Rivian has a future beyond electric trucks and vans according to the company's founder.
He put a lot of human power behind that effort.
About half of Rivian's employees are focused on future products.
Updating compute, drive unite, and battery packs are important.
Rivian is seen by Scaringe as charting a course toward smaller electric vehicles like e- bikes and even using self driving vehicles. The battery supply chain in the U.S. will be discussed by Scaringe.
The Rivian R1S SUV is parked in San Francisco. The image was created by Haje Kamps.
Over the next 10 to 15 years, a quarter of the way we think about our product portfolio is that we will increasingly use vehicles, public transportation, and e- bikes. We have a lot of products that are far away from what you see here.
Even though Rivian has a trademark for an e-bike, Scaringe wouldn't say explicitly that Rivian is planning on making one. The founder believes that e-bikes will play an increasingly important role for transportation.
Rivian will be moving to smaller form factors, which is the next move for urban delivery, according to Scaringe.
Rivian CEO says policy needs to help guide how these new things are integrated into cities
He said that a lot of the new types of mobility that are emerging weren't considered in how we designed our streets. Are you talking about e- bikes? There is a loophole in the law that allows kids to ride a bike that can go 20 miles an hour. The regulatory framework needs to catch up over the next couple of years.
The CEO of Rivian was on the stage of the Disrupt stage. The image was created by Haje Kamps.
He broke it down into two systems, which involve spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on perception and compute in a vehicle to achieve a very high level of autonomy where the vehicle drives.
It's possible to take your hands off the wheel and eyes off the road, but there are other circumstances where you have to participate.
The Rivian cars have a driver assistance system called Driver+.
The hardware-constrained systems continue to get better, whereas the hardware heavy systems are taking a lot of capital for a roadmap that keeps extending longer than expected.
"We get to leverage the learnings that occur between our consumer vehicles and our commercial vehicles, the commercial vehicles which are driving on many different routes." There is a lot of learning that you get from the deployed fleet. The role that artificial intelligence and machine learning can play in your camera's training is very powerful. Our platform is going to have the better long term potential because it is a more hardware constrained system that can be applied across a lot of vehicles in millions and millions of miles.
It is possible for companies with heavy hardware to have Level 4 autonomy. The system can drive itself under certain constraints without the driver taking over. Rivian's current vehicles will be limited to Level 3, which means the system can drive itself in certain conditions but a human must take over driving if the system requires it, due to its hardware limitations.
As compute levels rise, the ability to expand it to Level 4 is definitely there.
Having human drivers behind the wheel is becoming a liability and is one of the reasons Scaringe thinks it is a smart business move. According to insurance providers. The more drivers use Driver+, the lower the rates will be.
It's better than the best human according to Scaringe. The vehicle is not going to check its phone for a text while it is in motion. The safety aspect of moving into these Level 2, Level 3 systems that drive towards more and more time being driven by the vehicle itself is meaningful.
The supply chain constraint we are likely to see across the battery supply chain over the next 15 years is an example of the chip shortage we just went through.
It wasn't built for hundreds of thousands of large battery packs going into electric vehicles. It's small because it was built around consumer electronics.
It has to grow on the order of 20x over the next 10 to 15 years and so the level of investment needed to build that is staggering. The level of risk concentration is a real thing since it hasn't been built in the US. The IRA bill has a huge impact on the transportation space because it creates large and very helpful incentives to go build and create the supply chain that doesn't exist today.
The Department of Energy awarded over two billion dollars to 20 battery companies to boost domestic production.
Despite the moves being made in this space, and the dollars going into it, Scaringe still believes that the demand for battery materials and cells will outstrip the supply in the future.
The industry is going to be constrained by how quickly we go from a few million electric vehicles a year to 100 million electric vehicles a year.
Rivian made 7,363 of its EV pickups and SUVs in Q3
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