During my demo drive there was an actual disconnect. The employee in the driver’s seat took over as we passed through a one-lane stretch of road due to some tree trimming. Smaller things in general. But it wasn’t exactly rare either; I discovered several other demo rides that also had interruptions.
The rest of the drive was good enough for software that isn’t ready to ship, especially when you consider that Rivian threw out its old rules-based driver assistance system and adopted an end-to-end approach – which is how Tesla developed Full Self-Driving (supervised). It stopped at stoplights, it handled turns, it braked for speed bumps, all with no programmed rules telling it to do these things.
A quiet focal point in 2021
Rivian’s old system “was all very deterministic and it was all very structured,” CEO RJ Scaringe said in an interview Thursday. “Everything the vehicle did was the result of a prescribed control strategy written by humans.”
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Scaringe said that when Rivian saw transformer-based AI taking off in 2021, he “quietly reconstituted the team and started with a clean slate and said, let’s design our self-driving platform for an AI-centric world.”
After spending “a lot of time in the basement,” Rivian launched the new ground-up driving software in 2024 on its second-generation R1 vehicles, which use Nvidia’s Orin processors.
Scaringe said it wasn’t until recently that his company started to see dramatic progress “when the data really started pouring in.”
Rivian is betting it can train its Large Driving Model (LDM) on fleet data so quickly that it will allow the company to roll out what it calls “Universal Hands-Free” later this month. That means Rivian owners will be able to take their hands off the wheel on 3.5 million miles of roads in the US and Canada (as long as painted lines are visible). In the back half of 2026, Rivian will allow “point-to-point” driving, or the consumer version of the demo we received on Thursday.
The ‘eyes off’ to ‘hands off’ challenge
By the end of 2026, after Rivian starts shipping its smaller, more affordable R2 SUVs, it will drop the Nvidia chips and equip those vehicles with a new custom autonomy computer, revealed Thursday. This computer, plus a lidar sensor, will eventually allow drivers to take their hands and eyes off the road. True autonomy – where a driver doesn’t have to worry about retaking control of the vehicle – is far beyond that and will depend heavily on how quickly Rivian can train its LDM.
This rollout introduces a near-term challenge for Rivian. The new autonomy computer and lidar won’t be ready until months after the R2 goes on sale. If customers want a vehicle capable of driving without eyes (or more), they will have to wait. But the R2 is a crucial product for Rivian, and the company needs it to sell well – especially in the wake of declining sales of its first-generation cars.
“With technology moving as fast as it is, there’s always going to be some degree of obsolescence, and so what we want to do here is be really direct” about what’s coming, Scaringe said. The early R2s will still get Rivian’s promised “point-to-point” driving, which will be based on the new software and will be hands-off but not eyes-off.
“So [if] if you buy an R2 and you buy it in the first nine months, it’s just going to be more limited,” he said. “I think what’s going to happen is some customers are going to say, ‘this means a lot to me, and I’m going to wait.’ And some will say ‘I want the latest, greatest stuff now and I’ll get R2 now and maybe I’ll trade it in a year or two and I’ll get the next version later. Fortunately, there is so much demand for the R2 that we think customers can make the decision for themselves by being upfront with this.”
“In a perfect world, everything goes at the same time, but the vehicle timeline and the autonomy platform timeline just aren’t perfectly aligned,” he said.
When I first interviewed Scaringe in 2018, before Rivian even showed what its vehicles looked like, he shared a goal that still rattles around in my head. He wanted to make Rivian’s vehicles so capable of driving themselves that: “if you go on a hike and you start at one point and you end at another point, you have the vehicle meet you at the end of the path.”
It was the kind of pie-in-the-sky promise of self-driving cars that was all the rage seven years ago, but at least it stuck with me because it was something that felt true to the Rivian’s whole aspirational adventure.
Scaringe told me Thursday that he still thinks it’s possible for Rivian to enable such a use case in the next few years. That certainly won’t happen until the company tests and builds its more capable R2 vehicles, which is at least a year away at best.
“We could [do that]. That hasn’t been a big focus,” he said. That could change, however, as the company gets closer to Level 4 autonomy, as by then the company will have its LDM trained on more difficult roads without guidance features like lane lines.
“Then it becomes kind of like, what’s odd [operational design domain]? Dirt roads, off-road? Easy,” he said. Just don’t expect a Rivian to drive himself up Hell’s Gate in Moab.
“We don’t use resources to crawl rocks independently,” he said. “But as for getting to the trailhead? For sure.”
This story has been updated to reflect that Rivian’s Universal Hands-Free update is coming later this month.