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Somehow, it didnt leak. When I caught up with Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe after the companys AI & Autonomy Day keynote on December 11 at its Palo Alto headquarters, he marveled that the company had managed to keep the events news under wraps until it was ready for its big reveal. It didand there was a lot to discuss. At the keynote, Rivian unveiled its Gen 3 platform, which will turn the maker of EV trucks, SUVs, and vans into an autonomy company, a focus he says will subsume the whole business of transportation. Debuting late next year in a version of the upcoming R2 SUV, the Rivian Autonomy Computer platform is powered by a chip the company designed itself, the RAP1 (Rivian Autonomy Processor). The R2s self-driving features will also draw on data from a lidar unit that sits inconspicuously at the top of the windshielda far cry from the spinning lidar towers atop vehicles such as Waymos. (Controversially, Teslas cars dont use lidar sensors.) Rivian also showed off a new voice-controlled user interface called the Rivian Assistant that will be available as an update for its current vehicles as well as for the R3. A bet on the future of car interfaces shifting toward talking rather than tapping on screens, it features integration with Google Calendarhinting at the kind of productivity-related features that might become more useful as cars take over more of the work of driving themselves. I spoke with Scaringe about all these topics and more. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. At least in broad strokes, how much of what you announced today was part of the original Rivian vision and road map? Well, that was 20 years ago. But something like today is the result of many thousands of people working on it for the last few years. Development on the platforms we showed today started in 2022. One of the threads connecting a lot of your news is you doing stuff yourself rather than being dependent on other parties. Was there a period where you werent sure which way to go? Maybe the way to answer that is that when we launched in 2021, we had what we call our Gen 1 architecture. And it was a very different approach than what went into our Gen 2 and, of course, what’s going into our Gen 3. We had a perception platformsome of which was our own, much of which was not our ownthat fed into a planner, which was our own, and made a set of rules-based decisions around how to drive the vehicle. It was very basic driver assistance: low level two features. And by virtue of that being the architecture, we had a natural limit. We realized that as we approached the launchthat the world was going to shift away from these more deterministic and classical systems to a true AI-based system. Its sort of ironic. When we say self-driving, we might think historically it’s always been AI. But in the beginning, actually, there was no AI. Some of it was very sophisticated if-then statements with good machine vision. What its shifted to now is true AI, and that happened in the early 2020s. As that was happening, we came to the view that we needed to completely shift our approach. And when we made that decision in early 2022, we approached it as a clean sheet. With that clean-sheet approach, it was, Let’s design our own perception platform. Let’s design our own compute platform with Gen 2, leveraging Nvidia as a supplier of the chips themselves, the inference platforms themselves, and go build a data flywheel that will allow us to build a neural net-based approach. The vehicles ultimately launched in the middle of 2024, a little less than a year and a half ago. And then, in parallel to that, we also kicked off some big hardware efforts, the biggest of which is an in-house chip. To go from zerono chip design team, no chip in-house, no chip IPto launching a chip takes time, it takes many hundreds of millions of dollars, it takes a very, very large organization. But we made the decision in 22 and we’ve been working towards it. Somehow, it didnt leak. But it’s now nice that we can talk about it publicly and it’s going to be in the vehicles next year. An AI-centric approach required this vertical integration of perception. It doesn’t necessitate owning compute, but owning compute allows you to deliver it at a lower cost level and, in our case, a higher performance level. We just have such a conviction that [autonomy] isnt just a part of the auto industry. If you look out a little bit, this is the whole business. And so we built this view that where we deploy most of our R&D should be this category. Was it completely obvious you needed lidar? There’s a thinking around lidar that needs to be shed, which is that they’re expensive and mechanically complex. The old Velodyne lidars, even what you see on the roads today, they were really complex sensors. But they’re now very low cost, extremely reliable, and solid-state based. Ten years ago, the best-performing lidar you could buy was maybe $70,000. Five years ago, it was maybe $5,000. Today it’s in the low hundreds of dollars. And so it’s become so cost-effective at turning the entire fleet into a ground truth fleet. It’s really helpful for training your cameras, especially in adverse conditions. When you peel back the onion and you look at the cost trajectory of the sensor, it’s become this sort of strange debate, because Tesla’s taken such a stance on it. But it wasn’t really a debate. If it was a $10,000 sensor, it would’ve been a different story. But when it’s a few-hundred-dollars decision, it’s much easier to make. Your new assistants Google Calendar integration made me realize that if I don’t have to spend quite as much time thinking about driving, there’s a lot of opportunity to be productive in the car. To what degree are you trying to build a richly