Rivian To Challenge Tesla FSD Later This Year, CEO Thinks

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I’ve been writing a bit lately on why robotaxis are not going to be as disruptive as many people expect. (See here and here and here.) A big core of the critique is the expectation that personal vehicles will have self-driving tech in them, and people would still rather have their own cars with self-driving capability than use robotaxis for most of their transportation.

Tesla Full Self Driving (FSD) has gotten quite good, but you still have to constantly monitor it. Many people who have FSD in their cars use it around 99% of the time, though, and love it. With this being the case, and as it gets better, the competition need something similar. Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe has figured that out and is promising something comparable by the end of the year.

“Later this year, we’ll have full supervised point-to-point, which will be very similar to Tesla’s FSD,” he said. “And that’ll roll out to all of our Gen 2 vehicles and, of course, R2.”

Now, how can Rivian have something like Tesla FSD when Tesla’s been working on this so much for a decade? Well, for one, Tesla went down a lot of wrong paths, wasting a lot of time. Additionally, others have also been working on it, even if not as vocally. Also, hardware has gotten much better in that time, helping everyone working on this. And last but probably not least, Rivian has an approach that uses more sensors than Tesla, more similar to Waymo’s approach.

Do I think Rivian will have an ADAS system comparable to Tesla FSD by the end of the year? I really don’t know. It’s possible!

Scaringe has previously said that the company will have fully autonomous, unsupervised driving developed next year. More recently, he said they’ll be here by 2030. Just in March, Rivian signed a $1.25 billion deal with Uber to sell 50,000 such fully autonomous R2 vehicles to Uber for robotaxi use. But that assumes the company really does developed robotaxi-capable technology. Can it achieve what Waymo has achieved? Why not?

As we’ve learned over time, we’ll believe it when we see it. A lot of big claims have been made over the years, especially concerning driving. But let’s hope Scaringe is right and Rivian has it’s own self-driving tech in consumer cars soon.