Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free

Agreed, it seems inevitable that autonomy and insurance are going to be bundled.

1. Courts are finding Tesla partially liable for collisions, so they've already got some of the downsides of insurance (aka the payout) without the upside (the premium).

2. Waymo data shows a significant injury reduction rate. If it's true and not manipulated data, it's natural for the car companies to want to capture some of this upside.

3. It just seems like a much easier sell. I wouldn't pay $100/month for self-driving, but $150 a month for self-driving + insurance? That's more than I currently pay for insurance, but not a lot more. And I've got relatively cheap insurance: charging $250/month for insurance + self-driving will be cheaper than what some people pay for just insurance alone.

I don't think we need to hit 100% self-driving for the bundled insurance to be viable. 90% self-driving should still have a substantially lower accident rate if the Waymo data is accurate and extends.

> the alternative would be a corporation constantly providing -- for free -- updates and even support if your car gets into an accident or stuck.

That's one alternative.

Another alternative would be that you get what you get at purchase time, and you have to buy a new car to get the newest update.

"Continuous development" isn't always a selling point when it's something with your life in its hands. A great example is Tesla. There are plenty of people who are thrilled with the continuous updates and changes to everything, and there are plenty of people that mock Tesla for it. Both groups are large markets that will have companies cater to them.

Agreed, autonomy is a service and not a feature of the car. It has to be. There is inherent cost as you use it and associated liabilities, legal requirements for auditing, technical need for maintenance and dealing with updates in a timely fashion.

You could make the point that owning the car is a lot less important if you don't drive it yourself. If Uber didn't have to pay drivers, they could expand their area of operation to basically everywhere. Drivers need to be paid so having them drive long distance is relatively expensive. That constrains the area of operation. But otherwise, cost per mile is very low. So, orchestrating pickups in the country side becomes possible.

It's going to enable night time travel as well. Nap/sleep while traveling. Wake up at your destination. That's going to revolutionize commutes as well and enable people to live much further away from work. A four hour commute is much less of a problem if you can spend the time working or napping.

That in turn is going to do wonders for real estate prices. Because there are a lot of nice places to live that are currently far away from cities and therefore still relatively affordable. We got a preview of that during the lock downs when people figured out that remote working is a thing.

Let's be real. A staggering amount of drivers are incapable to switch on Automatic Cruise Control or trigger automatic parking. They know how to start the car, how to switch lights and wipers on/off and that's about it.

Paying subscription for something what they are never going to use is going to be a hard sell.

> a corporation constantly providing -- for free -- updates and even support

Corporations could decide to only advertise shipped features, not beta tests.

> Autonomy subscriptions are how things are going to go

In America, maybe. Chinese manufacturers are already treating self driving as table stakes. If I have a choice between a subscription car and one that just works, I’m buying the latter.

> continuous development and operations/support

ICE vehicles require continuous servicing and manufacturer support.

The other possible future is you rent the car for exactly when you need it and don’t pay a monthly bill— or your monthly bill pays for a certain number of rides/minutes/miles per month. In which case the subscription costs are managed by the provider, who might be the manufacturer and might not.

At least in cities, a fully-functioning, on-demand autonomous fleet would probably be superior to car ownership in just about every way except as a status symbol.

Direct quote from RJ Scaringe, founder/CEO of Rivian:

> This is a decision. It's generated, I said there's many millions of decisions, many of them will never get noticed and they're just under the surface. One of those decisions that's been noticed quite a bit is the fact that we've intentionally not included CarPlay in the vehicle. And that's not to say we don't think a close partnership with Apple is important. So we have Apple Music integration, we have a bunch of Apple integrations that are yet to come, we have a great relationship with the team at Apple. But it was more to say, we just felt and continue to feel very strongly about creating a consistent, fully integrated digital experience where you're not jumping between apps, let's say from a CarPlay app back to the vehicle app. And it's quite jarring when you don't have, let's say vehicle level controls when you're in the CarPlay environment. That view we've had since the early, early days. I think that's going to become even more important and more true in a world of integrated AI.

https://cheekypint.transistor.fm/14/transcript

I was hesitant buying my Tesla this year (first one) as I really liked having CarPlay in my prior car (Jeep). But after having it a while, it's really a non-issue. The Tesla Apple Music app is pretty good. Their maps and navigation is pretty good (and integrated with FSD). And I can easily just use the bluetooth connection for a couple other minor things I occasionally use.

In 6 years I don’t want your laggy legacy system with unsupported apps. I want my new phone to power the experience. Most of my experience in a car is digital, the physical needs to do its best to get out of the way. I hope Rivian fails for missing this obvious point.

