Rivian is weighing a plan to make its own self-driving sensors using Chinese technology

The sensors work by mapping the environment around a vehicle in three dimensions, a capability that is central to self-driving systems. The affordable end of the lidar market has been largely captured by Chinese companies including Hesai Group and RoboSense — a shift that has drawn scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers worried about national security implications. Scaringe said that "all the real choices are coming out of China" for sensors in the "low hundreds of dollars price point" that automakers such as Rivian require.

Instead of sourcing components straight from Chinese vendors, Rivian wants to move the underlying production know-how onto American soil. "Think of it as finding a way to structurally ingest the technology," Scaringe told Reuters. He said Rivian is in "active discussions" with lidar firms and that the effort could involve other automakers as well.

"A number of different car manufacturers are thinking about how they could do that either together, or at least through a shared alignment to say, hey, let's develop production capacity in the United States for this, or at least outside China," Scaringe said.

An upcoming variant of the R2, expected to reach customers later this year, is set to be equipped with lidar, though Rivian has kept its supplier under wraps. At prior showcases, the units on display were notably compact — a far cry from the bulky, rotating hardware mounted atop Alphabet $GOOGL's Waymo robotaxis.

The lidar push fits within Rivian's larger ambition to develop autonomous-driving capabilities in-house rather than rely on outside providers, with Tesla $TSLA squarely in its sights as a benchmark. Scaringe said the chip initiative alone will absorb "many hundreds of millions of dollars." RAP-1 — the Rivian Autonomy Processor in its first generation — is fabricated using Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's 5-nanometer process and is due to ship this year, with follow-on designs designated RAP-2 and RAP-3 slated to arrive on a roughly two-year cadence and tap progressively more advanced manufacturing nodes.

"It's not like you invest a few hundred million dollars and it's done," Scaringe said. "We've built a team. That team is going to continue to develop future versions of the platform."