Details on Rivian's self-driving goals

[diplomat33]

Rivian has given more details on their self-driving capabilities that they hope to bring to their EV pick-up truck, the R1T and R1S:
Rivian's self-driving future in focus at Amazon's re:MARS 2019 event

Here is the relevant part:

The camera and radar hardware on Rivian’s production vehicles will be capable of Level 3 autonomous driving that’s upgradable via over-the-air software updates. The initial vehicles will ship with Level 2 capabilities and use data accumulated from its customers’ driving sent to the cloud to develop its Level 3 transition.

The Future of Self-Driving Technology: Aurora is improving self-driving technology with the Aurora Driver, the computer system that powers and coordinates signals from its perception system to control vehicles of different makes, models and classes. Hear from Aurora to better understand the role of AI in self-driving technology and the longstanding impacts of self-driving cars for our future.

A few thoughts:
1) No mention of LIDAR. I wonder if Rivian is going with just cameras and radar?
2) Rivian is going with over the air software updates. Good!
3) They are aiming for L3 autonomy. It certainly sounds more realistic to just promise L2 to L3. However, I thought there was a general consensus among many self-driving projects that L3 is ultimately not a smart goal because L3 is a sort of half-way point in between human responsibility and machine responsibility which could cause the driver to lose attention and as a result be less safe? It's why companies like Waymo have worked to go straight to L4. Even Tesla is trying to go straight to L4/5.
4) The use of fleet learning is good. But considering that Rivian is starting from 0 in fleet size, it seems like it may take them awhile to leverage that ability. Or is Rivian planning to start with what Tesla would call FSD "feature complete" at L2 and just use fleet learning to bump it up to L3? That could still take awhile depending on how many vehicles they sell. It is hard to tell since I don't think we know much about the status of their FSD.

 

[Bladerskb]

Rivian

Rivian uses lidar, but they are not really an autonomous player and are absolutely no threat. They don't even have a full AD/ADAS team at the moment.

 

[Eno Deb]

Rivian

Rivian uses lidar, but they are not really an autonomous player and are absolutely no threat. They don't even have a full AD/ADAS team at the moment.

They also appear to have side radars in addition to the front one. Looks like the sensor suite is tailored for an EyeQ 4- or 5-based solution.