Three years after its launch, the Rivian R1 is getting its first significant update. While fans await the release of the recently announced R2 and R3, the $69,900 electric pickup (R1T) and $75,900 SUV (R1S) are getting 600 hardware updates, including a battery option that reaches 420 miles on a charge, heat pumps to warm the cabin efficiently, and an improved quad-motor option that generates 1,025 horsepower and gets 0-60 in 2.4 seconds.
Even if a Rivian isn’t parked on your horizon, your next car may look more like one all the same. The updates inside the vehicle do illustrate larger industry trends. Here’s a look at three notable features that will shape the future of car design.
Zonal architecture
For the new R1, Rivian developed all of its silicon in-house, alongside the software that will run on it. Something you never see—its computer infrastructure—is meant to shave thousands of dollars off the loss-lead build price of an R1, while offering more long-term customization to the product.
The modern car is a computer network on wheels, with processing distributed throughout the vehicle to control everything from your antilock brakes to your backup camera. Until recently, each of these electronic control units (ECUs) in the vehicle had a specialized function no matter where they were set in the vehicle, which made these systems inefficient to integrate. But under zonal architecture, ECUs each handle a different zone of the car rather than one function. They are linked together like nodes in a mini internet, in which each ECU acts as a generalist, managing its local area of the vehicle and connecting to local specialized sensors and silicon to do so.
This architecture leads to savings in weight and expensive processors—which is a reason it’s also been adopted by the conglomerate Stellanis and Tesla. Under zonal architecture, Rivian was able to remove 1.6 miles of wiring connecting computation across the vehicle (simple ethernet cabling takes much of its place)—and this architecture also allowed it to cut down the total number of ECUs needed, from 17 to seven.
Zonal also makes over-the-air (OTA) updates are more feasible (more focused software updates require less code and are smaller to transmit).
“It’s not just simplification in that it’s easier to build [zonal] components; it gives us more control on how we can interface with the product,” says Jeff Hammoud, chief design officer at Rivian. “In our case, we’re more able to rapidly introduce new features and provide updates to let the vehicle evolve over time . . . so then the limitation just becomes, ‘what is the hardware capable of?’”
Smarter, branded exterior lighting
We are living in a renaissance of headlights and taillights, thanks largely to the ever-increasing capabilities of LED lighting. The new R1 has two updates that increase the utility of its front and back light bars.
The first: R1’s front light bar—which side note, is redesigned to be a bit thinner and brighter—will actually fill up as its battery charges, visualizing its fullness almost like a giant version of the battery gauge on your phone.
It’s almost a little silly, if you think about it: your truck as a big ‘ole progress bar. But Hammoud says this debated feature won out internally.
“It’s definitely a little bit of showbiz, but it’s cool . . . you get that added user benefit where you walk up and you can see where you are immediately,” says Hammoud. This handy bit of UX is also meant to make the Rivian more recognizable—every charge is an animated advertisement of the brand—and while a touch whimsical, Hammoud thinks that’s right for Rivian. “We don’t want to take ourselves too seriously all the time,” he says. “It is a little moment of fun.”
The second update is a bit more functional. The back light bar can be set into a new hazard mode that makes it glows bright yellow to warn cars behind you to watch out. You can even set an animation to signal for drivers to go around you to the left or right.
A novel screen experience, powered like a video game
RIP the classic car dashboard. Touchscreens have wiped out many dials and physical buttons, and one test found that simple tasks like changing the radio station or turning on heated seats can take two to four times longer in a touchscreen vehicle than one with physical buttons.
But I’d argue the other cost has been one of expressiveness. Screen UIs lack the romance cars once had; most feel as dull as bad apps. But as part of a full hardware and UI refresh that uses the Unreal Engine at its core, Rivian has opted to give up on realistic renders and instead offer an interface inspired more by video games or comic books.
That direction is most prominent on the R1’s home screen. Formerly, it showed you the Rivian R1, rendered like a perfect picture. A lot of companies take this approach. But Rivian felt that made it tired.
“If you look at every [competitor’s screen] right now, if they have a digital rendering in the vehicle. It’s something highly realistic,” says Hammoud. “But do you need to look at a realistic render of your vehicle when you’re inside of it?” Or, put differently, why would anyone sit in their car to look at a perfect little picture of their car?
With the new design language, Rivian will display the vehicle in an illustration style that blends cel-shading with a technical line drawing. Set the car to camp mode, and you’ll see your Rivian parked beside a campfire, while the battery and lighting settings of the cabin adjust.
It might seem like a small aesthetic change, but even this update drives operational efficiencies at Rivian. Whereas the company used to have to pre-render every color and trim option so that your on-screen Rivian perfectly matched your real one, now, Rivian simply displays the vehicle as a full 3D model with components that can be updated at will (kind of like you can swap an outfit in a game).
The new style is part of a larger UI update, which includes simplified buttons and menus. Buttons are notably flatter, and the team says it’s worked hard to reduce most major functions to a tap. Notably, the UI uses colors only in relation to specific functions: green is always related to charging, yellow is a call for action, and red is only used if something is going wrong.
“This is not the end, it’s the beginning of additional improvements. We have lots of ideas on how the UI could be context-aware for applications,” says Wassym Bensaid, chief software officer at Rivian.
“But we have to balance,” notes Hammoud, “between improvement, and not having the vehicle change so much all the time that [people ask], ‘why is it changing all the time?!?”