Rivian’s head of software says the company is not trying to be like Tesla on automation

Wassym Bensaid, Rivian’s chief software officer, told B-17 that the EV company aims to deliver a software alternative to Apple Carplay.

Rivian isn’t prioritizing autonomous driving, the company’s chief software officer said in an interview with B-17.

As Waymo and Tesla race to scale autonomous driving and usher in an era of self-driving cars and robotaxis, Rivian, the 15-year-old electric truck and SUV company based in Irvine, California, has different priorities for artificial intelligence, CSO Wassym Bensaid told B-17.

“We are not necessarily chasing full-self driving, we’re not chasing robotaxis,” he said. “Our goal is incremental improvements to the safety and convenience for customers.”

For Bensaid, who joined Rivian in 2019 as the senior director of the system architecture and integration team, AI is an opportunity to deliver a safer and seamless driving experience through improved software.

During a fireside chat at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco on October 30, the CSO said, “The car is a fantastic environment for AI” and that the ideal vehicle would be one that could be largely controlled by a user’s voice.

“The fact that we’re touching the screen or the fact that we’re using buttons today in some cars — I think it’s an anomaly. It’s a bug, it’s not a feature,” Bensaid said. “Ideally, you would want to interact with your car through voice. And the problem today is that most voice assistants are just broken. They don’t work. And this is where AI can really unlock and enable very different experiences in the car.”

‘We’re doing a tech product which happens to be a car’

Unlike its EV counterparts at Tesla or General Motors, Rivian’s core focus has been the electric vehicle pickup and SUV segment, but it has struggled to take a significant bite out of the EV market in the US.

Its first truck, the R1T, wasn’t delivered to customers until 2021, 12 years after Rivian’s founding in 2009 by current CEO RJ Scaringe. This year, the company went through two rounds of layoffs. In October, the company announced it would cut production target from 57,000 units to between 47,000 and 49,000 units, citing supply chain issues.

EVs approached an inflection point earlier this year, with the sales rate slowing even though the demand for electric cars persists. This has caused legacy car companies like Ford to pump the brakes on its ambitious EV goals.

Scaringe said in an interview with The Verge that the slowdown in EV growth stems from an “extreme lack of choice” for affordable options. Rivian’s lowest-priced vehicle, the R1T truck, retails for about $70,000.

A $5 billion investment from Volkswagen announced in June could help the struggling EV company deliver on its cheapest model yet, the R2, priced at $45,000 and set to launch in 2026.

The CEO said on Kleiner Perkins’ “Grit” podcast from September that he has made an intentional effort to avoid becoming a Tesla 2.0.

“Tesla has been absolutely inspiring,” Scaringe said during the podcast. “One of the things that was so important to me with Rivian was to make sure we weren’t covering the same ground as Tesla.”

Bensaid’s comments to B-17 reflected much of the same sentiment.

“We’re not chasing a specific autonomy level because we think, philosophically, that it’s really about the incremental features, whether it’s safety or convenience that you can progressively add to the car,” he said. “In some cases, some of the automakers end up in a battle over winning standards instead of really delivering better features for customers.”

A spokesperson for Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.

During the TechCrunch fireside chat, the chief software officer said that Rivian’s “north star” will eventually be an operating system for other car companies, providing an alternative to Apple’s CarPlay.

In January, Goldman Sachs analysts said Rivian’s software is “a key part of the value proposition and monetization opportunity” for the company.

“Software is, really behind the scenes, pervasive throughout the entire company,” Bensaid told B-17. “And we see Rivian as a tech company. We’re doing a tech product which happens to be a car.”