By Stephen Nellis, Max A. Cherney and Abhirup Roy
SAN FRANCISCO, May 5 (Reuters) - Rivian Automotive is considering making its own lidar sensors and could do so in partnership with a Chinese firm, CEO RJ Scaringe said in an interview with Reuters on Tuesday.
The Irvine, California-based electric automaker last year launched a plan to make its own chips as part of a broader push to develop its own proprietary self-driving technology that would compete with products from Tesla. Rivian said that a version
of its R2 vehicles coming later this year would include lidar sensors, which help self-driving vehicles gain a three-dimensional view of the road.
Rivian did not disclose who would supply it with lidar sensors, which on demonstration vehicles were much smaller than the large, spinning units found on the streets of San Francisco and other cities in robotaxis designed by Alphabet's Waymo. Chinese suppliers such as Hesai Group and RoboSense have come to dominate the market for smaller, cheaper lidar sensors, but the rise of Chinese sensors has raised national security concerns among U.S. lawmakers.
Rather than buy directly from a Chinese supplier, Rivian is mulling making its own lidar sensors in the United States using Chinese technology, possibly through a joint venture, Scaringe said in the interview in San Francisco. Scaringe said that "all the real choices are coming out of China" for the "low hundreds of dollars price point" for the sensor that automakers such as Rivian require.
"Think of it as finding a way to structurally ingest the technology," Scaringe said. "The advancements in terms of going from the early lidars that I think a lot of us have seen - we see them here - to these much more advanced solid-state lidars, those advancements didn't happen in the United States. Those advancements happened in China."
Scaringe said Rivian is in "active discussions" with lidar firms and that the effort might also include other automakers.
"A number of different car manufacturers are thinking about how they could do that either together, or at least through a shared alignment to say, hey, let's develop production capacity in the United States for this, or at least outside China," Scaringe said.
Rivian is committing "many hundreds of millions of dollars" to its custom chip program, whose first chip, called the Rivian Autonomy Processor or RAP-1 internally, arrives this year, Scaringe said.
The automaker intends to release a new chip "every couple of years" with RAP-2 and RAP-3 successors to the first chip made on "more powerful" chip technology than the 5-nanometer from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company used to make RAP-1, the CEO said.
"It's not like you invest a few hundred million dollars and it's done," Scaringe said. "We've built a team. That team is going to continue to develop future versions of the platform."
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis, Max Cherney and Abhirup Roy in San Francisco; Editing by Sam Holmes)
