Waiting For Lidar In The Rivian R2 Might Not Be Worth The Headache

• Early units of the Rivian R2 will not be equipped with lidar.
• This has caused a bit of a debate between early adopters: buy early and get the car first, or wait for the newest tech?
• Rivian’s leadership says that buyers won’t notice the difference between the two “for some time.”

Rivian’s upcoming R2 is all the range right now. The automaker has the potential to poach a ton of buyers already in the EV space, including Tesla buyers who want to try something new. But a lot of those Tesla owners have technological PTSD and fear that being an early adopter could mean that they’re left in the dust later on.

That’s why when Rivian announced that early models of the R2 wouldn’t come equipped with lidar, some folks winced. Fans on forums wondered aloud whether it was really worth buying a Launch Package R2, or whether they should wait until Rivian pushes out its new autonomy-focused hardware later this year. Fear not, early adopters, because the automaker says that even if buyers pick up a lidar-less R2, they won’t notice a difference for years.

Photo by: Rivian

That little tidbit came from two bigwigs over at Rivian: Wassym Bensaid, the company’s Chief Software Officer, and James Philbin, SVP of Autonomy and AI. The pair spearheaded an AMA over on Reddit where they answered a ton of questions about the upcoming electric SUV, including how Rivian will handle lidar in its autonomy stack.

“Lidar-equipped vehicles will form the foundation of an improved data flywheel for our Large Driving Model (LDM), with benefits that accrue to the entire Gen2+ fleets, regardless of sensor suite,” said Philbin in a response to a question regarding autonomy capabilities between lidar-equipped and lidar-less models. “We do not expect a noticeable difference between lidar and non-lidar vehicles for some time.”

Philbin went on the say that the company believes that the autonomous driver assistance capabilities are expected to remain the same between Rivian’s Gen 2 and its upcoming Gen 3 platform “for the next several years.” The roadmap includes the capability of point-to-point hands-free assisted driving on the early R2 Performance with Launch Package, which won’t come with LIDAR.

Here’s the full comment:

Both Gen 3 (RAP1) and Gen 2 platform vehicles will have similar levels of capability at both the base and Autonomy+ levels for the next couple of years. Since all Autonomy features are based on the same underlying technology, base autonomy features will continue to improve along with new Autonomy+ features.

Lidar on R2 will have the same core feature set as non-lidar vehicles, including Autonomy+, with the main difference being that over time lidar vehicles will require less supervision including greater eyes-off support.

Notably, would-be early adopters of the R2 have been a bit nervous to make the jump to an early release of the R2 that launched without lidar. This especially after Rivian confirmed that it has no plans to retrofit the sensor to cars later on.

The good news is that it sounds like the sensor won’t make a huge difference near-term. Comments from Rivian show that the biggest benefit to lidar, at least initially, is that it will help Rivian to better improve its autonomy models thanks to richer data being collected by its fleet of lidar-equipped cars. 

If you’re someone who keeps cars until the wheels fall off, eventually you might notice a difference between the two autonomy stacks. Rivian is transparent about this, though is pretty vague on the timeline outside of noting that it will be “several years” before this becomes obvious.

But if you like to switch cars to get the latest and greatest tech (and want to be one of the first folks with an R2), it sounds like buying early or waiting won’t make that much of a difference—at least as far as short-term autonomy capabilities are concerned.