Rivian announced that it will be opening its Autonomy Early Access Program very soon, an invite-only program that gives a limited group of Gen 2 R1 and R2 owners on Autonomy+ pre-release driver assistance features, starting with Point to Point in December for owners in California and Florida.
You can sign up through your Rivian.com account, where an Autonomy Early Access tile shows up on the primary owner’s account if your vehicle qualifies. You’ll need an active Autonomy+ subscription since trials don’t count. Rivian picks participants based on how much you use Autonomy features and a clean recent safety record, which includes things like forward collision warnings, and it balances the group by region and vehicle model. If you aren’t picked you won’t get a rejection email, but your interest stays on file as the program expands to more states, so there’s no need to reapply.
Participation comes with homework. You’re expected to use the features weekly, log issues in the vehicle, fill out a monthly survey and share location and camera data under an NDA, and you won’t get paid for it. Rivian rechecks eligibility every 30 days and can remove anyone at any time.
Point to Point plugs Universal Hands-Free into navigation, so the vehicle follows your turn-by-turn route through supervised turns, highway transitions and city streets using Rivian’s Large Driving Model. It lines up with James Philbin saying Rivian was on track for a year end start, and the broad rollout to every Autonomy+ subscriber is still set for 2027.
The NDA means early testers won’t be saying much publicly, so Autonomy & AI Day on December 9 is probably our best look.
Cries in still waiting for a VIN.
I wish Rivian well, I really do. I’d even be willing to volunteer a bit of time to help them make things better. But, the NDA? That’s a no from me, dog. If they don’t want you talking about it, that means it’s still dangerous. That’s not something I want to step into at this point in my life.
If they’re saying point to point in 2027 I’m gonna take a while guess that for people not doing early access we’ll probably get the actual update December of next year. I’m really irritated about how they’re skipping stop sign and stop light before point to point release. I feel that with Autonomy+ they need to just do incremental updates so that updates aren’t boring and disappointing rather than just waiting and releasing all the progress at once.