powerful assistant? Google Calendar is just one of what will become many instances of integrations. Today there’s a limited set that have been set up to go agent-to-agent. But any platform that’s going to truly survive, and not just get gobbled up by an AI platform, will need to become very, very capable in terms of enabling agent-to-agent. Effectively like SDKs [software development kits] that just make it very easy to plug in. The goal is that essentially any app that you might want to use, we’ll be able to plug into our agents and it’ll be seamless. So you can reach across apps like you saw today. You talked to the car, the car was able to reach into Google and find the calendar. We were able to tell it to move something, and it reached back to Google through an agent and moved eveything around. It’s the tip of the iceberg. All these things will start to become so natural where the car becomes like a personal assistant. If you want to move your schedule or order food or schedule someone to come to your house to fix the plumbing, all this stuff just becomes very, very easy to do. And if you are no longer driving the car, you may want to be able to use the car to help you with more of these things. Do you have any sense as to what the future looks like in terms of robotaxis and autonomous private vehicles coexisting? I definitely think they’ll coexist. Theyre anything but mutually exclusive. The existence of level four [autonomy] is what enables both of them, and the technology from a level four point of view is the same. We’re focused on the tech, and the initial instance planned is a personally owned vehicle. But it doesn’t preclude us from doing robotaxis or rideshare. Rideshare today is such a small percentage of miles. I used to be of the view that we’d go from 99% of the world’s miles being in personally owned vehicles to 50% being in personally owned ones and the other half of the world’s miles being in shared. Maybe that happens, but I think it’s probably more likely to go from 99% to 90%. Maybe that’s because I have kids now, and the complexities of car seats and soccer balls and soccer outfits. I think it will be different country to country. When you look at the wealth level in the United States, if you can afford a car today, a lot of people would still rather own one and have the simplicity of it always being available for them and their family. But I actually don’t need to have a strong conviction on this either way. If theres a heavy shift in the model of consumption, we’re equally ready for that. Im surprised how much attention the business model gets. If one end of the spectrum is traditional ownership as we know it today, and the other end of the spectrum is pay as you go, we’re not being very imaginative. There are going to be a lot of things in the middle. Maybe I own the vehicle during the daytime and somebody else uses the vehicle at night. Maybe the vehicle’s mine during the week and another family’s during the weekend. Maybe the vehicle’s shared among five or six people as opposed to infinitely shared. There’s just going to be a spectrum of new ways to consume mobility, the moment the vehicle can drive itself. And our view is we’re going to exist across that entire spectrum. But the only thing that’s absolutely certain that’s necessary for any point on that spectrum is level four. Robotaxis dont work with level three. Personal level four obviously doesn’t work with level three. You need level four. So that’s what we’re focused on.
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E-Commerce
At the Exceptional Women Alliance (EWA), we bring together accomplished women who mentor, support, and challenge one another to grow as leaders, women, and as human beings. Each month we highlight one of these extraordinary voices and the insights that define her approach to leadership and life. This month I spoke with Mindy Mackenzie, former interim CEO of Beautycounter, longtime advisor to portfolio companies at The Carlyle Group, and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Courage Solution: The Power of Truth Telling with Your Boss, Peers, and Team. Mindys leadership philosophy challenges the belief that progress requires constant motion. She believes the most important work begins in stillness, in the willingness to pause, listen, and lead from purpose and authenticity rather than pressure. Q: You say sitting still can feel like agony, and you highly recommend it. Why? Mindy Mackenzie: Most of us are addicted to motion. We fill every moment because slowing down forces us to face what is really happening inside. Sitting still, truly being with yourself, can feel unbearable at first. It is uncomfortable, but it is also where truth lives. If you can sit quietly, even for a few minutes, you will start to hear what is real instead of what you are performing. That is the beginning of clarity. Q: Why is this so hard for successful women leaders? Mackenzie: Because we have been conditioned to equate busyness with value. High-performing women often measure their worth by what they accomplish. The problem is that when you stop, you have to confront the question underneath it all: Who am I when I am not producing? I think a key concept is understanding who you are outside of your role. Many leaders do not know that answer, and that lack of separation between identity and achievement is what makes stillness so uncomfortable. Q: How can leaders start practicing stillness in a real way? Mackenzie: You do not need to go to a monastery or sit in 17 yoga retreats. It does not take five hours a day. Sit in your closet for five minutes. Set a timer. Just get in touch with yourself and allow whatever comes up. When I work with executives, I remind them that they are human choosers. Every day you have the choice to lead from pressure or from