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

is everyone designing their own silicon getting so much additional them-specific utility out of it that it's actually worth it?

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.

Which honestly is crazy to me. I have a Rivian, and to say the software is disappointing would be an understatement. There are heisenbugs galore; some examples:

* Doors refuse to open

* Lose the ability to control media playback using any controls

* Any button in the UI just opens and closes the windows

Granted, I'm a server side/backend engineer mostly, and I don't know much about writing software/firmware for a very hostile emf environment. But if any project I worked on had bugs like this, fixed at the rate they're fixed on Rivian, I would assume a badly flawed architecture or non existent technical leadership

Yet VW paid billions for this very software. I can't imagine how bad it must've been on their own stack that they gave up and bought this other seemingly broken stack