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

Rivians have been spotted with giant Velodyne VLS-128 "Alpha Puck"s since several years ago [1]. But from last I checked, Rivian's ADAS is still struggling with ping-ponging in lanes on curved stretches, and it only works on a small set of pre-mapped highways. Highly doubtful that "universal hands free" is coming.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/mqijd2/riv...

The big lidars are for ground truth collection. They get used in projects ranging from autonomous development all the way down to budget adaptive cruise control or parking sensor benchmarking.

The ping-ponging is certainly a Gen1 problem. (My Gen1 does this.) Gen1 was essentially an off-the-shelf Mobileye unit, and the performance was, as expected, not good.

Gen2 autonomy stack is completely unrelated to Gen1, and from what I hear is a completely different level of reliability.

(also - this presentation covered yet another, unrelated, gen3 autonomy stack, which shares none of the hardware or models with the existing gen2 stack, either.)