US electric car manufacturer Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe said in an interview on Tuesday local time that the company is considering producing its own lidar sensors and may cooperate with a Chinese company to produce them. Rivian launched a plan last year to develop its own chips as part of its overall strategy to develop proprietary self-driving technology that would compete with Tesla's products.
Rivian said that the R2 model launched later this year will be equipped with a lidar sensor, which can help self-driving cars obtain a three-dimensional image of the road.
Rivian did not disclose the supplier of its lidar sensors, which are much smaller on the demo vehicles than the large, rotating sensors commonly found on self-driving taxis designed by Alphabet Inc's Waymo Inc.
Rivian is considering using Chinese technology to produce lidar sensors in the United States instead of purchasing them directly from Chinese suppliers. Scaringe said in an interview in San Francisco that they may do this through a joint venture. Scaringe also noted that "all the real options come from China" for the sensors that automakers like Rivian need "in the low hundreds of dollars."
“You can think of it as finding a way to structurally integrate this technology,” Scaringe said, “from the early lidars that many of us have seen — like what we’re seeing here — to today’s more advanced solid-state lidars. State-of-the-art lidar, these advances are not happening in the United States, but in China.”
Scaringe said Rivian is in “active discussions” with lidar companies, and the work may also involve other automakers.
“A lot of different automakers are looking at how to collaborate, or at least work together to build capacity in the U.S. or at least outside of China,” he said.
Scaringe also revealed that Rivian is investing "hundreds of millions of dollars" in its custom chip project. The project's first chip is internally called the Rivian Autonomous Driving Processor or RAP-1, which will be released this year.
Scaringe said the automaker plans to release a new chip "every few years," and that RAP-2 and RAP-3 will be follow-ups to the first chip, using "more powerful" chip technology than the TSMC 5-nanometer process used in RAP-1.
“It’s not like you invest a few hundred million dollars and be done with it,” Scaringe said. “We put together a team. That team will continue to develop future versions of the platform.”
