Ford’s BlueCruise hands-free highway self-driving feature has thus far proven to be quite popular, and it continues to expand quickly as a result. BlueCruise isn’t without its fair share of competition such as GM’s Super Cruise and Tesla’s Autopilot/Full-Self Driving features, most recently adding the new STLA AutoDrive to that list from Stellantis. As Ford Authority reported in January, Rivian – once a Ford partner, and now an EV rival – was also planning to launch its own BlueCruise foe in 2025, and now, that feature has officially debuted.
This new feature is called Rivian Enhanced Highway Assist, which enables owners to take their hands off the wheel when it’s engaged. It will operate on 135,000 miles of highway in the U.S. and Canada at launch, with some big expansions planned for the future, both on and off paved surfaces. Rivian developed its own autonomy platform in-house, which utilizes a multimodal suite of 11 cameras and five radars, an onboard compute module capable of over 200 trillion operations per second, and machine learning models.
Rivian Enhanced Highway Assist uses early sensor fusion, combining raw information gathered from its cameras, radars, and other sensors, which the company says is a more effective approach to the late sensor fusion that many other automakers are currently using, as it processes data from each sensor individually. From there, that data is processed using machine learning algorithms, which reportedly results in the vehicles obtaining a more accurate view of their surroundings.
Rivian will continue to update this platform in the coming months and years, and next year, it expects to add a hands-off/eyes-off feature for controlled conditions in its second-generation vehicles. As Ford Authority previously reported, Rivian also expects to share its tech with other automakers, after it signed a joint-venture agreement with Volkswagen that will provide the latter with precisely that, along with electrical architecture and other bits of software.
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