Rivian Automotive is exploring the possibility of manufacturing its own lidar sensors and has not ruled out working with a Chinese company to do so, CEO RJ Scaringe said in an interview with Reuters on Tuesday. The Irvine, California-based electric vehicle maker has been developing proprietary self-driving hardware and software, and last year announced plans to produce its own chips as part of that strategy.
Scaringe confirmed that a version of Rivian's upcoming R2 model, due later this year, will be equipped with lidar sensors that provide a three-dimensional view of the road. He did not name the supplier for those sensors. On Rivian demonstration vehicles the lidar units have been notably smaller than the large, spinning sensors used by some robotaxi fleets.
Several Chinese companies, including Hesai Group and RoboSense, have become prominent suppliers of compact, lower-cost lidar sensors. That shift toward Chinese-made components has prompted national security concerns among lawmakers in the United States. Rather than sourcing directly from a Chinese vendor, Rivian is considering producing lidar in the United States using Chinese technology, potentially via a joint venture, Scaringe said in the interview in San Francisco.
Scaringe characterized the current industry landscape for the price level Rivian needs - the "low hundreds of dollars price point" - by saying, "all the real choices are coming out of China." He added that the company is looking for a way to "structurally ingest the technology."
Expanding on that point, Scaringe contrasted early lidar designs with recent progress toward solid-state systems. "The advancements in terms of going from the early lidars that I think a lot of us have seen - we see them here - to these much more advanced solid-state lidars, those advancements didn’t happen in the United States. Those advancements happened in China," he said.
Rivian is in "active discussions" with lidar firms and is considering a collaborative approach that could include other automakers. "A number of different car manufacturers are thinking about how they could do that either together, or at least through a shared alignment to say, hey, let’s develop production capacity in the United States for this, or at least outside China," Scaringe said.
Separately, Rivian is committing significant capital to its in-house chip program. Scaringe said the company will invest "many hundreds of millions of dollars" in custom silicon. The first of those chips, internally named the Rivian Autonomy Processor or RAP-1, is slated to arrive this year.
The automaker plans to follow RAP-1 with additional generations on a roughly biennial cadence. Scaringe said successors RAP-2 and RAP-3 will be built on more powerful chip technology than the 5-nanometer process used by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to produce RAP-1. "It’s not like you invest a few hundred million dollars and it’s done," he said. "We’ve built a team. That team is going to continue to develop future versions of the platform."
Implications for industry participants
- Automakers pursuing advanced driver assistance and autonomy are evaluating whether to rely on established suppliers or to bring key sensor manufacturing in-house.
- Chipmakers and contract manufacturers may be affected by OEM moves to design and commission proprietary silicon on a multi-year roadmap.
- Suppliers based in China have driven recent advances in compact, lower-cost lidar technology that many vehicle makers are now considering integrating.
Notes on the information provided
The reporting reflects statements made by RJ Scaringe in an interview in San Francisco. It describes ongoing deliberations and active discussions; it does not report any final agreements or identify specific partners or suppliers. The timetable and technical details referenced are those provided by Rivian in the interview.