At Rivian Autonomy and AI Day (RIVN) on December 11, the pure-play electric vehicle maker showcased a range of technology and software products, with a focus on vertical integration, which means doing everything end-to-end in-house.
CEO RJ Scaringe launched the company’s new Autonomy platform at the event – and at a challenging time for the electric vehicle sector, in which so far only Tesla has achieved profitability. Although Rivian has made gross profits in recent quarters, actual (or net) profits have remained elusive.
Scaringe, who founded the company in 2011, saw Rivian go public in 2021 and reach stratospheric highs of $120 per share before the stock came back down to earth, now at $18. A crucial cash infusion from Volkswagen (VWAGY) of nearly $6 billion via a joint venture between the two companies has given Rivian some much-needed breathing room.
The following is a condensed version of Yahoo Finance’s conversation with Scaringe, touching on the company’s journey toward fully autonomous driving (FSD), or personal L4, as Rivian calls it, building in-house chips, and where the entire electric vehicle industry is headed.
Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe speaks at the company’s inaugural Autonomy and AI Day, showcasing developments in self-driving technology, in Palo Alto, California, December 11, 2025. (Reuters/Carlos Barria) ·REUTERS/Reuters
Yahoo Finance: Thanks for having us here, RJ. Rivian Autonomy Platform — tell me about Rivian’s progression now to what’s coming out in the near term and its vision for the future.
RJ is scary: Self-reliance has been a journey for us. We followed the launch of our Gen 1 vehicles in late 2021. In early 2022, we realized we wanted to take a fresh approach to our Autonomy platform. So we started the process on that, and that involved developing a camera platform, redesigning the compute platform, and architecting the entire system around an AI-centric approach.
This is what went into our [current] Gen 2 vehicles we finally launched in mid-2024, and counting against our Gen 1 [vehicles] increased by about 10x – that’s the deduction on the vehicle. When we launched this, there were 55 megapixels of cameras, a set of radars, and that started the process of creating the data stream to actually train this model.
On our Gen 3 platform, it is [built using] an internal chip… This is a platform capable of processing 5 billion pixels per second, approximately 5 times the best in its class today. This is very, very high processing capacity. And this not only increases the performance level of this platform, but it also allows us to build the model more efficiently and faster.
Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe speaks as a screen displays an image of Rivian’s Autonomy Processor during the company’s inaugural Autonomy and AI Day, showcasing developments in self-driving technology, in Palo Alto, California, December 11, 2025. (Reuters/Carlos Barria) ·REUTERS/Reuters
Currently, Rivian offers Universal Hands-Free, which is similar to GM’s Supercruise, and which will be expanded to more roads. What comes next?
In 2026, we will add “point to point”. So you can get in the car from your driveway, type in the address, and it does everything, hands free, eyes on, etc… But it’s still monitored.
Then the platform goes to the next big step, which is the “eyes closed” – and the “eyes closed” is really powerful. That’s when you can start being in the car, using your phone, reading a book. Essentially, your role in driving the car does not diminish in any way. You are just a passenger.
And then the next step is what we call Personal Level 4, which is the idea that the vehicle can operate on its own, even without anyone on board. And so things like picking the kids up from school, dropping them off at the airport, or going grocery shopping.
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You mentioned the custom silicon that Rivian manufactures in-house. Tell me about why it’s important for you to take the next leap in the next few years. Why not use a standalone, commercially available product like Nvidia’s?
We made the decision years and years ago to build our entire vertical software platform in-house and not rely on tier-one vendors for this content… We then built teams of thousands of people to put it all together. [We] has spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing these systems. And when we talked about autonomy and our overall AI roadmap, we had a very similar view, which was that this would be the most important technical change in transportation, I would say, more than anything else, more than anything since the beginning of the car. And we wanted to control our own destiny…
You [also] need a partnership with someone like TSMC, which in our case is our partner. [Although Rivian designed its chip in-house, a chipmaker is needed to actually produce the chip.] And what we’re going to get is better performance, something very specific to vision-based robotics… And then we had to build this data flywheel, and so a lot of offline training, that means a lot of GPUs.
The Rivian R2 is equipped with the latest hardware and software from Rivian’s Autonomy platform. ·Pras Subramanien
I want to mention Tesla because they do the same thing when it comes to full verticality. It has its own chips. It manages its own data centers. But unlike Tesla, Rivian uses sensors rather than simple camera vision. Do you think Rivian can reach, and even surpass, Tesla FSD’s position in the next two years?
Our goal is to be world class. Tesla, to be clear, is a great product. They’ve built a truly impressive platform. We completely agree with them in the belief that it should be a neural network based approach, building an end-to-end trained model that uses a fleet of vehicles, building a data flywheel that trains the model with reinforcement learning. So we really agree here.
We have a different view on the benefits of a diverse set of perceptual modalities. In our case, which still requires a lot of camera, call it main camera. But including radar and lidar [light detection and ranging]this allows us to transform our entire fleet into a “ground truth” fleet. So every vehicle on the road is very useful for training our model. [Similar to Tesla, Rivian’s EVs will send massive amounts of data collected via sensors and cameras to train its self-driving model.]
Rivian’s universal hands-free assisted driving software in action. ·Rivien
I want to ask you about the general situation of the electric vehicle industry in America. The tax credit disappeared in the fourth quarter. How is it going for you now? I’ve heard people talking about how electric vehicle manufacturers could benefit because we have fewer competitors in the market.
I think what you postulate in your question is probably pretty fair. I think many manufacturers are pulling out. I think it’s a shame. I think it would be healthier for the auto industry if everyone focused on electrification. I think this withdrawal means there will be less choice, which is bad for customers. But I think because there is less choice it means the environment will be less competitive…
If you look at the segment of vehicles with prices starting under $50,000, there are very few very compelling choices, and as a result, only one company, Tesla, has amassed about 50% market share… and that’s not a reflection of a healthy industry. This is a reflection of an underserved market. And so if we want to see electrification go from its 8% adoption rate, as it is today in the United States, to say 25 or 30 or ultimately 100%, we need to have more than one big choice.
And of course, I think Rivian is one of them. [great choices] with our R2. I think it’s going to be exceptional. The car itself is simply amazing, but I hope there are more.
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Pras Subramanian is a senior automotive reporter for Yahoo Finance. You can follow it X and on Instagram.
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