Rivian’s CEO talks AI, self-driving cars, and a $5.8 billion partnership with Volkswagen

As demand for EVs declines, electric automaker Rivian is taking this time to adapt its business and expand its brand. Rivian’s founder and CEO RJ Scaringe joins Rapid Response to explore the company’s recent $5.8 billion partnership with Volkswagen, the ongoing risk assessment for self-driving features, and how Rivian’s AI-enabled ‘technological plumbing’ can accelerate the brand beyond incumbent manufacturers.

This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.

I want to ask about AI because everyone’s focused on how it will impact car experiences. What are you doing at Rivian, and how far are we from a driverless world? Should we have one?

I think it’s incredibly important. It arguably becomes the most important part of the business—the vehicle’s ability to drive itself. Consumers start getting their time back. Even if you enjoy driving, the ability to leave and have the car take you is a nice feature. This is a big focus for us. When we launched our first products, we had a limited highway assist feature that allowed hands-on wheel and eyes on the road, but the vehicle drives itself.

On our Gen 2 vehicle, we started working on designing an entire camera set, with 55 megapixels, more than any other vehicle sold in the U.S. We have five radars, including a front imaging radar. We control that entire stack and use emerging technologies to train the platform. Self-driving developed before 2021 was heavily rules-based. But now, we can use end-to-end training, using modern techniques akin to what’s used in large language models and transformers. It’s completely changing self-driving development and speeding it up.

We announced a hands-free feature, where the vehicle will drive itself on highways with hands off the wheel, coming very soon. After that, we’ll expand it to other roads, then to hands-free, eyes-off. There are exciting features coming.

I want to make sure I really understand this. So the car can essentially be driven without you doing anything, but it’s not safe enough to turn it entirely over to the car in all situations. But as it improves, you’ll update the software to allow that safely, without changing the vehicle.

When we release or enable our self-driving features, we start in domains with extremely high confidence. It’s a bit of the Wild West because there’s no legal body arbitrating the level at which to expose these features. 

It’s your judgment about what you feel confident in and the risk you’re willing to take?

Every brand makes this decision differently. We’ve really erred on hyper-focus on safety, making sure that before we expand the operating windows to, let’s say, neighborhood roads or school zones, we want to really be robust in the solution.

We’re talking about autonomy, which is one slice of AI in the vehicle. We’ll see other AI elements emerge.

Think of something as simple as navigating. Imagine if you don’t know where you want to go. You get in the car, and say, “I’m hungry.” And the car says, “Well, what do you feel like?” And you say, “I don’t know.” And it says, “Well, yesterday you had Italian. What do you feel about burritos today?” And, you know, so just the ability to be conversational and contextual. It’ll be one of those kinds of changes, I think, where it’ll happen, we won’t even fully realize it’s happening. And then we’ll look back and be like, how did we used to live?

When you think about AI applications beyond self-driving, how important is it for Rivian to be at the forefront versus following along? 

Early on, we realized software was going to be important. At Rivian, we’re controlling the whole software stack, not using suppliers for all these computers. We’re making our own, with all our own computers.

It requires fundamental shifts, not relying on third-party suppliers for software or computers. This architecture I’ve described underpins what we’ve achieved.

We did a $5.8 billion joint venture and licensing deal with Volkswagen Group, the second-largest car company in the world. We’re providing software and electronics to enable what I just described, allowing them to step massively forward in network architecture and software topology.

And, that’s of course what we architected. If you don’t have that, it’s hard to imagine integrating AI properly. Step one is getting the plumbing right. You’ve got to get the network architecture right. You’ve got to get the topology of computers right. You’ve got to get the right levels of compute. I mean, down into the basics of like, what level of memory do you have? What’s your graphics capabilities?

And these are things that are going to be really hard without making a big break from the traditional model for existing manufacturers. So I say all this because I think we’re at this inflection point where the cars of the historical past in terms of architecture and the cars of the future in terms of architecture—I put ourselves, I put Tesla in that category. And the features are sort of similar, like they’re mostly the same. And it’s easy to confuse features for capability, but the platforms are totally different. And so the growth potential of those two platforms in terms of adopting future technology is wildly different. So where they end up in, let’s say five to 10 years, is in very, very different places. And so I think we’re gonna see a lot of existing incumbent manufacturers work very hard either through partnerships like what was done with us, or through other means to move to these newer technology platforms.

China has become a leading EV producer. I’m curious about the implications for the car industry. How do you view China’s developments and their impact on your business?

Well, the world is electrifying. The U.S. market is slower than Europe or China.

But probably the singular issue that I’d say there’s very clear alignment between both the Democratic side of the United States and the Republican side of the United States is that the United States needs to continue to lead in technology and to continue to really serve as an economic superpower. And in order for that to be true, we also need to continue to be great at the world’s future technologies.

China benefited from government support for EVs. If America wants to stay at the forefront in this technological development, how important is government support?

China has many electric car companies, a lot narrowly differentiated. Their regions provided much financing, leading to intense price competition to capture a growing market. However, there’s uncertainty about whether these products can be sold in the U.S. and the tariffs involved.

Probably, in the short term, there’s going to continue to be not a lot of trade from the U. S. shipping products to China—and vice versa China shipping products and vehicles to the United States. But I think in the long term everyone should be thinking about this, to say, let’s imagine a world where we can all compete freely, meaning we’re competing head to head.

And so we spend every day thinking about “How do we make our products better?” How do we look at what others are doing and embrace the competition and see it as an opportunity for us to run faster? That’s the mindset we built into the business.

This interview is part of a Rapid Response partnership with Stripe.