Your eyes will be fine (assuming that we are talking about automotive LiDAR specifically).

Automotive LiDAR is designed to meet Class-1 laser eye-safety standard, which means "safe under normal conditions." It isn't some subjective/marketing thing, it is an official laser safety classification that is very regulated.

However, if you try to break that "normal conditions" rule by pressing your eyeball directly against an automotive LiDAR sensor for a very long period of time while it is blasting, you might cause yourself some damage.

The reason for why your phone camera would get damaged, but not your eyes, is due to the nature of how camera lenses work. They are designed to gather as much light as possible from a direction and focus it onto a flat, tiny sensor. The same LiDAR beam that is spread out for a large retina can become hyper-concentrated onto a handful of pixels through the camera optics.

Depends on the type of LIDAR. LIDAR rated for vehicle use is at a wavelength opaque to the eyes so it hits the surface and fluid of your eye and reflects back rather than going through to your cones and rods.

It isn't however opaque for optical glass (since the LIDAR has to shine through optical glass in the first place) so it hits your camera lens, goes straight through, and slams the sensor.

I watched the livestream and they said their hardware is "Camera Safe". I am not sure if camera safe and eye safe are correlated, but I would hope/expect that they would not release something that isn't known to be eye safe. I guess it's possible that the long term effects could prove bad, and we will all end up getting "Lidar Eye" dead spots in our vision.

The existing regulations here might be insufficient. There is definitely risk if the devices are not carefully designed to be safe.

There are two kinds of safe. Safe when it's working as intended, and safe when it breaks.

But yes there are lidar sensors out there where if broken in the right way could burn out your retinas permanently.

In terms of plain wattage, it cannot be dangerous. Unless, of course, you were to stand with your eye up against the sensor and maybe stare at it for a few minutes.

Its possible that they have tried that and the market isn’t giving them what they need at the price they want. I do mostly agree with you though; its the economics of the car thats gonna supercharge adoption.

EDIT: another commenter mentioned that their platform is used by other companies (VW perhaps?). With that information, it might make more sense to do this.

Most traditional OEMs in the automotive industry are integrators. They write a specification, and a Tier 1 supplier provides a black box matching that spec. (Tier 1 in turn provides a spec to its suppliers and integrates their parts)

This has several consequences - Tier 1 suppliers are waiting on input/approval from OEM before proceeding with projects - Tier 1 suppliers don't necessarily have the capital to do work "at risk", even if they could build the part without approval/specifications. (TBH - some do) - Each layer of the supply chain lacks context on the whole project and product line and cannot achieve efficiencies outside of the scope of its contract.

These haven't really been a problem for mechanical parts and E/E parts that have well-defined functions and interfaces and have a lot of re-use from previous generations. It works really well with Kaizen (incremental innovation).

To outsource it, a traditional OEM would need to completely specify the behaviour of said self-driving system, baseline the specification, put out the requests for quotation, etc. Tier 1 then needs to analyse the spec, estimate it, break it down in to sub work packages, work with its suppliers, etc. From an optimisation point of view, this is really inefficient partitioning of the problem space. For greenfields development, an emergent specification via experimentation may be better - but that won't fit in traditional V-model sub-contract OEMs/Tier 1s use.

That flow doesn't need to be followed; the suppliers could raise/allocate capital and build the self-driving stack "at risk" - and this seems to be done (Tier IV, Waymo, etc). But as it's new technology, I assume Rivian think they can do better by themselves and can get the capital for the development as part of an integrated solution while they are smaller it might seem they should not waste limited capitial that way - but integration will save a lot of inefficiency in sharing specifications across boundaries, full system integration and deriving emergent specification via experimentation rather than some MBSE folly.

It’s probably a sensible concern that if they use someone else’s tech, they’ll be subsidizing that company’s eventual mastery of the self-driving space, who will then be able to control pricing. The only long game, I imagine, is to create your own self-driving tech, so that your own customers are investing in your own long term success, not someone else’s.

They could have a better driving assistance package than 99% of other cars on the road for 1/10 the price by using OpenPilot as the LKAS, or installing a Comma in the car.

Real shame nobody has taken that approach, not even a fork

Rivian has a huge interest in being the outsourcer for legacy automakers. They’re not able to sell $100k cars enough and even with the promised R2, they probably will only be a small-ish player in the EV market. Their CEO recognizes how crazy good Chinese EVs are and currently they’re not even a competitor for Tesla.

