Rivian said Thursday it plans to launch a hands-off version of its driver assistance system for highway driving “in a few weeks,” and an “eyes-off” version in 2026.
The hands-off system will let Rivian compete with companies like Ford and General Motors, which have both launched similar systems in the past few years. (Ford has named its system BlueCruise, while GM has SuperCruise.) Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (supervised) system, which is not fully autonomous despite its name, requires users to keep their hands on the wheel.
The launch comes as Rivian is forecasting another challenging year, driven in large part by uncertainty around what changes the Trump administration might make to regulatory policy. The company did post its first positive gross profit in the fourth quarter of 2024. That was buoyed by a company-wide cost-cutting effort in 2024 but also an increase in software and services revenue.
Rivian’s autonomy ambitions were front-and-center when the company broke stealth in 2018. At that time, CEO RJ Scaringe was talking about dreamy scenarios where Rivian owners could start a hike and have their vehicles drive autonomously to meet them at the finish. But autonomy took a back seat in the years since — at least publicly — as Rivian focused on completing its IPO, and launching and scaling three different vehicles.
Rivian has now posted back-to-back years of building and delivering around 50,000 vehicles, and has some breathing room — thanks to a major deal with Volkswagen finalized late last year — to focus on rolling out features like a hands-off system.
Rivian is training its driver assistance platform using what’s known as “end-to-end” training, a similar approach to what Tesla is doing with its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) software. Instead of writing out hard-coded rules, Rivian uses data from the cameras and radar sensors to train the models that power its driver-assistance system.
Much like Ford and GM, Rivian is starting out by allowing the hands-off feature to only be used on highways. Scaringe said Thursday that, once the eyes-off version launches in 2026, Rivian will slowly allow the driver assistance system to expand beyond other types of roads.
“Ultimately, the end state, we think hands-free, eyes-off needs to be available essentially everywhere,” Scaringe said.
To reach that point, Scaringe said Rivian is evaluating a “variety of really creative ways we can access a substantial amount of GPUs without having to deploy the capex ourselves” in order to train its self-driving models — a notable break from how Tesla is spending billions of dollars on GPUs.
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Rivian’s cost–cutting measures have gotten it a lot closer to profitability, but the company is warning that 2025 could still be a challenging year – especially because of the whorl of uncertainty caused by the new Trump Administration.
The company announced Thursday its fourth quarter and full-year 2024 financial results, and along with it, shared plans to deliver between 46,000 and 51,000 EVs across 2025. Rivian cautioned that “changes to government policies and regulations, and a challenging demand environment” could affect those results, according to the shareholder letter the EV maker released alongside its results.
Rivian didn’t specify what those changes might be, but Trump said on the campaign trail that he was inclined to find a way to kill the $7,500 federal EV tax credit. Friend of the Trump administration Vivek Ramaswamy has also called for the $6.6 billion loan from the Department of Energy to be clawed back. That loan was finalized three days before Trump took office.
Rivian spent much of 2024 on a cost-cutting tear. It laid off 10% of its workforce in February, and rolled out simplified, cheaper-to-make versions of its flagship EVs – the R1T pickup and the R1S SUV – in June. The company ended up changing 600 parts on those vehicles to drive down manufacturing costs, while also revamping its electric architecture and software user interface.
Changes like those helped Rivian notch $170 million of positive gross profit in the final quarter of 2024 – though $60 million of that came from software and services.
Rivian reported $1.7 billion in revenue for the fourth quarter, a 32% increase from the same period in 2023. The bulk of its Q4 revenue — about $1.5 billion — came from the sale of 14,183 vehicles as well as $299 million from the sale of zero-emissions regulatory credits to automakers. For the year, Rivian reported $325 million in revenues from the sale of regulatory credits.
Revenue from software is increasingly playing an important role. Rivian generated $214 million from software and services in the fourth quarter, double the amount from the same-year ago period. Rivian reported $484 million in revenue for 2024 from software and services.
Rivian may be in the business of building and selling EVs, but its future is also largely pinned to software, namely through a lucrative joint venture with Volkswagen Group.
Revenue from software was primarily driven by charging and subscriptions fees, repair and maintenance services, and new vehicle electrical architecture and software development services provided by the joint venture, according to Rivian.
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