Posted by doctoboggan 12/11/2025
I will care when they sell the cars without steering wheels.
https://rivian.com/newsroom/article/rivian-releases-third-qu...
1. He has a STEM PhD (from MIT)
2. He is conservative in what he discloses
3. Not outspoken or political
IMO one of Rivian’s benefits is its image as the anti-Tesla
Those are my bearish questions. On the bullish side, the VW deal shows that they're willing and able to license part of their platform, so possibly have a big chance to recoup costs and maybe turn a profit just on that side, which justifies a big software + autonomy investment.
(GM has made a lot of cars with their own transmissions. And at various times, they've supplied -lots- of them to other automakers all over the world. They've made a lot of money doing this.
Someone's gotta build the machine vision/control systems for all of these self-driving cars; that someone may well be Rivian.
It's not as sexy as something like a new convertible might be, or a $40k self-driving electric car, and a consumer might not even know that the new car in their driveway has expensive Rivian parts buried inside, but that future can be very profitable for them.)
Oh, I think everyone missed this. Rivian is betting Elon made a big mistake by designing FSD to be strictly for Tesla. Rivian are doing FSD to license it out to other manufacturers. They're planning to open a new market.
Cruise automation was also for years working on custom silicon, I knew people there. Many people working on the custom devices didn't really believe in the mission statement either, but they were paid well, and got to do fun work, so they took the job.
What makes Rivian, or Tesla better at making the "normal" car pieces compared to Toyota, or Honda? The answer is they're really not better at those things and quite worse typically ; bad fit and finish, rattles, corroding suspension components, difficult to buy replacement parts, etc.
If these companies were truly about making electric cars available to all, a partnership with a car company that knows how to do the "regular car stuff" makes a LOT more sense.
Instead you have these companies that might be innovative in the drive train, electronics, batteries, and co-packaging who have to learn all the "hard" stuff normal car companies have been doing for a 100-years.
Now, instead of moving into a partnership with a regular car company, they're becoming hardware/software organizations making custom silicon with custom software.
Even doing custom silicon and the associated software takes YEARS of expertise to do it and not have a 1000 warts, not withtsanding going into a MOVING VEHICLE where the risks of making mistakes is life and limb.
So, my conclusion is this is more fancy smoke and mirrors to impress investors and the general public, but not in the best interest of end-users (people who buy vehicles to use as transportation).
Personally I think they will ship R2 Gen 2 vehicles to the early adopters that are less concerned with ADAS.
My R2 reservation is very late (I had to redo it for reasons) so I probably won't be able to order one until it's available anyways.
Of course, Waymo has achieved good results with A LOT of fancy hardware. But it's hard to see how they stand a chance against Cybercab mass production (probably behind schedule, but eventually).
I think Rivian has the best-looking line of EVs out there. Maybe they will be able to come from behind in self-driving tech. But this big reveal is not that promising, IMO.
The "fancy" hardware is going to get dirt cheap, and in a game where you're asking your customer to trust you with their lives, reliability is going to win. Combine that with time to market, and Tesla feels like a pretty clear "risky bet" at best... Maybe they make it work, but they have to do it before the other companies make lidar cheap, and prices have fallen dramatically over the past 10 years, for much better hardware.
Same can be said for vision-only, of course. Maybe it won't every quite get to 99.99.
ALSO what happens when the first generation hits end-of-life... will there be a clear path to recycling? I want to believe these platforms will last more than a subscription cycle...
BUT I guess we won't know until we see a teardown...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/mqijd2/riv...
Gen2 autonomy stack is completely unrelated to Gen1, and from what I hear is a completely different level of reliability.
(also - this presentation covered yet another, unrelated, gen3 autonomy stack, which shares none of the hardware or models with the existing gen2 stack, either.)