Rivian’s 2026.31 software update added Google Maps and Waze reports for police presence and speed cameras to the native navigation, and while it’s something a lot of us have wanted for a long time, there’s a big catch. None of it shows up unless you’re actively navigating to a destination.
That takes away a lot of the value.
When I hop in my Rivian for a drive I already know by heart, I’m not setting a destination, so I never see a single alert.
The data itself has been hit or miss too. I’ve had reports pop up that were clearly stale or just wrong, and plenty of owners have been seeing the same thing.
There’s also no way to submit a report from the center display, which is a big part of what makes Waze work. The whole system depends on drivers adding and confirming what they see, so right now Rivian owners can pull from that pool but can’t add anything back to it. If only there were some way to plug in a phone and get the full Waze experience, including reporting. Oh well.
To be fair, more data and alerts are on the way. I still wish Rivian had spent more time on this before shipping it, with in-car reporting, alerts outside of active guidance, and better accuracy all there on day one.
That leads to a bigger question. Would you rather Rivian hold features like this until they’re fully built out, or keep shipping smaller pieces with every update? The same can be said about autonomy, where Rivian has been rolling out its driver assistance features in stages and owners have been living with each in-between version along the way. Incremental releases make sense for a lot of things, but alerts and autonomy only matter if you can trust them, and every wrong police report makes it a little easier to ignore the next one.
I’ll keep an eye on how these alerts improve, and as soon as I see changes in the release notes, I’ll share them with you all. In the meantime, let me know in the comments which approach you’d prefer.
Also wish there was audible alerts for police notifications. Not just the pop up notification
100% agree as I keep nav audio off and don’t often look down to see any sort of alert.
I actually submitted a feedback to Rivian via the app for the same. No one is going to look at the screen 24/7
Does anyone Navigation take a long time to load once destination is input. I have been waiting for the remaining battery to show. It has been lagging somewhat.
This can be a difficult balance to strike. As a software engineer, I know well the temptation to implement the universe before letting anything out the door, but you have to stop somewhere or you’ll never ship anything. Trouble is, finding the right “somewhere” isn’t always obvious. Sounds like they missed the mark this time. It happens.
Totally agree, Ryan. All you have to do is read the comments/evaluations of any new feature to find out that whatever you shipped fell short of the mark for some portion of the user base. I’m of the ‘incremental progress’ camp. If you think what you have is solid then ship it.
This is not the end of the world if they follow it up with a refinement that adds some of this functionality.
It’s probably just a time constraint. Much better to ship something rather than nothing.
Give me a leased Mac Studio with 512ram for like 300 a month and I could have all these features easily implemented using local Qwen or Deepseek in about a week with no code going to the cloud for IP safety. I don’t doubt for a second they’re going to eventually land… and if not I should just ask RJ for a temporary project based contract to help them out.
But they might be gated for other reasons. Maybe some of what is required to implement has pre-requisites that aren’t final (For example, local rivian assistant for voice control).
Rivian is unfortunately falling into a pattern of delivering less than ideal functionality just to say it’s “integrated”. Text messaging and Waze are two great examples where CarPlay/AA offer a far better experience. I don’t want CarPlay if Rivian can get on par, but it’s becoming less than certain this will happen at the rate in which customers expect. Not going to impact my buying decisions, but will certainly start to for the masses…
I like the idea of Rivian releasing bits and pieces at a time but, the caveat is to clearly explain its current limitations as well as what the future intent and functionality will be in upcoming OTAs. Much like how they released traffic lights and signage showing up before FSD fully uses them, it allows us as drivers to start to familiarize with future functionality ahead of of time as while also allowing Rivian to release more frequent updates with realtime testing on parts before full functionality is released. Otherwise, OTAs will be less frequent, have fewer small updates each time and will be riskier if full functionality is required every time.
Huh, I always setting a destination even to very well known places, like my home. I envy you living somewhere with traffic not constantly disrupting up your travels around town. The functionality should definitely work without having to use navigation but I honestly thought everyone uses navigation for live traffic data. It’s the only real reason I pay for Connect+.
They are not from Waze and don’t alert, so don’t call them Waze alerts. They are along-drive visualizations of google maps hazards, which is a small subset of what are displayed in Waze. Probably only 10% of police shown in waze make it through to google maps and rivian nav. Pretty useless.
I’m a big fan of the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) approach. As a software provider (Rivian infotainment), I think it’s important to get something into customers’ hands early and see how they actually use it. That feedback helps shape the roadmap and lets you focus development on what customers really need. In my view, that leads to a much more customer-driven development process rather than one driven mainly by market assumptions or internal priorities (often preferred by legacy OEMs).
I’m not trying to be overly negative as a newcomer to the community waiting on my R2, but this feels like an odd complaint. No one gets google maps or waze alerts of they aren’t running those apps. It’s a neat idea, and would be cool for them to add in the future. But I’m surprised anyone would have expected a different experience. I’d love my R2 to ship with working wings and a bar of gold but wouldn’t expect it