Electric vehicle maker Rivian has detailed a major update to its driver assistance system, bringing expanded hands free driving and new automation features to its lineup.
The company shared the changes during its Autonomy and AI Day event today, which is now available to watch online in replay.
The biggest addition is Universal Hands Free, a system that lets drivers operate hands free on more than 5.5 million kilometres of compatible roads across the US and Canada. As long as lane markings are visible, the vehicle can steer on its own. Rivian says the system also supports momentary manual adjustments through “Co steer,” letting drivers fine tune their lane position without disabling the feature.
Rivian is also introducing Lane Change on Command, which will automatically perform lane changes on divided highways when the turn signal is activated. Owners can also set “Drive Styles,” which adjust acceleration, following distance and overall behaviour based on mild, medium or spicy settings.
The company says its vehicles use 10 HDR cameras and multiple radar sensors to detect objects at long range and maintain full 360 degree awareness. Rivian claims the onboard computing system can process 200 trillion operations per second, with each drive feeding into its machine learning model to improve performance over time.
New autonomy features will be bundled under a subscription called Autonomy+, arriving in February 2026. Pricing is set at $69.99 CAD per month or a one time option of $3,500 CAD, with a 60 day trial included for new deliveries. The subscription will also add automatic parking and full highway guidance, from on ramp to off ramp, later in 2026.
In comparison, Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) capability is priced at $99 CAD per month or a one time payment of $11,000 CAD. Tesla’s system relies only on cameras and its AI neural net, that keeps getting trained from its huge customer fleet.
Tesla abandoned radar (May 2021) and lidar for a vision-only autonomous driving system because, as Elon Musk stated, “Vision became so good that radar actually reduced SNR” and adding lidar or radar “reduce[s] safety due to sensor contention” when sensors disagree with cameras. He has consistently argued that “humans drive with eyes & biological neural nets, so makes sense that cameras & silicon neural nets are only way to achieve generalized solution to self-driving,” calling lidar an expensive crutch that fails in rain, snow, or dust while high-resolution radar still “just can’t compare to passive optical.”
Rivian says its Core driver assistance features will remain included at no extra cost. This covers lane keeping, lane departure warnings, adaptive cruise control, lane change assist on supported highways, automatic high beams, blind spot warnings, collision warnings, automatic emergency braking and other safety systems.
In a demo of the Rivian Universal Hands Free, the system tried to run a red light, according to Gjeebs:
Currently, the Rivian R1S starts at $139,990 CAD and R1T from $132,990 CAD. The cheaper R2 SUV is coming in 2026 priced from $66,500 CAD.
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