What’s Coming in Rivian’s 2026.15.30 Hotfix

Rivian’s got a new update in testing that should hit cars externally before long. Version 2026.15.30. It’s not a feature drop, it’s a hotfix, and nearly all of it goes into Rivian Assistant. Gen 1 and Gen 2 R1T and R1S all get it.

A lot of what’s been quietly bugging me about the assistant is on this list, so here’s what’s worth knowing.

• It searches Favorites first now, then Recents, then your contacts, instead of guessing. It handles names it used to mangle, defaults to your mobile number, and you can ask what number you have for someone without it dialing them, which used to drive me nuts.
• Dictate a text and it punctuates for you. They also retuned the “Hey Rivian” wake word so you’re not repeating yourself three times to get its attention.
• Small one I like. It finally knows what your vehicle has, so it won’t try to work a powered liftgate on an R1T that never came with one.
• Navigation got real attention. It can read routes off your screen before you start driving, it’s better at finding POIs, and they killed that bug where updating a saved spot by voice would wipe your charging filters. Same with the one where every stop on a road trip showed the same arrival time, which was confusing on longer drives.
• Climate is smarter. Ask for a temperature with climate off and it restores your old fan speed instead of blasting the lowest setting, “make it warmer” lands somewhere reasonable now, and it heats the seat you actually asked for.
• Calendar respects events you’ve hidden, knows what day you mean when you say “this Friday,” and stops mangling the tense when it reads things back.
• The chimes are quieter too, straight from people complaining about it.

The one I’d flag on its own is availability. It used to be locked to your region, but now it just follows your vehicle’s language setting, so if your car is in English you get the assistant wherever you are. That quietly unlocks it for owners up in Quebec who were shut out before, which is a nice win for them.

There’s the usual behind the scenes stuff too. Smarter cloud logic for bad signal areas, per-user encryption on Assistant Memory, chat history that clears when you switch profiles, a few profile and PIN fixes, and the minimum speed for Universal Hands-Free, Highway Assist, and Adaptive Cruise Control dropping to 5 mph.

None of it is exciting on paper. It’s mostly making the assistant you already own behave the way it should have from day one, which is what a hotfix is for, and honestly half of these are daily irritations I’ll be glad to see gone. Should land externally before long.