Riding onboard with Rivian’s race to autonomy

Summary

The robot swerved through the cafeteria of Rivian’s Palo Alto office, shelves adorned with chilled canned coffees — until it didn’t. Five minutes later, a man carefully pushed it out of everyone’s way, the words “I’m stuck” flashing yellow on the poor droid’s screen. It was an inauspicious start to Rivian’s “Autonomy & AI Day,” a showcase for the company’s plans to make its vehicles capable of driving themselves. Rivian doesn’t make the cafeteria robot and isn’t responsible for its abilities, but there was a familiar message in its foibles: this stuff is hard. Hours later, as I rode in a 2025 R1S SUV during my 15-minute demo of Rivian’s new self-described “Large Driving Model,” I was reminded of that message. The EV equipped with the automated-driving software drove myself and two Rivian employees on a switchback route near the company’s campus. As we glided past Tesla’s engineering office, I noticed a Model S in front of us slow to turn into the rival company’s lot. The R1S eventually noticed this, too, braking hard just before the Rivian employee nearly intervened. During my demo drive, there was one actual disengagement. The employee in the driver’s seat took over as we passed through a one-lane section of road due to some tree-trimming. Minor stuff overall. But it wasn’t not exactly rare either; I spotted multiple other demo rides that had disengagements too. The rest of the drive went well enough for software that is not ready to be shipped, especially when you consider that Rivian threw out its old rules-based driver assistance system and adopted an end-to-end approach — which is how Tesla developed Full Self-Driving (Supervised). It stopped at stoplights, it handled turns, it slowed for speed bumps, all without programmed rules telling it to do these things. A quiet pivot in 2021 Image Credits:Rivian Rivian’s old system “was all very deterministic, and it was all very structured,” CEO RJ Scaringe said in an interview Thursday. “Everything that the vehicle did...