Andrew J. Hawkins, reporting for The Verge on Thursday:

At an “AI and Autonomy” event at the company’s office in Silicon Valley on Thursday, Rivian unveiled its own proprietary silicon chip, as well as a number of forthcoming autonomous features that it says will enable it to eventually sell Level 4 autonomous vehicles to customers. That includes equipping the company’s upcoming R2 vehicles with lidar sensors.

Rivian also said it will launch a new AI-powered voice assistant as well as a foundational “Large Driving Model” trained similarly to large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT that will “distill superior driving strategies from massive datasets into the vehicle.” And it said it would wrap everything up in an Autonomy Plus subscription service for a new potentially lucrative revenue stream for the company…

It’s safe to say Rivian’s R1-series of vehicles is much better than any Tesla on the market for the price. While expensive, Rivian sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks feel like luxury cars with beautiful interiors, all with comparable specifications to Tesla’s Model X and Cybertruck. But Tesla still has Rivian beat in the software department because of the company’s famed yet highly controversial Autopilot suite of driver assistance features. Autopilot’s traffic-aware cruise control and auto steer work on practically every clearly-marked road in the United States and abroad and are class-leading. While many companies compete with Tesla in the electric vehicle market, including Rivian, none of their autonomous driving systems come close to Autopilot’s versatility and reliability. Tesla has offered and perfected Autopilot for over a decade, so it’s no surprise. (Rivian’s current system only works on select U.S. highways.)

Newer Tesla models can be equipped with a more advanced package of features called Full Self-Driving, which enables supervised point-to-point autonomous navigation, meaning the car will do everything from pulling out of a parking space to changing lanes to finding a parking spot at the destination. Full Self-Driving has improved considerably since its launch — which has suffered numerous embarrassing “delays” (the feature was never ready, contrary to Elon Musk, the company’s chief executive) — yet it still makes concerning mistakes and must be intently supervised at all times. Despite Full Self-Driving’s fundamental design flaws, it is a significant step ahead of legacy vehicle manufacturers like Mercedes-Benz and BMW, with whom Tesla directly competes, as well as Rivian, which, until Thursday, had no plan to implement a similar feature. (It’s worth noting Alphabet’s Waymo cars work unsupervised reliably, but in limited cities.)

Rivian’s Thursday announcements came in three parts: silicon, hardware, and software. Beginning with silicon:

The centerpiece of this new effort is the tiny chip with a 5 nanometer process node called the Rivian Autonomy Processor. Taiwan’s TSMC will produce the chip for Rivian. The company says that it “integrates processing and memory onto a single multi-chip module,” and is being used to power the company’s third generation computer. Rivian says the chip’s architecture will deliver “advanced levels of efficiency, performance, and Automotive Safety Integrity Level compliance,” referencing a risk classification system for safety-critical automotive electronics…

Tesla’s custom Samsung-fabricated silicon is class-leading and more or less enables Full Self-Driving’s dominance in the field. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is picking up the slack for Rivian, and that matters considerably. Current Rivian models don’t have silicon powerful enough for a feature similar to Full Self-Driving, and by including the Rivian Autonomy Processor in R2 models beginning next year, Rivian is strategically readying itself for better software. Next, hardware:

Rivian will use a variety of sensors to power its autonomous driving, including lidar. The company plans on integrating lidar into its upcoming R2 vehicles to help with redundancy and improved real-time driving. Waymo and other robotaxis use lidar to create 3D maps of their environment, while Tesla famously does not. Some automakers have said they would use lidar in future production vehicles, but that turned out to be easier said than done. Volvo, for example, recently dropped lidar for its EX90 SUV.

As Hawkins writes, Waymo’s success can largely be attributed to the massive lidar sensor array that sits atop every Waymo vehicle on the street. Similarly, while this might be controversial, I blame the Tesla Robotaxi and FSD’s failures mostly on Tesla’s insistence on cameras to power its software. Tesla calls its camera array Tesla Vision, and the result of this system is that Tesla vehicles make considerably more mistakes on the road than their lidar-powered Waymo counterparts. They’re so bad that while Waymo works without driver supervision in Austin and San Francisco, the Tesla Robotaxi still has a Tesla employee in the driver’s seat ready to take over in case FSD makes a fatal mistake. To that end, I’m grateful Rivian has gone with lidar for its hardware as opposed to a Tesla-like vision-only approach. Finally, software:

Rivian also outlined a series of advanced features coming to its cars in the future, including hands-free driver assist, also known as Level 2 Plus, and eyes-off driving, also known as Level 3. Early next year, Rivian plans on rolling out hands-free driving for its second-generation R1 vehicles that will function on 3.5 million miles of roads across the US and Canada — a big leap over the 135,000 miles it covered earlier this year. And the feature will be available on more than just highways. In a video, Rivian demonstrated its hands-free system on a variety of roads, including across the Golden Gate Bridge, up the steep hills of San Francisco, and along the Pacific Coast Highway.

From my understanding, the “Level 2+” autonomy level coming to R1 cars next year is roughly analogous to Tesla Autopilot from six years ago, whereas the Level 3 system is more equivalent to FSD. As I said earlier, Rivian is undoubtedly many years behind Tesla — and even more years behind Waymo — but Thursday’s announcements are the first steps toward catching up. The main thing Rivian drivers miss when coming from a Tesla is Autopilot, and the new system should aim to close that gap. FSD is still in its infancy, and I don’t blame Rivian for wanting to take its time with it. Lidar should presumably speed the process up — it’s just easier to work with than vision-only models — but for now, the Level 3 system is in the distant future. I think Rivian owners will be patient enough to keep waiting, especially if all R2 and R3 models ship with the hardware necessary from the factory, but I must call that eventual reality vaporware for now.

I’m highly bullish on self-driving cars: they’re safer, better drivers than humans and alleviate a major stress point, especially for Americans. I just want more competition in the currently heavily-dominated-by-Waymo-and-Tesla market.