The Garage Video Podcast - Vidya Rajagopalan, SVP Rivian Software and Hardware Engineering

[Newtonrj]

YouTube Oct 15, 2024

Vidya Rajagopalan, Senior Vice President of Electrical Hardware Engineering at Rivian. Vidya joins host John Heinlein, Ph.D., Chief Marketing Officer from Sonatus to discuss the electrical and software architecture for Rivian vehicles ranging from the R1, the R1 second generation, and the newly announced R2. This conversation covers topics including domain architecture vs zonal architecture, decisions around high performance ECU’s, vehicle networking, sustainability, ADAS/autonomous driving, Over the air updates (OTA), and much more!

Chapters:
00:00 Overview
00:28 Meet Vidya Rajagopalan
04:08 Surprising fun fact about Vidya
05:45 The mindset shift making an SDV
06:34 ECU Consolidation
07:35 System level thinking
11:00 Building systems from merchant silicon
12:03 Domain to Zonal shift
15:38 Zonal architecture of Rivian R1 Gen 2
18:52 Vehicle networks and automotive ethernet
21:53 Software architecture
24:41 ADAS and autonomous driving
26:08 Feedback for continuous improvement
27:00 Over the Air Updates (OTA)
29:42 Rivian R2
32:35 Conclusion

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[gultin]

Great interview. Missed opportunity to have an R1 (if not R2) in the background though.

 

[BrayBay]

Good technical podcast. The talk about compute headroom makes me wonder how much further R1 Gen1 can be stretched before hitting the hardware limits.

Great interview. Missed opportunity to have an R1 (if not R2) in the background though.

No kidding. Interesting thing is I think they're in front of a green screen, so they absolutely could have changed that.

 

[Newtonrj]

Good technical podcast. The talk about compute headroom makes me wonder how much further R1 Gen1 can be stretched before hitting the hardware limits.



No kidding. Interesting thing is I think they're in front of a green screen, so they absolutely could have changed that.

Vidya did mention 10x over spec on needed compute. She also mentions that CPU and memory get consumed quickly so that will be an interesting set of resources for her team to manage.

My question is lifecycle - How many years does her team expect to support each generational platform before moving it to legacy and emergency patches only?

-RJ

 

[FraserC]

Very interesting interview, I was hoping for some mention of upcoming attractions though, V2H being my top priority interest. I'm really curious about whether this is a Rivian prioritization, or a bureaucratic delay... Anyone have ideas?

 

[ndmiller]

Very cool talk on the thought process and decision making Gen1 versus Gen2 versus R2 including answers to some questions I've had about the why's of my Gen1 R1T.

Will be interesting to to see the tricks up the sleeve for R2 and future.

 

[MountainBikeDude]

Finally had an opportunity to sit and watch this and beyond the green screen Ioniq 6 in the background, it was fairly fascinating to learn about some of the decisions they needed to make to get Gen 1 to market, and then the transition and consolidation of electronics into Gen 2 and beyond.

Cheers.

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