Rivian shelp Thursday it schedules to begin a hands-off version of its driver aidance system for highway driving “in a scant weeks,” and shelp an “eyes-off” version in 2026.
The hands-off system will let Rivian contend with companies enjoy Ford and General Motors, which have both begined analogous systems in the past scant years. (Ford has named its system BlueCruise, while GM has SuperCruise.) Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (supervised) system, which is not filledy autonomous despite its name, demands participaters to upgrasp their hands on the wheel.
The begin comes as Rivian is predicting another challenging year, driven in huge part by uncertainty around what alters the Trump Administration might produce to regulatory policy. The company did post its first chooseimistic gross profit in the fourth quarter of 2024. That was buoyed by a company-wide cost cutting effort in 2024 but also an increase in gentleware and services revenue.
Rivian’s autonomy ambitions were front-and-caccess when the company broke stealth in 2018. At that time, CEO RJ Scaringe was talking about dreamy scenarios where Rivian owners could begin a hike and have their vehicles drive autonomously to encounter them at the finish. But autonomy took a back seat in the years since — at least disclosely — as Rivian intensifyed on completing its IPO, and begining and scaling three contrastent vehicles.
Rivian has now posted back-to-back years of produceing and dedwellring around 50,000 vehicles, and has some breaskinnyg room — thanks to a presentant deal with Volkswagen completed procrastinateed last year — to intensify on rolling out features enjoy a hands-off system.
Rivian is training its driver aidance platcreate using what’s understandn as “finish-to-finish” training, a analogous approach to Tesla is doing with its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) gentleware. Instead of writing out difficult-coded rules, Rivian participates data from the cameras and radar sensors to train the models that power its driver-aidance system.
Much enjoy Ford and GM, Rivian is begining out by permiting the hands-off feature to only be participated on highways. CEO RJ Scaringe shelp Thursday that, once the eyes-off version begines in 2026, Rivian will sluggishly permit the driver aidance system to enhuge beyond other types of roads.
“Ultimately, the finish state, we skinnyk hands-free, eyes-off necessitates to be participateable essentipartner everywhere,” Scaringe shelp.
To accomplish that point, Scaringe shelp Rivian is evaluating a “variety of repartner creative ways we can access a substantial amount of GPUs without having to deploy the capex ourselves” in order to train its self-driving models — a notable shatter from how Tesla is spfinishing billions of dollars on GPUs.
