RJ Scaringe, founder and CEO of electric vehicle maker Rivian, says the company\u2019s future goes beyond electric trucks and vans.<\/p>\n
Onstage at Disrupt on Wednesday, the executive said out of Rivian\u2019s 13,000 employees, about half are focused on what\u2019s next for the company.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo that\u2019s updated compute, updated drive unites and really important updated battery packs,\u201d said Scaringe.<\/p>\n
Scaringe also said he sees Rivian charting a course toward smaller EVs like e-bikes and even using autonomous vehicle technology. Scaringe also touched on the future of the battery supply chain in the U.S.<\/span><\/p>\n A Rivian R1S SUV is parked at the Disrupt stage in San Francisco on October 19, 2022. Image Credits:<\/strong> Haje Kamps \/ <\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWhen you look at transportation over the next 10 to 15 years, a quarter part of the way we think about our product portfolio is that we\u2019re increasingly gonna go towards multimodal, so we\u2019ll be using vehicles sometimes, public transportation other times, and increasingly e-bikes,\u201d Scaringe told transportation editor Kirsten Korosec. \u201cSo for us to be part of that sort of mosaic of different mobility solutions, we have a whole host of products, a number of which are pretty far from what you see here.\u201d<\/p>\n Scaringe wouldn\u2019t commit to saying explicitly that Rivian is planning on making an e-bike, even though the company did file a trademark for an e-bike earlier this year. However, the founder did say he thinks e-bikes will play an increasingly important role for transportation, both in the movement of goods and people.<\/p>\n Scaringe elaborated on that point, saying Rivian will be moving to smaller form factors, which Scaringe sees as the next move for urban deliveries.<\/p>\n At the same time, the Rivian CEO says policy needs to learn how to ingest some of these new modalities.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re living in a world right now where a lot of these new types of mobility that are emerging weren\u2019t contemplated in how we designed our streets, our parking, certainly policy,\u201d he said. \u201cYou\u2019re talking about e-bikes. This is a really key one; there\u2019s a loophole where kids can be on a bike that can go 20 miles an hour because it\u2019s a bike. So we\u2019re seeing the regulatory framework needs to do a lot of catch-up over the next couple of years around these spaces.\u201d<\/p>\n RJ Scaringe, CEO at Rivian, on the Disrupt stage in San Francisco on October 19, 2022. Image Credits:<\/strong> Haje Kamps \/ <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Scaringe expressed concern that society seems to have lumped together all different types of autonomy, so he broke it down into two systems \u2014 hardware-heavy 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 itself and often eliminates the need for even a steering wheel; and hardware-constrained systems, or advanced driver assistance systems, where automakers only need to spend thousands of dollars on sensors and compute to achieve a lower level of autonomy.<\/p>\n \u201cSo the ability to take your hands off the wheel and eyes off the road and have the vehicle drive, but there are a number of circumstances where of course you as the driver have to participate,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Rivian\u2019s vehicles are equipped with the latter form of autonomy, its driver assistance system called Driver+.<\/p>\n Scaringe said that the hardware-heavy systems are taking a lot of capital for a roadmap that keeps extending longer than most anticipated, whereas the hardware-constrained systems continue to get better.<\/p>\n \u201cWe 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, frankly, all day long,\u201d said Scaringe. \u201cSo there\u2019s this wonderful learning that you get from the deployed fleet. And so while there\u2019s less hardware, the role that AI and ML can play in your camera\u2019s training, therefore, your planning algorithms, is really quite powerful. And so our view as a company is really a more hardware-constrained system that can be applied across a lot of vehicles in millions and millions of miles is a platform that\u2019s going to have the better long term potential.\u201d<\/p>\n Scaringe also said that for hardware-heavy companies, Level 4 autonomy is already widely possible as long as you create a geofence. Level 4 means the autonomous system can drive itself under certain environmental constraints without requiring the driver to take over. Rivian\u2019s current vehicles will be limited to Level 3 autonomous technology, 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, said Scaringe.<\/p>\n \u201cBut over time, of course, as we add new sensing modalities, and as compute levels continue to rise, the ability to expand it to Level 4 is certainly there,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n One of the reasons Scaringe thinks it\u2019s a savvy business move to pursue autonomy is because, increasingly, having human drivers behind the wheel is becoming a liability. At least, according to insurance providers. Scaringe says through Rivian\u2019s insurance products, rates actually go down the more drivers use Driver+.<\/p>\n \u201cThe reason for that is it\u2019s much better than the best human,\u201d said Scaringe. \u201cThe vehicle\u2019s not going to check its phone for a text, it\u2019s not going to get distracted by something out the window. So the safety aspect of moving into these Level 2, Level 3 systems that intentionally drive towards more and more time being driven by the vehicle itself is meaningful and real.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you look at the semiconductor shortage we\u2019ve just gone through\u2026 I would call that an appetizer to the degree of the supply chain constraint we\u2019re likely to see across the battery supply chain over the next 15 years,\u201d said Scaringe.<\/p>\n The battery supply chain as we know it wasn\u2019t built for hundreds of thousands of large battery packs going into electric vehicles. It was built largely around consumer electronics, so it\u2019s very small, said Scaringe.<\/p>\n \u201cSo it has to grow on the order of 20x over the next 10 to 15 years, and so the level of investment needed to go build that is staggering,\u201d said Scaringe. \u201cAnd moreover I think the level of risk concentration, given that it hasn\u2019t been built in the United States, is a real thing. So, you know the the IRA bill that recently passed which affects many businesses, it has a huge impact on the transportation space because it creates very large and very helpful incentives to go build and create the supply chain that doesn\u2019t exist today.\u201d<\/p>\n Earlier today, the Department of Energy actually awarded $2.8 billion to 20 battery companies to boost domestic production, the first tranche of $7 billion that has been set aside per Biden\u2019s Infrastructure Bill.<\/p>\n Despite the moves being made in this space, and the dollars going into it, Scaringe still sees the demand for battery materials and cells outstripping the supply in the near future.<\/p>\n \u201cThis isn\u2019t speaking to Rivian, but as an industry, it\u2019s going to constrain how rapidly we go from, you know, a few million electric vehicles a year to 100 million electric vehicles a year,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" RJ Scaringe, founder and CEO of electric vehicle maker Rivian, says the company\u2019s future goes beyond electric trucks and vans. Onstage at Disrupt on Wednesday, the executive said out of Rivian\u2019s 13,000 employees, about half are focused on what\u2019s next for the company. \u201cSo that\u2019s updated compute, updated drive unites and really important updated battery […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1229154,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1229152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrity-gossip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1229152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1229152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1229152\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1229152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1229152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1229152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A multimodal business with smaller EVs<\/h2>\n
A rosier outlook on lower-level autonomy<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/gp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/TechCrunch-Disrupt-Haje-Kamps-522.jpg\")
<\/p>\nDealing with battery supply issues<\/h2>\n