Rivian Rolls Out Hands-Free Driving Update to Gen 2 Vehicles

Rivian announced the rollout of its Enhanced Highway Assist, bringing hands-free driving “on compatible highways” to its Gen 2 vehicles.

Rivian said it has developed its Rivian Autonomy Platforms in-house, around three core elements.

• A multimodal suite of 11 cameras and 5 radars offering sensor redundancy and a 360º worldview. Our in-house developed cameras have the highest resolution of any vehicle in North America, while the overlapping radars offer additional visibility, detecting objects over long-distances and through challenging conditions.
• An on-board compute module capable of over 200 trillion operations per second, making a Rivian vehicle the most powerful computer our customers likely own.
• Rivian-trained machine learning models based on the latest ML research and transformer architectures, which enable the vehicle to reason and understand its environment.

Rivian emphasizes that, while Enhanced Highway Assist offers hands-free driving, drivers must still pay attention to the road and their surroundings.

It uses an infrared camera embedded in the interior rearview mirror for driver attention detection, rather than requiring the driver to intermittently touch the steering wheel. The location is intentional and intuitive because the mirror can be adjusted for each driver, which also adjusts the orientation of the camera.

Improved Dual-Motor Performance and a Performance Upgrade

The company also says the software update improves the performance of dual-motor vehicles.

With this software update, we’ve made performance Dual-Motor vehicles more capable. When Off-Road Mode is selected, Rally Mode is now available. Rally Mode delivers heightened throttle response and crisper steering on almost any terrain, including ice, mud, dirt, or asphalt.

Now, you have the flexibility to add a Performance Upgrade to your vehicle after purchase. Dual-Motor (Gen 1 and Gen 2) with a Standard+, Large and Max battery pack are eligible for an upgrade, which can be purchased straight from your Rivian account page or mobile app for a one-time $5,000 payment ($7,200 CAD). The upgrade is delivered via software update to make your vehicle instantly quicker, sportier and more powerful. The Performance Upgrade unlocks 665 horsepower and 829 lb.-ft. of torque, and introduces three new drive modes—Sport, Rally and Soft Sand—in addition to All-Purpose, All-Terrain, and Snow modes.

Conclusion

Rivian makes clear that, while it may not be first to the market with hands-free driving tech, it’s goal is to be the safest and most trusted.

Our platform is continuously enhanced—nearly every month—through software updates. Later this year, we plan to expand our hands-off/eyes-on capabilities to more highways and to select surface roads. Next year, a hands-off/eyes-off feature is planned for controlled conditions with our current Gen 2 vehicles.

This new era of autonomy is incredibly exciting. While being first to market with new capabilities is important, our #1 goal is being the most trusted. As our technology advances, our intention is to do it safely, responsibly, and ultimately make driving less stressful and to give you back your time. We can’t wait to show you what’s next.

Rivian has emerged as one of the leading EV companies. The company is also uniquely poised to take advantage of Tesla’s recent stumbles, making the release of its hands-free driving tech an important step in its progress.

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