Rivian Point-to-Point This Year, Eyes Off Next, Says RJ Scaringe

RJ Scaringe put fresh dates on Rivian’s self-driving rollout during a Masters of Scale episode that dropped yesterday, recorded live on stage with host Jeff Berman. Supervised Point-to-Point lands later this year across every Gen 2 R1T, R1S and R2, and he lined it up directly against Tesla’s Full-Self Driving.

Next year the system goes unsupervised, which is the one that matters. That is the point where you can take your eyes off the road. After that comes full capability with nobody in the front seat, and he framed that around stuff like airport drop offs or sending the car to grab something from the store. If you have been weighing the one-time Autonomy+ buy, this is the timeline you are betting on.

He also walked back through how the autonomy stack got here. The early cars leaned on a Mobileye front camera and a planner that was basically handwritten, and that ran until Rivian pulled the whole system in-house across late 2021 and into 2022. The Gen 2 hardware launched about a year and a half ago and the data flywheel has been spinning up since according to RJ.

On the Volkswagen side he put the licensing deal at $5.8 billion and said the first product out of it, the VW ID1, launches next year as the lowest cost EV in Europe. He said the company licensed the software platform but kept its self-driving stack and its vehicle designs in-house.

Rivian still plans to put 50,000 robotaxi versions of R2 on the road starting in 2028 with paid rides through Uber, and before that there will be cars running on the platform with safety drivers up front.

He spent real time on Mind Robotics, the industrial robotics company he spun out late last year. Rivian is the first customer, the company has already raised a lot of capital, and the stated goal is to build one of the largest robotics companies in the world. He was direct that the capital needs were bigger than Rivian could carry, which is a big part of why it sits outside the company.

R2 is in production now and he called it the first high volume product, with R3 already known and R4 and R5 hinted at.

We’ve, for the most part, heard a lot of this already but what’s useful is hearing him confirm autonomy dates and the VW numbers on the record in a single sitting. During the R2 media event last week, I sat down with James from Autonomy at Rivian who discussed the upcoming UHF 2.0 in Q3.

Jose’s Take

Rivian has been beating this drum since Autonomy and AI Day back in December, so the dates themselves are not new. And I have seen no shortage of people calling the whole thing impossible. The skepticism is fair, because Rivian does still have to show this working in the real world and not just on a roadmap slide. I am bullish on it anyway. The AI side is moving fast enough that I think they get there.