Rivian made a big decision when it chose to build its own autonomy stack instead of buying something off the shelf from NVIDIA. On the surface, buying a proven platform like NVIDIA DRIVE or even Tesla Full Self-Driving might have looked faster or safer. Long term though, Rivian’s choice to own the full autonomy stack looks like exactly the right move.…

Rivian is building something that looks a lot bigger than “just” a better driver assist system. If you zoom out, the real product is the full autonomy pipeline, the in-vehicle compute, the electrical architecture that ties it all together, and the tooling to ship updates safely at scale. That is exactly the kind of stuff legacy automakers keep tripping over,…