Today in The Garage, we have a special guest, 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