GoKawiilI’m sitting in a Rivian R1S SUV as it drives itself down the leafy streets of Palo Alto, Calif., through areas crowded with touchstones of tech history. At one point I pass the landmark HP Garage, the one-car workshop where Hewlett-Packard, and, arguably, Silicon Valley, was founded in 1939. I skirt Stanford University, where a team led by computer science professor Sebastian Thrun won a US $2 million DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005. The team’s Volkswagen SUV, named Stanley, became the world’s first vehicle to navigate a grueling 212-kilometer Mojave Desert course with no human intervention.
The Rivian I’m in might look like any other electric SUV in this affluent town, with its concentration of tech bros, venture capital, and startups. But inside this boxy EV is something special: an Autonomy+ system that will allow owners to enter an address, sit back, and let the vehicle drive to any mapped destination in the U.S. and Canada. This point-to-point system is one of the most advanced semiautonomous-driving systems coming to market. It is also a precursor of the company’s bid to make self-driving cars a reality, for robotaxis and—eventually—for everyday car buyers. After years of incremental advances and frustrating setbacks, self-driving has been swept up in the great AI resurgence, and is now a top priority for investors and global automakers, who envision vast new streams of profits.
So here I am, 21 years after that DARPA challenge, riding shotgun in Stanley’s vastly more advanced descendant. Rivian’s Autonomy+ is intended to operate seamlessly on suburban streets like these, sensing and responding to traffic lights, crosswalks, and stop signs. That point-to-point system is set to debut on Rivian’s all-new R2 SUV by roughly the end of this year, and via over-the-air updates for its newest R1S and R1T models. Rivian says it will charge $49.99 a month, or $2,500 up front, versus Tesla’s $99 per month for its rival system, which is somewhat misleadingly called Full Self-Driving (Supervised), or FSD. Mercedes, meanwhile, plans to charge $3,950 for a three-year subscription for the forthcoming MB.Drive Assist Pro on its CLA-Class EV; that system still requires at least one hand on the steering wheel.
Video released by Rivian shows the company’s R1 SUV being driven on a variety of urban and rural roads, according to the company. Rivian plans to introduce this self-driving system to compete with Tesla’s offering before the end of 2026. Rivian
Impressive as it is, Autonomy+ is only a Level 2+ system in the classification system established by the Society of Automotive Engineers. Level 2+ means that a human driver must be ready to retake control at any moment. Rivian, along with a horde of deep-pocketed rivals, is aggressively working toward more impressive (and potentially lucrative) levels of autonomy. At Level 3, drivers could “check out” behind the wheel for limited periods, to scroll through emails or watch a movie—but not to sleep.
The big race right now is to deliver Level 4 autonomy: A car you could (in theory) dispatch to pick up a pizza, and have it carted home on the heated, unoccupied driver’s seat—or in which you could spend the ride lounging alone in the back seat, enjoying a private slice while reading a newspaper.
At Rivian’s software lab in Palo Alto, Calif., a technician evaluated code for the company’s self-driving system. Jason Henry/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Robotaxis currently roaming the U.S., China, and the Middle East have proved that driverless, Level 4 autonomy is possible. These cars operate in relatively tiny numbers in a couple of dozen cities, and within the specific constraints of commercial services. Now Rivian and its many rivals—including Tesla, Toyota, Mercedes, Volkswagen, and China’s BYD are racing to bring that level of self-guided mobility to the masses. Rivian’s strategy combines a suite of cameras, radar, and lidar; a custom set of silicon chips, developed in-house, to process sensor data; and an AI autonomy model running on those chips. With $1.25 billion in backing from Uber, Rivian plans to graduate to a fleet of self-driving, Level 4 robotaxis starting in 2028. Those taxis, in turn, will be the literal training wheels for extending Level 4 ability to consumer vehicles.
Meanwhile, millions of connected cars, as they cruise every nook and cranny of the globe, are already sending data to train automakers’ systems. The race is on to funnel those data through fast-improving AI models with “end to end” capability: an AI architecture, powered by deep learning, that processes raw sensor data directly into physical vehicle commands. So equipped, engineers anticipate they’ll be able to solve the tricky edge cases—tangled urban streets, unique geographies, swarms of pedestrians, inclement weather—that skeptics once deemed intractable.
Rivian’s Plan for Level 4 Self-Driving
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