Rivian sued over false self-driving claims for Gen 1 R1

Rivian has been hit with a class action lawsuit accusing the electric vehicle maker of spending five years misleading customers about the autonomous driving capabilities of its first-generation R1T truck and R1S SUV. Filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, the complaint alleges that Rivian promised its flagship vehicles would eventually achieve hands-free, eyes-off driving,a feature classified as Level 3 autonomy by the Society of Automobile Engineers. Rivian declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.

The lawsuit centers on Driver+, Rivian’s driver assistance system, which the company allegedly marketed as a stepping stone to full hands-free operation across its lineup. The complaint points to a “coordinated nationwide marketing campaign” that stretched over five years, including statements from CEO RJ Scaringe at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2022. “No software update, no matter how sophisticated, will enable its Gen 1 vehicles to perform as advertised,” the complaint states. The three named plaintiffs, represented by Coleman Law and Tycko & Zavareei, are seeking a jury trial on claims of fraud, negligent misrepresentation, and unjust enrichment.

The core allegation is that Rivian knew its first-generation hardware was incapable of delivering the driving features it advertised but continued to promote them to drive sales. The first-generation R1 vehicles do not offer hands-free driving and never will, because their sensor suite and computing platform lack the necessary support.

By contrast, Rivian’s second-generation R1 vehicles, overhauled in 2024, do offer hands-free driving. The revamp introduced the Rivian Autonomy Platform, which comes standard and includes 11 cameras, five radar sensors, and a computer 10 times more powerful than its predecessor. In December 2025, Rivian rolled out Universal Hands-Free via a software update to second-generation vehicles only. This feature allows drivers to take their hands off the wheel on more than 3.5 million miles of roads in the United States and Canada, as long as lane lines are visible. The lawsuit argues that this capability always required hardware the first-generation vehicles lacked, and that Rivian knew it.

Rivian is not the first EV maker to face legal consequences for self-driving promises. Tesla has spent a decade claiming its vehicles would become fully autonomous through its Full Self-Driving software, and multiple owners have sued for failing to deliver unsupervised driving. In December 2025, a California administrative law judge ruled that Tesla’s marketing of Autopilot was “a long but unlawful tradition” of using ambiguity to mislead consumers. Tesla has also been found to have supplied European regulators with misleading safety data about its driving systems, and it subsequently dropped the “Autopilot” name from its California marketing, though it has since sued the DMV to reverse the false advertising ruling. Even some of the engineers who trained Tesla’s self-driving AI have said they would not ride in it. Meanwhile, Waymo, widely considered the industry leader in autonomous driving, has issued six recalls as its robotaxis encountered situations their software could not handle.

This would not be the first costly legal setback for Rivian. In October 2025, the company agreed to pay $250 million to settle a class action shareholder lawsuit filed after it abruptly hiked prices on R1 models by nearly 20% in 2022. The new lawsuit targets a different promise but raises the same underlying question: how far automakers can stretch their marketing of capabilities that do not yet exist, and whether buyers are paying for technology the company knows it cannot deliver on the vehicles they are purchasing.