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

Autonomy subscriptions are how things are going to go, I called this a long time ago. It makes too much sense in terms of continuous development and operations/support to not have a subscription -- and subscriptions will likely double as insurance at some point in the future (once the car is driving itself 100% of the time, and liability is always with the self driving stack anyway).

Of course, people won't like this, I'm not exactly enthused either, but the alternative would be a corporation constantly providing -- for free -- updates and even support if your car gets into an accident or stuck. That doesn't really make sense from a business perspective.

Imagine having a vehicle with +680 hp (or 1000 hp in case of Rivian quad) and then drive it autonomously... sigh where's the fun in that?

There is nothing fun about sitting in traffic on your commute to/from work, and neither there is much fun in doing long-distance driving in a straight line on highway for hours on end (regardless of the horsepower). That's what autonomous driving is for imo.

There is a lot of fun in driving a high-hp car on track or offroad or in some not-much-populated area or in plenty of other scenarios. That's where using autonomous driving mode would feel preposterous to me.

> There is nothing fun about sitting in traffic on your commute to/from work, and neither there is much fun in doing long-distance driving in a straight line on highway for hours on end

And I wish this would be more broadly recognized. Every time there's a story about someone important freaking out about something related to autonomous driving, I'm at least somewhat afraid they'll use it as justification to deny me access to it for those specific use cases.

And honestly, those are the only use cases I really care about or feel comfortable with right now. Of course my car is also too old to support much more than that.