Rivian unveils self-driving chip and autonomy plans to compete with Tesla

Rivian unveiled its self-driving chip and autonomy plans to compete with Tesla and others at its AI and Autonomy Day on Thursday in Palo Alto, California.

Rivian, a mainstay in the world of electric vehicle startups, said it plans to roll out an Autonomy+ subscription and one-time purchase program, priced at $49.99 per month and $2,500 up front, respectively, for access to its self-driving suite.

CEO RJ Scaringe said it will learn and become more confident and robust as more miles are driven and it gathers more data. This is what Tesla uses through a neural network, as it uses deep learning to improve with every mile traveled.

He said:

“I couldn’t be more excited for the work our teams are driving in autonomy and AI. Our updated hardware platform, which includes our in-house 1600 sparse TOPS inference chip, will enable us to achieve dramatic progress in self-driving to ultimately deliver on our goal of delivering L4. This represents an inflection point for the ownership experience – ultimately being able to give customers their time back when in the car.”

At first, Rivian plans to offer the service to personally-owned vehicles, and not operate as a ride-hailing service. However, ride-sharing is in the plans for the future, he said:

“While our initial focus will be on personally owned vehicles, which today represent a vast majority of the miles to the United States, this also enables us to pursue opportunities in the rideshare space.”

The Hardware

Rivian is not using a vision-only approach as Tesla does, and instead will rely on 11 cameras, five radar sensors, and a single LiDAR that will face forward.

It is also developing a chip in-house, which will be manufactured by TSMC, a supplier of Tesla’s as well. The chip will be known as RAP1 and will be about 50 times as powerful as the chip that is currently in Rivian vehicles. It will also do more than 800 trillion calculations every second.

RAP1 powers the Autonomy Compute Module 3, known as ACM3, which is Rivian’s third-generation autonomy computer.

ACM3 specs include:

• 1600 sparse INT8 TOPS (Trillion Operations Per Second).
• The processing power of 5 billion pixels per second.
• RAP1 features RivLink, a low-latency interconnect technology allowing chips to be connected to multiply processing power, making it inherently extensible.
• RAP1 is enabled by an in-house developed AI compiler and platform software

As far as LiDAR, Rivian plans to use it in forthcoming R2 cars to enable SAE Level 4 automated driving, which would allow people to sit in the back and, according to the agency’s ratings, “will not require you to take over driving.”

More Details

Rivian said it will also roll out advancements to the second-generation R1 vehicles in the near term with the addition of UHF, or Universal Hands-Free, which will be available on over 3.5 million miles of roadway in the U.S. and Canada.

Rivian will now join the competitive ranks with Tesla, Waymo, Zoox, and others, who are all in the race for autonomy.