Rivian detailed Thursday how it plans to make its electric vehicles increasingly autonomous — an ambitious effort that includes new hardware, including lidar and custom silicon, and eventually, a potential entry into the self-driving ride-hail market, according to CEO RJ Scaringe.

The announcements at the company’s first “Autonomy & AI Day” event in Palo Alto, California shed fresh light on Rivian’s technology development, much of which has been kept undercover as it pushes to begin production of its more affordable R2 SUV in the first half of 2026. Rivian’s event is also a very public signal to shareholders that it’s keeping pace, or even exceeding, the automated-driving capabilities of industry rivals like Tesla, Ford, General Motors, as well as automakers from Europe and China.

Rivian said it will expand the hands-free version of its driver-assistance software to “over 3.5 million miles of roads across the USA and Canada” and will eventually expand beyond highways to surface streets. This expanded access will be available on the company’s second-generation R1 trucks and SUVs. It’s calling the expanded capabilities “Universal Hands-Free,” and will launch in early 2026. Rivian says it will charge a one-time free of $2,500 or $49.99 per month.

“What that means is you can get into the vehicle at your house, plug in the address to where you’re going, and the vehicle will completely drive you there,” Scaringe said Thursday describing a point-to-point navigation feature.

After that, Rivian plans to allow drivers to take their eyes off the road. “This gives you your time back. You can be on your phone, or reading a book, no longer needing to be actively involved in the operation of vehicle.”

Rivian’s driver assistance software won’t stop there; the EV maker laid out plans on Thursday to enhance its capabilities all the way up to what it’s calling “personal L4,” a nod to the level set by the Society of Automotive Engineers that means a car can operate in a particular area with no human intervention.

After that, Scaringe hinted that Rivian will be looking at competing with the likes of Waymo. “While our initial focus will be on personally owned vehicles, which today represent a vast majority of the miles driven the United States, this also enables us to pursue opportunities in the rideshare space,” he said.

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To help accomplish these lofty goals, Rivian has been building a “large driving model” (think: an LLM but for real-world driving), part of a move away from a rules-based framework for developing autonomous vehicles that has been led by Tesla. The company also showed off its own custom 5nm processor which it says will be built in collaboration with both Arm and TSMC.

That custom chip powers what Rivian is referring to as its third-generation “autonomy computer,” or ACM3. The new computer can process 5 billion pixels per second, and will start showing up on Rivian’s upcoming mass-market R2 SUV in late 2026.

Rivian will couple the ACM3 with a lidar sensor at the top of the windshield (from an undisclosed supplier) to provide “three-dimensional spatial data and redundant sensing,” which it says will help with “real-time detection for the edge cases of driving.”

The R2 is set to start shipping in the first half of 2026, meaning the launch versions of the SUV will not have ACM3 or the lidar sensor. But the company said in a press release that it aims to “continuously improve the autonomy capabilities” of its “Gen 2 R1 and future R2 vehicles, with a clear trajectory including point-to-point, eyes off and personal L4.”

The company believes it can reach an advanced state of autonomy in many of its current vehicles without the new hardware — but Scaringe said Thursday that the new hardware suite will “enable a much higher ceiling than we have in our vehicles today.”

Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.

You can contact or verify outreach from Sean by emailing sean.okane@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at okane.01 on Signal.