Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe said the company’s autonomy efforts now consume most of its research and development budget — an admission that implies over $229 million spent on autonomy alone in the first quarter of 2026. Scaringe made the remarks during a conversation with former Salesforce co-CEO and OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor, at CNN’s The 1 on 1 programme. Rivian‘s R&D spending has climbed steadily over the past year, even as the company works to narrow losses across its automotive segment. The EV maker spent $458 million on R&D in the first quarter of 2026, up 20% from $381 million a year earlier. Quarterly R&D ran at $410 million, $453 million and $424 million through the remaining quarters of 2025. Applying Scaringe’s “vast majority” framing — which in financial-disclosure language typically implies at least half — to the Q1 2026 figure points to roughly $229 million or more flowing into autonomy work in a single three-month window. System Reset Taylor opened the exchange with an anecdote about his own bet on autonomy. “I bet my wife in the hospital with our first child that she wouldn’t get her driver’s license because of autonomous driving and on-demand services like Uber and Lyft, and she just got her driver’s license, so I paid her the $10,” he stated. He then questioned Scaringe on how Rivian balances adapting to major technological shifts like generative AI and autonomous driving while still maintaining a steady, long-term strategy. Scaringe’s answer traced an arc that began with Rivian‘s 2021 R1T launch and ended with a full architectural reset of the company’s self-driving stack. “For us, a big focus initially was building out a technology platform and then scaling it. When we launched what we call our Gen 1 vehicles, what we had in terms of