But, VW is willing to pay $5B for their software platform. I think they want to extend that to being able to sell custom chips and “AI” capabilities, whatever that means.

I would wager that's because there isn't a lot of existing silicon that fits the bill. What COTS equipment is there that has all the CPU/Tensor horsepower these systems need... AND is reasonably power efficient AND is rated for a vehicle (wild temp extremes like -20F to 150F+, constant vibration, slams and impacts... and will keep working for 15 years).

Yea, Tesla has some. But they aren't sharing their secret sauce. You can't just throw a desktop computer in a car and expect it to survive for the duration. Ford et all aren't anywhere close to having "premium silicon".

So you're only option right now is to build your own. And hope maybe that you can sell/license your designs to others later and make bucks.

I was just in a discussion on this very topic. It's the build vs buy equation applied to silicon. Early in the tech boom the entire silicon stack was proprietary and required a lot of time and investment to train up people who could design the circuitry, we got our first "ASICS" which was basically a bunch of circuitry on a die and you then added your own metal layer so it was like having a bunch of components glued to a board and you could "customize" it by putting wires between the parts. Then we had fabs that needed more wafer starts so they started doing other peoples designs which required they standardize their cells and provide integration services (you brought a design and they mapped it to their standard cells and process). And as the density kept going up they kept having loots of free space they needed to fill up. The 'fabless' chip companies continued to invest in making new parts until the pipeline was pretty smooth. And at that point the level of training you needed a the origin to get it into silicon dropped to nearly zero, you just needed the designs. And into that space people who were neither 'chip' companies, nor were they 'fabless' OEMs, realized they could get their integration needs met by asking a company to make them a chip that did exactly what they wanted.

One the business side, the economics are fabulous, your competitors can't "clone" your product if they don't have your special sauce components. So in many ways it becomes a strategic advantage to maintaining your market position.

But all of that because the all up cost to go from specification to parts meeting the specification dropped into the range where you could build special parts and still price at the market for your finished product.

A really interesting illustration is to look at disk drive controller boards from the Shugart Associates ST-506 (5MB) drive, to Seagate's current offerings. It is illustrative because disk drives are a product that has been ruthlessly economized because of low margins. The ST-506 is all TTL logic and standard analog parts, and yet current products have semiconductor parts that are made exactly to Seagate's design specs and aren't sold to anyone else.

So to answer your question; apparently the economics work out. The costs associated with designing, testing, and packaging your own silicon appears to be cost effective even on products with exceptionally tight margins, it is likely a clear winner on a product that enjoys the margins that electric vehicles offer.

I share your skepticism. This feels like an attempt to tap the trainloads of money piling into "AI", for a company that is in pretty desperate need of more cash to stay alive.

In a vacuum there are potentially some advantages to doing your own silicon, especially if your goal is to sell the platform to other automakers as an OEM.

But custom silicon is pricey as hell (if you're doing anything non-trivial, at least), and the payoffs have a long lead time. For a company that's bleeding cash aggressively, with a short runway, to engage in this seems iffy. This sort of move makes a lot more sense if Rivian was an established maker that's cash-flow positive and is looking to cement their long-term lead with free cash flow. Buuuuut they aren't that.

I have the same question. It makes sense that they might need bespoke software, but how could they possibly be more efficient at creating chips than an AMD/Nvidia?

Possibly. Realistically this is replacing the expensive category of FPGA (Zynqs or similar with strong hardware CPU cores), this means they get all the peripherals they desire in hardware, and they can pick the core variant in order to optimise for their workloads (all the different vector extensions for example). There's an interesting market for that kind of thing, either full FPGA to ASIC replacement, or drop in replacement FPGAs of lower cost (The Rigol MHO98 replaced the Xilinx FPGA of the previous generation with a substitute from Fudan). If you're shipping a lot of hardware, that sort of thing becomes worthwhile.

Probably a lot of overlap in the venn diagram of people who would like the two things. Mostly the "Early Adopter" circle.

Also a lot of cars have a lot of limitations with comma.ai. Yes, you can install it on all sorts but there are limitations like: above 32mph, cannot resume from stop, cannot take tight corners, cannot do stop light detection, requires additional car upgrades/features, only known to support model year 2021. Etc.

Rivian supports everything, it has a customer base who LOVE technology, are willing to try new things, and ... have disposable income for a $1k extra gadget.

CarPlay and affordability. I was totally smitten last year with the R1S during a test drive. I'm not a car person but felt that spark people must feel when they obsess over their vehicles.

But it wasn't pushing-six-figures smitten, which is where you're at when you get a new one with customizations.