presence. I ask one question: What do you choose right now? It sounds simple, but it changes everything. Q: You draw a connection between leadership and parenting. How do the two overlap? Mackenzie: Parenting teaches humility, patience, and listening before responding. Those skills are exactly what leadership requires. At home, I often ask my family, on a scale of one to 10, how are you feeling about this? I use the same approach in business. The answers usually surprise me. You think you know where someone stands, but you do not until you ask. That question opens real dialogue. It moves a conversation from assumption to understanding. In leadership, that shift builds trust, and trust is the foundation of every strong culture. Q: How do you define authentic impact? Mackenzie: Real impact comes from genuine care. I even use the word love in business, which makes people squirm, but I genuinely love the people who work for me and they know it. I’ve paid attention to the bosses who have sucked the energy out of the room versus the bosses who have given energy. True, amazing impact that lasts on people’s lives comes from leaders who bring that conscious intention to how they show up. That’s the measure of leadershipthe energy you give, not the energy you take. Q: What do you want leaders to take away from this approach? Mackenzie: Telling yourself the truth about how you really feel is tremendously hard, and it is a radical act of courage. All of these concepts are so easy to say, and they are a lifetime’s work. We need to be reminded because we forget, we get caught up. What can you do? Just try to pause and go, what is happening here? What am I choosing right now? And then not judge it or beat yourself up with self-flagellation. The old way is saying I’m not good enough, I’m bad, I’m wrong. The new way is just acknowledging how you feel and letting it be okay. Larraine Segil is founder, chair, and CEO of The Exceptional Women Alliance.
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E-Commerce
Ford Motor said on Monday it will take a $19.5 billion writedown and is killing several electric-vehicle models, in the most dramatic example yet of the auto industry’s retreat from battery-powered models in response to the Trump administration’s policies and weakening EV demand. The Dearborn, Michigan-based company said it will stop making the F-150 Lightning in its electric vehicle form, but will pivot to producing an extended-range electric model, a version of a hybrid vehicle called an EREV, which uses a gas-powered generator to recharge the battery. The company is also scrapping a next-generation electric truck, codenamed the T3, as well as planned electric commercial vans. Instead, Ford said it will pivot hard into gas and hybrid models, and eventually hire thousands of workers, even though there will be some layoffs at a jointly owned Kentucky battery plant in the near term. The company expects its global mix of hybrids, extended-range EVs and pure EVs to reach 50% by 2030, from 17% today. Ford will spread out the writedown, taken primarily in the fourth quarter and continuing through next year and into 2027, the company said. About $8.5 billion is related to cancelling planned EV models. Around $6 billion is tied to the dissolution of a battery joint venture with South Koreas SK On, and $5 billion on what Ford called program-related expenses. The automaker also raised its 2025 guidance for adjusted earnings before taxes and interest, to about $7 billion, up from a previous range of $6 billion to $6.5 billion. Fords shift reflects the auto industrys response to waning demand for battery-powered models, after car companies plowed hundreds of billions of dollars into EV investments early this decade. The outlook for electrics dimmed significantly this year as U.S. President Donald Trumps policies yanked federal support for EVs and eased tailpipe-emissions rules, which could encourage carmakers to sell more gas-powered cars. U.S. sales of electric vehicles fell about 40% in November, following the September 30 expiration of a $7,500 consumer tax credit, which had been in place for more than 15 years to stoke demand. The Trump administration also included in the massive tax and spending bill that passed in July a freeze on fines that automakers pay for violating fuel-economy regulations. Rather than spending billions more on large EVs that now have no path to profitability, we are allocating that money into higher-returning areas, said Andrew Frick, head of Fords gas and electric-vehicle operations. The F-150 Lightning rolled off assembly lines starting in 2022 with much fanfare comedian Jimmy Fallon wrote a song about the truck. Ford increased production of the model to meet an influx of 200,000 orders, but sales havent kept pace. The company sold 25,583 Lightnings through November of this year, a 10% decrease from the prior-year period. The successor to the F-150 Lightning, the T3 truck, was supposed to be built ground-up for production at a new complex in Tennessee, and be a core part of Fords second-generation EV lineup. Ford is now replacing production of the EV pickup with new gas-powered trucks starting in 2029 at the Tennessee factory. Ford effectively killed the entirety of its announced second-generation of EV models with Mondays announcement. For its future EV lineup, the company is shifting focus to more affordable EV models, conceived by a so-called skunkworks team in California. The first model from that team is slated to be priced at about $30,000 and go on sale in 2027. This midsize EV truck is being built at Fords Louisville plant. (Corrects the location of the battery plant to Kentucky, not Tennessee, in paragraph 3) Nora Eckert
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E-Commerce
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