Mind Robotics just announced a $400 million round led by Kleiner Perkins, pushing the RJ Scaringe founded company past $1 billion in total funding in under a year. Rivian is a key partner and shareholder, and the Normal plant is essentially the live training environment for Mind's robots.
Rivian Assistant launches with 2026.15 and Google Calendar is the only platform it supports at launch. If you live in iCloud or Outlook, you'll need a sync tool to mirror your schedule into Google so the assistant can actually see your appointments, navigate to them, and reschedule events by voice from day one. Here are the options worth considering.
Rivian 2026.15 is rolling out with the new Rivian Assistant as the headline feature. Here's my hands-on video review covering how it works, what it can do, and where it lands in the real world.
Customer R2 deliveries are about to start, and the next 30 days are going to tell us more about where Rivian is actually headed than anything that's been pitched on a stage in the past year. The marketing is done, production is rolling, and the story is about to shift from pricing and trims to what real ownership actually looks like. I've got an R2 coming too, so I'll be sharing the full experience here as it unfolds.
Back for round two of The Sunday Drive. Lighter on hard news than last week but heavier on the stuff that matters long term, with a bigger VW stake, an R2X tease, a chip story worth paying attention to, and Rivian Assistant on the way.
The upcoming 2026.15 software update brings Rivian Assistant, the new AI voice assistant, as the headline feature, alongside Profile PIN authentication and a handful of Gen 2 refinements. Here's what to expect when it lands.
Rivian's new Stories post on Adventure Network scaling mostly recaps things R1 owners already know, with one exception. The underground work at most existing RAN sites is already done, so adding new stalls becomes a hardware drop instead of a months-long construction project.
Rivian is exploring a way to manufacture its own lidar sensors in the United States, possibly through a joint venture using Chinese technology. If the plan lands, the R2 would become the first mass-market American EV fitted with a domestically built lidar unit, and it would mark another step in Rivian's push to bring more of its critical tech stack in-house.
Rivian's RAP1 chip and Gen 3 Autonomy Computer aren't just spec bumps. They're the moment Rivian stops renting compute from someone else and starts owning the whole stack, the same way Apple did when it walked away from Intel and built its own silicon.
RJ Scaringe confirmed to Reuters that Rivian is working on undisclosed R2 variants, even floating the R2X by name before catching himself and saying he didn't want to announce the program. With the Georgia plant being built for flexibility, an R2X performance trim, an R2 RAD Edition, and even a smaller R2T pickup all feel like real possibilities now.
