Rivian owners chosen to try the company’s point-to-point driving feature early will have to promise to keep quiet about it. The Autonomy Early Access Program, which began sending invitations on Oct. 15, requires selected owners to sign a Participation Agreement that includes a non-disclosure agreement covering the program’s details. Rivian’s own rule for testers is to “maintain strict confidentiality regarding all preview features.”
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The secrecy sits alongside a long list of obligations that run the other way: testers must hand over location and camera data, use the preview weekly, and answer surveys, all without pay. The terms read less like a perk than like a structured field trial.
Who gets in, and how Rivian chooses
Rivian’s support page for the program limits eligibility to U.S. owners of R1 Gen 2 and R2 vehicles with an active paid Autonomy+ subscription. Trials do not count, and Gen 1 R1 owners and Canadians are excluded. Any subscriber can express interest through a tile in the Rivian account, but selection starts in California and Florida and weighs safe driving history, feature usage, vehicle model and driving state. Rivian rechecks eligibility roughly every 30 days.
Applying itself requires consent for Rivian to review existing vehicle usage, driving history and prior program participation, and the full list of data collected arrives only with the agreement after selection.
Electrek’s report on the program describes the same pattern and adds that Rivian aims to balance selections by region and model. Autonomy+, announced at Rivian’s December 2025 autonomy event, costs $2,500 one time or $49.99 a month, and Rivian began charging for it in April after a free trial period, so every tester is already a paying customer who has agreed to be both a subscriber and an unpaid evaluator of the next release.
What testers agree to besides silence
The obligations are specific. Participants must use preview features weekly, log issues in the vehicle when it is safe to do so, complete monthly surveys, and make themselves available for interviews or focus groups. They must keep data collection enabled, including location and Camera Data Sharing. The primary owner must also tell any secondary drivers that the vehicle is enrolled and make sure they follow the program terms.
Rivian keeps broad control over membership. It can remove participants who fall short of safety or participation requirements, and access can be suspended or ended if Autonomy+ is canceled, the vehicle changes hands, an eligibility check fails or the terms are broken. In return, testers get new Autonomy features early over the air and a program newsletter. Participants are not paid, and the support page makes no promise that a given feature will ship.
The confidentiality clause is a common device for pre-release software. Its reach is what stands out, because the drivers involved will be operating a car on public roads with a feature that is, by Rivian’s own description, still being refined, and they will not be free to describe how it behaves.
Where point-to-point fits in Rivian’s autonomy plan
Point-to-point is the next step beyond Universal Hands-Free, which Rivian released in software update 2025.46 in December. Electrek’s coverage of that update said the feature works on roads with clearly marked lane lines, with Rivian expanding coverage from 135,000 miles to more than 3.5 million miles of roads in the United States and Canada, but it cannot slow or stop for traffic lights or stop signs. The early-access group will get point-to-point on R1 Gen 2 and R2 vehicles already on the road, starting in late 2026, with broader access not expected until 2027.
The company’s larger timetable has moved. On Rivian’s July earnings call, CEO RJ Scaringe called the first version “Level 2++,” meaning hands off the wheel and eyes on the road, and said hands-off, eyes-off driving arrives in 2027 and Level 4 in 2028. In January 2025, Electrek reported that Scaringe had said an eyes-free system would launch in 2026, a target that has slipped to 2027.
Hardware is the other constraint. Rivian is aiming for the end of 2026 for its third-generation autonomy hardware. The Rivian Autonomy Processor, or RAP1, is an in-house chip that Rivian rates at 1,600 sparse INT8 TOPS and 5 billion pixels per second, and it powers the third-generation Autonomy Compute Module 3, with lidar planned for future R2 models. Scaringe said at that event that the new hardware, including the in-house inference chip, would let Rivian make dramatic progress in self-driving, with Level 4 as the goal. Electrek reported in May that the company was weighing building its own lidar. The early testers are therefore running software on the older compute while the platform meant to support eyes-off driving is still being finished. Rivian has not said what the agreement permits testers to say publicly, and the support page quotes only the confidentiality requirement itself.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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