Rivian’s Roadmap to AI Architecture and Autonomy with Founder and CEO RJ Scaringe

By 2030, it'll be inconceivable to buy a car and not expect it to drive itself. Every single one of our cars, we want to have the ability for it to operate at very high levels of autonomy. Radars are extremely cheap. LiDARs are very cheap. But the really expensive part of the system is actually the onboard inference. An order imagined more expensive than any of the perception stack. My view is EV adoption in The United States is a reflection of the lack of choice. As consumers, we need lots of choices. We need to have variety. We self identify with the thing we drive. The The world doesn't need another model y. The world needs another choice. Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, I'm here with RJ Scurinch, the founder and CEO of Rivian. We're here to talk about their autonomy strategy, proprietary chips, their coming r two model, whether Americans want EVs, and what our relationship to cars is going to be in the age of AI. Let's get into it. RJ, thanks so much for doing this. Thank you for having me. So Rivian's already, an incredibly cool company. How did you decide it was gonna become an autonomy company when that happened? I mean, it's from the beginning, we thought of it as a transportation and mobility company. And in fact, even before Rivian became Rivian, when I was thinking about what's the first products, it was unclear what kind of car it would be, but or even if it was a car, but it was always good. We wanted to be at the front edge of helping to redefine what does it mean to have access to personal transportation. And so autonomy has always been part of the strategy, but it's not fully coming to life with the technology that we're building. And you think about the function of Rivian. There's transportation. There's also the experience. Like, when how long did you guys start investing in the autonomy strategy here? Yes. We launched r one in very 2021. Mhmm. And we used what I'll broadly characterize like a one data approach to autonomy. So we had a perception platform. We used a a third party, a front facing camera that was essentially a third party solution that then plugged into an overall framework that we built, but it was all rules based. So the camera is fed a rules based planner. The planner would then make a bunch of decisions around the feeds from the perception. And it was, you know, the the moment we launched, we knew it was the wrong approach, but it was the thing we'd started working on, well before the launch. And so at the 2021, 2022, we made the decision to completely reset the platform. And Was that hard decision? No. Because it was so clear when we made we made the you know, when you're building something like this, you're you recognize you're gonna …