Rivian Maps Infotainment

[electruck]

3) If the data can't be passed (no cell phone coverage) the services that rely on it (route planning, speech recognition) aren't available

While you make a generally valid point, it is worth noting that not all speech recognition is Cloud based. As of SDK 2.0 (Sept 2019), Alexa Auto supports a fair amount of offline speech recognition. Alexa Auto will support speech based control of vehicle functions such as hvac, radio, etc even when there is no network connection.

https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/...oice-control-extension-to-alexa-auto-sdk-v2-0

Sponsored

 

[ajdelange]

I hope everyone understands that I am not privy to Rivian's design. I am only guessing as to what Rivian will offer based mostly on what Tesla does.

 

[Gearhead500]

based mostly on what Tesla does.

Having never owned or really followed Tesla closely, I appreciate the insight.

 

[bajadahl]

I'm curious if you will be able to download areas of Maps for offline routing.... Similar to Garmin or Gaia. Since these are adventure vehicles for those of us who actually expect to take them into the woods we will absolutely need some offline mapping capabilities. I for one am already planning to add an iPad with Gaia and Garmin apps for overland routing so that I have a backup to the onboard routing.

 

[Gearhead500]

Good call. I’m hoping they have offline figured out.
Sounds like the first gift my wife bought me while we were dating. An atlas for my truck. ? I’m sure my kids head would explode if they saw that.

I want to take the same route from the Long Way Up but doubt they always had cellular or gps, but maybe they did. ?

 

[bajadahl]

I still carry an Atlas when traveling (between the seat and center console).... Old habits die hard! Having paper maps is still a good habit especially if you're going to be overlanding in the back country.

 

[CommodoreAmiga]

Got it. But there are some who take this very, very seriously. Anyone for whom this is a concern should be aware that the car will be continuously reporting its position, speed, battery current... back to Rivian and that when you ask the car to plan a route for you the route is probably not being planned by the car but by an algorithm running in a server on board the mother ship. Other compute intensive jobs, such as speech regognition are not done on board.

I've had vehicles with "cloud services" but they've also all had fallback functionality that would work when there was no data connectivity. My current car, for example, will prioritize online routing, but will still calculate routes if no connectivity is available. Voice commands also work without data.

Considering Rivian is building an "Adventure" vehicle and they supported Long Way Up (and admitted they learned a lot about poor connectivity from that journey) I sincerely hope they've built something that can work stand-alone, even if it benefits from cloud connectivity, when available.

 

[ajdelange]

I'll say again that I don't know what Rivian is developing but, again, assuming near parity with Tesla the fall backs will be there. For example, while route planing that takes current traffic and weather conditions into account will not probably be possible a simpler route based on a low resolution map may be. I sort of get the impression that Telsa downloads quite a bit of local detail when connectivity is there so that it is available should connectivity be lost. The network is sophisticated enough to know when you are approaching an are with sketchy cell phone service.

Telsa uses AT&T. Don't know whom Rivian uses. If a Tesla driver drives into an area not well served by AT&T an option is to tether to his Verizon cell phone (if he has one). This makes it obvious that all these functions can be done over WiFi so that a detailed route could be planned (with voice recognition etc) at a rest or charging stop where WiFi is available.

I have run into areas where there is no AT&T (mountains of VT, northern shore of the St. Lawrence) but coverage has always been restored within a few minutes of driving. I wouldn't lie awake at night worrying about this (unless planning a drive from Tierra del Fuego to SFO).

While possible loss of connectivity is certainly something to be aware of my post was really to point out that when connectivity is available (nearly all the time) lots of information about what you are doing is out there in Maxwell's ether. There are some people who think all that information goes straight to the CIA. While Google is a much greater threat than the CIA those folks do lie awake at night worrying about such things and would probably want to know this,

 

[GIJoe]

I believe it will be a combination of cloud/cellular and GPS. Adventure vehicles going out of cellular range will be very common.

 

[skyote]

Shoot, my old TomTom had on road maps for all North America & was never "online"...GPS with local maps.

