Is your Rivian about to start talking and take the wheel?
The electric automaker has released a teaser video on social media that suggests that it might.
It opens with a man who looks a lot like David Hasselhoff, walking into a dark room with his back to the camera as 1980s-style techno music comes on and a familiar red light begins moving back and forth in the distance.
It’s revealed to be on the front LED light bar of a Rivian R1 model before the world October flashes on the screen. The “Knight Rider” reference is obvious, as it is very much a recreation of the scene when Michael Knight meets KITT for the first time, which opens the door to a few possibilities.
One is simply that the RIT and R1S will be getting a new feature for their light bars, which can already be used for amber sequential light animations to help direct traffic around the vehicle if it is parked in a dangerous position.
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It’s also possibly that Rivian will be launching an update to its Autonomy Platform, which enables advanced driver assistance features using a network of 11 cameras and five radars. It can currently handle hands-on adaptive cruise control and automated lane-changes, but is updatable and Rivian has said that more advanced capabilities will be coming in the future.
Among them are an expanded operational range under the Enhanced Highway Assist banner that will allow it to work from “on-ramp to off-ramp” with improved detection features, the ability to adjust the vehicle’s position in a lane relative to other as well as hands-free capability.
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That sort of thing would definitely be worthy of a KITT hat tip, even if it’s still far from fully autonomous driving. What’s particularly interesting about this is that it’s happening in October, because Tesla is scheduled to unveil its Robotaxi on the 10th of the month.
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