And real door handles. And real buttons. And better customer service.

Who was this announcement for? I’m at a point where I think Rivian’s real customers are investors.

I get where carmakers are coming from though.

Cars used to compete on distinctions between driving experience/fuel economy/reliability/etc. In comparison, differences between electric cars is mostly superfluous. They're very interchangeable.

For the next generation of car buyers, infotainment and features are going to be the main features. And if you are handing all of that away to the tech companies, your entire company is going to just become another captive hardware partner of the tech giants.

It's maddening that $100k purchases get totally nerfed by bad software. Absolutely crazy to me that I can go out find a super nice car I want and have to walk away because of bad software or no carplay support.

I hear this a lot and it's surprising to me. We have three cars in our family (two with carplay and the Rivian) and carplay always feels like such a downgraded experience compared to that of the Rivian.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I'll take a car infotainment system that doesn't need CarPlay/AndroidAuto to be usable (and lacks it) over one that requires a phone attached via CarPlay/AndroidAuto to be usable.

I use Android Auto on rental cars all the time.

My daily driver is a Tesla (Model S /w MCU v2) that doesn't have it. And doesn't need it to provide a usable experience.

I want the smaller size and cost of the R2

Not investors, though

I'd love to get in my car and go to sleep for a couple of hours or read a book whilst it drives me somewhere. Imagine if it could even pull over and charge up without any kind of intervention too. You could get in your car, and get a full nights sleep whilst it drive you somewhere 500 miles away.

Also, at some point, I'm probably going to be too old to drive safely, which will restrict my travels. Not if self driving gets to the point where that doesn't matter anymore.

It remains to be seen, but there is reason to believe that self driving cars will be enough safer than regular cars that I as a citizen want everyone to have them if you have a car.

I have kids who walk, ride bikes, and I do the same. There are a lot of terrible drivers out there - the average driver who thinks they are better than everyone else is still terrible (yes this includes me - I'm one of the few honest enough to admit I'm not good, but I'm about equal to everyone else)

I like approaching it from an accessibility standpoint. I don't need it and I enjoy the act of driving. That said, if I had vision impairment and wanted freedom to travel further from home with no assistance self driving cars make a lot more sense.

The product isn't necessarily "for me", but that doesn't mean it shouldn't exist.

Doing long highway drives is effortless. Think cruise control, but you can let go of the wheel.

The hardware necessary for level 2 autonomy is estimated to cost about US$400 in a Tesla. Much higher for companies using Lidar though prices are coming down as well.

My sister plans to just buy the self driving subscription for the month they go on road trips and thats it. Far better than buying it up front.

You sound like someone who doesn't spend 1+ hour every day commuting in traffic. :)

One day, all personal transport will be AI, and lunatics like me who enjoy performance driving will have special vehicles we drive at a track. Self driving cars are great. That you can’t afford one is just a matter of time.

The replies to this comment are very telling. Everyone is highlighting various desires and issues with cars:

- Cars are dangerous to people not in cars - Cars require your undivided attention (and even that isn't fool-proof) - Cars are inaccessible: age, eyesight, control operation, etc. - There's a lot of traffic (iow there's a lot of cars)

What people are expressing a desire for is more robust public transit and transportation facilities that protect everyone: peds, drivers, cyclists, etc.

The best way to solve all of these problems, totally ignoring self-driving for a moment, is to reduce the total number of vehicle miles traveled. Reduce the number of car trips. Reduce the length of car trips. If there are less cars, there is less danger from cars. If there are less cars, there is less traffic. The only way to have less cars is to provide alternatives: street cars, bike trails, pedestrian facilities, sub-regional buses and trains, inter-regional trains (or buses).

Literally all of these problems get significantly better when there are less drivers on the road. Trains can provide the inter-regional travel that allows you to work, read, hangout, sleep, etc. without the constant danger of having to watch the road the entire time.

Self-driving cars will certainly be useful, but I think people are really missing the point that the root of the problem is cars specifically. They can (and will!) still be available for people that truly want or need them, but harm reduction is the name of the game. Even changing a portion of your trip from car to something else can make a huge difference! It doesn't have to be door-to-door, it could be that you drive to a park-n-ride. Or you stop driving to the local downtown in the spring, summer, and fall.

Most of the people in this comment section want better public transit. It can be made to work even if the goal is to go skiing or mountain biking once you arrive. Cars need to stop being the default and become the exception. It's cheaper, more efficient, safer, and healthier.

That was planned a very long time ago. It was too early, and we completely squandered it. Now the spectrum allocated for V2V it is gone.

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