There is no reason to be concerned about this. I'm just hoping there's cool features for off roadway, and I bet there will be.

 

[ajdelange]

Shoot, my old TomTom had on road maps for all North America & was never "online"...GPS with local maps.

This reminds me of an old Garmin I have which has fairly detailed maps. The thing I remember about that machine is that the Canadian side of the border was labeled U.S.A. and conversely!

There is no reason to be concerned about this. I'm just hoping there's cool features for off roadway, and I bet there will be.

Don't doubt it either. The big advantage of downloaded stuff is that it is up to date and that you can move Canada to where it belongs if you discover a mistake. I don't think it takes a genius to figure out that if Mother Ship sees a vehicle headed into an area with poor cell phone coverage (and there are still quite a few of those) she might do well to download the most recent maps for those areas (if not the photography). Etc.

And you can always tether to your Iridium phone.

 

[sevengroove]

I'm curious if you will be able to download areas of Maps for offline routing.... Similar to Garmin or Gaia. Since these are adventure vehicles for those of us who actually expect to take them into the woods we will absolutely need some offline mapping capabilities. I for one am already planning to add an iPad with Gaia and Garmin apps for overland routing so that I have a backup to the onboard routing.

I am 100% sure they will offer the functionality to download maps for offline use. Google Maps has had this function for years now and I use it religiously on road trips (even though I don't go off the beaten path much). Not sure how it works with Tesla but I reckon when we set a destination on the map before starting the trip, the vehicle downloads a bunch of relevant info for offline use anyway. Not to mention, EVs would do well to store things like the location of every charging station around lest the user gets stuck in a tricky situation with low charge and no cell service.

 

[Rivian-WI]

My guess is that the maps will be downloaded to the vehicle and become 'static' until your vehicle is notified of an update to them. It is the stuff that is shown on top of those maps like traffic that will be 'real-time'.
Interesting question is if Charging stations would be a more static thing or real-time thing. Not like they change that often.

The Volvo I have only does regions that you pick. The entire US is not available by default.

 

[MReda]

My guess is that the maps will be downloaded to the vehicle and become 'static' until your vehicle is notified of an update to them. It is the stuff that is shown on top of those maps like traffic that will be 'real-time'.
Interesting question is if Charging stations would be a more static thing or real-time thing. Not like they change that often.

The Volvo I have only does regions that you pick. The entire US is not available by default.

Hopefully charger status is real time (available, in use, broken, etc). At least for the Rivian network, but ideally for some of the partner CCS chargers as well.

 

[ajdelange]

Once again comparing to Tesla: If you ask Tesla to display charging stations every one on the currently displayed map area is shown with the number of available stalls indicated. Some of the non Tesla networks make this information available as is known because ABRP, for example, displays it. Thus I think you will have this information in the Rivians too.

Telsa stores a crude map which covers a wide area (whole CONUS at least for US cars). As the map is zoomed on a given region more detailed mapping data is downloaded. Thus if you swipe to move the map to an area 200 miles from where you are you can easily see where you have moved the map well enough to center it where you want but it will take a couple of seconds for the smaller towns and highways to get downloaded and drawn. If you then zoom it is another second or two (or more if you have a bad internet connection) before the finer details supported by the higher resolution are seen. Same with the photography if you have that overlain.

I never took careful notice as to what happened when there was no cell service because it only happens rarely but I do remember that the map was pretty crude and there was no question of being able to ask the car to do anything with voice.

One additional comment based on a few remarks here. The G in GPS stands for Global and I think its pretty clear how GLONASS got its name(Globalnaya navigatsionnaya sputnikovaya sistema) Wherever you are their satellites are available. I remember a friend telling me that one of the things he was looking forward to was seeing whether his pocket Garmin would read 90 00 00 S at the South Pole (it did). You can get into situations (canyon, urban or natural) where the DOP is pretty bad and rain forest type canopy can make the signal unusable but you can pretty much always count on GPS/GLONASS coverage.

Sponsored