On December 11, 2025, Rivian held its first Autonomy and AI Day in Palo Alto, California. At the event, the company showed off custom silicon and advanced self-driving hardware. The company made the Rivian Autonomy Processor 1 (RAP1) in-house with TSMC. It can do more than 800 trillion calculations per second to power the next generation of vehicles. This is a change from Nvidia chips. The new Autonomy Compute Module 3 (ACM3) has four times the performance and 2.5 times less power use.
Rivian’s system has 11 cameras, five radars, and forward-facing LiDAR, which helps it find edge cases better than competitors that only use vision. The Large Driving Model, which was trained on both real and fake data, lets you reach Level 4 autonomy goals. An AI Assistant takes care of the car’s functions and repairs. The second-generation R1 and the soon-to-be-released R2 will use these for hands-free driving on more than 3.5 million miles of roads in the U.S. and Canada.
Autonomy+ will be available for the first time in early 2026 for $2,500 or $49.99 a month. It will have features like Universal Hands-Free, co-steer, and auto-parking that can be added through over-the-air updates. This is a lower price than Tesla’s FSD. Eyes-off functionality will be available in controlled areas by 2026. It will start on highways and move to off-road areas with clear lines. Production of the R2 starts in late 2026 with all the sensors.
After the event, Rivian stock fell 6% because of news about OpenAI and a slowdown in demand for electric vehicles, even though the company was trying to get investors excited about its self-driving technology. CEO RJ Scaringe talked a lot about Rivian’s long-term plans for robotaxis, putting the company in competition with Tesla and Waymo.
