U.S. electric vehicle maker Rivian announced on the 11th (local time) that it will launch an ‘autonomous driving’ service early next year using its custom in-house artificial intelligence (AI) chip.

That day in Palo Alto, California, Rivian held its first ‘Autonomous Driving·AI Day’ and revealed its in-house AI chip and plans to sell autonomous driving services.

Rivian said it plans to equip the sport utility vehicle (SUV) ‘R2’, which enters production next year, with its custom-designed chip, the ‘Rivian Autonomous Driving Processor 1’.

This chip, produced by Taiwan TSMC, powers Rivian next-generation ‘Autonomous Driving Compute Module 3’. The company said this module delivers four times the performance of the Nvidia-based systems installed in existing vehicles.

Rivian Chief Executive Officer (CEO) RJ Scaringe said the company spent years developing the chip, adding, “Generally, it is impossible to lower costs while increasing performance, but this time we dramatically improved performance while also reducing cost by hundreds of dollars per vehicle.”

Rivian plans to install its AI chip and module in existing vehicles and roll out the ‘Autonomy(Autonomy)+’ service, which advertises autonomous driving, starting early next year.

However, the service does not actually reach full autonomy and is closer to a driver-assistance feature that requires driver attention and intervention.

Customers can buy the software with a one-time payment of $2,500 (about 3.68 million won), or pay $49.99 per month (about 70,000 won) and use it as long as they want.

That is relatively inexpensive compared with competitor Tesla, whose supervised Full Self-Driving (FSD) service is sold for $8,000 upfront or $99 per month.

Rivian emphasized that it plans to equip future R2 models with sensors such as lidar to achieve ‘Level 4’, the fully autonomous tier under the U.S. Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) standard.

CEO Scaringe said, “While our current focus is on personally owned vehicles, we can at the same time explore opportunities in the ride share market,” hinting at the possibility of entering the robo (unmanned) taxi market in the future.

Bloomberg noted that Rivian’s move to implement autonomous driving using an in-house AI chip is an attempt to break with the industry practice of relying on Nvidia for automotive AI chips.

Even as it struggles with weak EV sales following the end of the EV tax credit by the U.S. administration of Donald Trump in September, Rivian has not loosened the reins on technology development, continuing to recruit talent in Silicon Valley.

Rivian shares are up about 25% this year, but remain more than 80% below their level at the time of the 2021 listing.