is transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Rivian announced that it was designing its own AI chips for fully autonomous driving, in a bold — if belated — move to catch up with Tesla and other automakers that have working on the technology for far longer.
At an “AI and Autonomy” event at the company’s office in Silicon Valley on Thursday, Rivian unveiled its own proprietary silicon chip, as well as a number of forthcoming autonomous features that it says will enable it to eventually sell Level 4 autonomous vehicles to customers. That includes equipping the company’s upcoming R2 vehicles with lidar sensors.
Rivian also said it will launch a new AI-powered voice assistant as well as a foundational “Large Driving Model” trained similarly to large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT that will “distill superior driving strategies from massive datasets into the vehicle.” And it said it would wrap everything up in an Autonomy Plus subscription service for a new potentially lucrative revenue stream for the company.
“Large Driving Model”
With sales expected to slow in the wake of the expiration of the $7,500 federal EV tax credit, Rivian is under pressure from investors to demonstrate a plan to compete with Tesla and other big names in autonomous vehicles. The company is still losing billions of dollars a year, despite its efforts to rein in costs and software advances thanks to a $5 billion tie-up with Volkswagen. Rivian reported its first positive gross profit earlier this year.
At the event, Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe said that the company was at an “inflection point” and that today’s announcement was about “being able to give customers their time back when in the car.”
Previous Next
... continue reading