Overview
- Rivian began an over‑the‑air rollout of its Rivian Assistant to eligible Gen 1 and Gen 2 R1 vehicles in May 2026 as part of software update 2026.15.
- Chief Software Officer Wassym Bensaid told The Verge’s Decoder podcast that deep in‑car AI makes the CarPlay and Android Auto debate “completely obsolete” and cited an internal drop in CarPlay requests from over 70% to under 25%.
- The Rivian–Volkswagen joint venture RV Tech is scaling to about 1,500 direct employees and licenses Rivian’s zonal electrical architecture and OS while Volkswagen’s stake has risen to roughly 15.9%.
- Rivian explicitly excluded its autonomy platform and the Rivian Assistant from RV Tech and says the assistant runs on a dedicated orchestration layer rather than the JV stack.
- The company plans a mix of cloud and local inference, upcoming XMM3 vehicle compute, and possible rate‑limits to control costs, and it is negotiating whether similar AI features will be licensed to Volkswagen brands.