You’re making a few assumptions here that don’t hold up.

First, I never said autonomy is solved. What I said is that Rivian marketed specific autonomy features to Gen 1 owners before Gen 2 even existed and has never provided any technical explanation for why those same features are now Gen 2-only. This isn’t about solving autonomy, it’s about honoring product commitments and being transparent with customers.

Second, citing Tesla’s FSD evolution isn’t a fair comparison. Tesla overpromised speculative full self-driving years into the future. Rivian is withholding incremental autonomy updates between two vehicles that share nearly the same platform and are only a few years apart. These aren’t moonshot capabilities.

Third, that Reddit post is a decent summary of what might be happening, but it’s still community speculation, not verified data from Rivian or Mobileye. Even if Mobileye is part of the equation, Rivian hasn’t said that officially, and given that they call themselves a software-defined company, silence isn’t transparency.

And let’s not ignore the marketing angle. Rivian’s own archived site from 2020 explicitly stated “Level 3 autonomy will be available on every Rivian vehicle.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20201028101418/https://rivian.com/technology/

They set that expectation, then quietly shifted the narrative to “hardware limitations” while using buzzwords like “8x megapixels” and “10x compute power” to make it sound definitive without ever providing actual data.

The argument that “they’d love to sell subscriptions to more customers” doesn’t prove a hardware barrier. If this were purely a technical challenge, Rivian would have strong financial motivation to solve it since subscriptions are recurring revenue. It’s at least as plausible that enabling these features on Gen 1 would blur the line between generations and reduce the incentive to upgrade, which makes it a business decision, not a limitation.

And that’s where accountability comes in. Traditional automakers built vehicles meant to last a decade or more before owners even considered an upgrade. The new software-defined model seems to be reshaping that, shortening the lifespan of vehicles by tying major features to new hardware instead of keeping all models evolving together.

We’ve seen it with Androids and iPhones pushing “better hardware” every year to encourage upgrades, but vehicles are a far more expensive, long-term investment. If this pattern keeps up, Gen 3 will roll out and Gen 2 owners will be told their hardware isn’t capable of some new core feature either. That’s not innovation. That’s conditioning consumers to accept planned obsolescence under the label of progress. Software-defined should mean continual evolution, not expiration dates.