Rivian is not pursuing autonomous driving like Tesla, says CSO

• Rivian Chief Software Officer Wassym Bensaid says the future of cars will be hands-free.
• That does not mean that Rivian is running full speed towards autonomous driving.
• Bensaid told BI that Rivian is focused on implementing AI-powered incremental features.

Rivian does not prioritize autonomous driving, the company’s Chief Software Officer said in an interview with Business Insider.

While Waymo and Tesla race to scale up autonomous driving and usher in an era of self-driving cars and robotaxis, Rivian, the 15-year-old electric truck and SUV company based in Irvine, California, has other priorities in artificial intelligence. intelligence, CSO Wassym Bensaid told Business Insider.

“We’re not necessarily chasing fully self-driving cars, we’re not chasing robotaxis either,” he said. “Our goal is incremental improvements to safety and convenience for customers.”

For Bensaid, who joined Rivian in 2019 as senior director of the systems architecture and integration team, AI is an opportunity to deliver a safer and seamless driving experience through improved software.

During a fireside chat at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco on October 30, the CSO said: “The car is a fantastic environment for AI” and that the ideal vehicle would be one that would operate largely through a user’s voice. can be controlled.

“The fact that we touch the screen or the fact that we use buttons in some cars today – I think it’s an anomaly. It’s a bug, it’s not a feature,” Bensaid said. “Ideally, you would want to communicate with your car via voice. And the problem today is that most voice assistants are just broken. They don’t work. And this is where AI can really unlock and enable very different experiences in the car .”

‘We make a technical product that happens to be a car’

Unlike its EV counterparts at Tesla or General Motors, Rivian’s core focus has been on the electric vehicle pickup and SUV segment, but it has struggled to take a significant bite out of the EV market in the take USA.

The first truck, the R1T, was not delivered to customers until 2021, 12 years after Rivian was founded in 2009 by current CEO RJ Scaringe. This year the company had two rounds of layoffs. In October, the company announced it would lower its production target from 57,000 units to between 47,000 and 49,000 units, citing supply chain issues.

EVs approached a turning point earlier this year, with sales falling even as demand for electric cars continued. This has led older car companies like Ford to put the brakes on their ambitious EV goals.

Scaringe said in an interview with The Verge that the slowdown in EV growth stems from an “extreme lack of choice” for affordable options. Rivian’s cheapest vehicle, the R1T truck, costs about $70,000.

A $5 billion investment by Volkswagen announced in June could help the struggling EV company realize its cheapest model yet, the R2, which will cost $45,000 and go on sale in 2026.

The CEO said on Kleiner Perkins’ September “Grit” podcast that he has made a deliberate effort to avoid becoming a Tesla 2.0.

“Tesla has been absolutely inspiring,” Scaringe said during the podcast. “One of the things that was so important to me with Rivian was making sure we weren’t covering the same ground as Tesla.”

Bensaid’s comments to BI reflected much of the same sentiment.

“We’re not aiming for a specific level of autonomy because we think philosophically that it’s really about the extra features, whether it’s safety or convenience that you can gradually add to the car,” he said. “In some cases, some automakers find themselves in a battle over winning standards rather than actually delivering better features for customers.”

A Tesla spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

During the TechCrunch fireside chat, the chief software officer said Rivian’s “north star” will eventually become an operating system for other car companies, offering an alternative to Apple’s CarPlay.

In January, Goldman Sachs analysts said Rivian’s software is “an important part of the value proposition and monetization opportunity” for the company.

“Software, really behind the scenes, is ubiquitous across the entire company,” Bensaid told BI. “And we see Rivian as a technology company. We make a technical product that happens to be a car.”