Rivian Revving To Rival Tesla With Level 3 Autonomy And Voice AI Plans

Although much has been said of the Tesla and Rivian rivalry, Elon Musk’s announcement during Tesla’s fourth quarter earnings call that its robotaxi service would launch in June, highlights the very different stages the EV makers are at.

At a press event in San Francisco last Thursday, Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe said the company is planning to go hands free in 2025, with eyes off the road in 2026, for Level 3 capability.

The Rivian Autonomy Platform currently offers Level 2 hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, driver assist with lane changing, parking, cruise control and collision warning features.

“We think there’s an enormous value to customers to having a robust, first Level 2, but importantly Level 3 in very specific domains,” Scaringe said. “Imagine a world where you leave your house, you’re still in the vehicle, but you get on the highway and you have all of your time back. You can be on your phone, writing emails. You don’t have to be looking at the road. You don’t have to be grabbing the wheel to say, I’m still here. The vehicle is capable of doing that, and that’s going to be for us. That’s absolutely on the roadmap. Something we’re hyper focused on.”

Level 4 autonomy, which is unsupervised full self driving with no one in the driver’s seat and possibly no one in the car, is still the ultimate goal for Rivian, but not a priority as a robotaxi, said Rivian Chief Software Officer Wassym Bensaid, who also holds the title of Co-CEO and CTO of the Rivian Volkswagen Technology Joint Venture.

Bensaid said vast AI integration is underway at Rivian to develop the next generation EV platform, which is being funded by a $5 billion partnership with Volkswagen.

“AI will be pervasive throughout the entire vehicle, and will unlock lots of new capabilities, whether it’s for self driving and autonomy with our end-to-end training approach or the in-cabin experience with the vehicle,” he said.

A Rivian you can chat with

As to when drivers will be able to ask their Rivian what a blinking red light on the dashboard means—a capability Amazon launched in AWS Bedrock over a year ago, and is currently being rolled out to Volkswagens with ChatGPT integration—Bensaid responded that Rivians will soon be able to tell the driver what is happening as well as book service appointments in anticipation of problems. He also described use cases where Rivian’s voice AI would be able to bidirectionally converse with multiple passengers while remembering preferences in making recommendations on routes and points of interest.

“Imagine everything that you’re doing today where you’re touching the UI. In the future, you will be able to do that through voice. And when you think about it, when you’re driving, it’s really actually way safer to interact through the voice,” he said.

A cheaper Rivian

Although many nifty features are possible with software defined vehicles, it’s a matter of resource allocation when it comes to what gets added, said Scaringe, explaining AI-controlled massage seats and extended batteries are not at the top of the list.

“If we were to say yes to all the countless great ideas, we would have a car that costs $300,000, so the magic of the product development process is to make thousands and thousands of trade offs.”

He explained that even if they got battery costs down to $60 per kilowatt-hour—a significant drop from the industry average of $115 per kilowatt-hour achieved last year, according to BloombergNEF—the cost to add range in an electric vehicle is still really high. Of Rivian’s three battery pack choices, the most popular has been their mid-sized battery pack which gets 300 plus miles of range, Scaringe said. “Customers would much rather see price come down.”

Although the company has produced 57,000 Rivians and sold little more than 51,000, its ambition is to sell millions like Tesla which has produced more than 7 million cars, and sold close to that, despite missing expectations this quarter.

Rivian is betting a cheaper, more compact car, comparatively priced to Tesla, may help achieve that goal, with the R2 five-seat SUV starting at $45,ooo, coming 2026. By comparison, the 2025 Rivian R1T pickup truck and the R1S SUV with seven seats currently for sale, start around $70,000.

Meanwhile, Rivian is planning for growth having recently finalized a $6.6 billion loan with the U.S. Department of Energy to build its Georgia plant. It also has been stepping up the pace of opening showrooms and service centers across the US.

^{Updated with Tesla’s fourth quarter earnings call details and related Rivian stats.}