As Rivian begins to accept orders for his 2026-square-engine picket and SUV, customers can initially be attracted by the power and deceptions the four engines in these rebooted EVs can trigger.
After all, four engines delivering a combined 1,025 horsepower and 1.198 pounds of feet of torque-and the ability to accelerate from a stop up to 60 miles an hour in less than 2.5 seconds-difficulty to ignore.
But they should also pay attention to the program.
“The square is really the culmination of everything Rivian has done so far,” Wassym Bensaid, the company’s head, told Techcrunch, quickly providing a point list of acceleration, speed, torque and about 374-mile range. “Now that we have full internal engines, we have full control over the stack, hardware and software.”
This control allowed Rivian to introduce several new features that will appear with software updates in the square engine this September. (Customers can order the square-engine garrison starting today with deliveries starting as early as next week, according to the company.)
The feature, which is likely to inspire most Tiktok videos and Instagram coils, is a “kick”, a feature that adjusts the power to the interior wheels and leaves the vehicle to spin around its center -even as it moves. Kick Turn, which Techcrunch tested during a press drive in June, allows a vehicle traveling below 20 mph on dirt to kick its back end and swing it to the right or left without moving the steering wheel. The idea is to give off-roads the ability to make tight turns on trails by pressing a button and without going through the tedious task of a 3-point turn.
Rivian fans and followers may remember promoted, but never released, a feature called “Tank turn. “Kick Turn, who controls power and tire grip, is the real world and a toned version of Tank Turn.
A kick could still be misused if the driver stayed in the same location and continued to spun the vehicle in a circle. However, Rivian put some program-powered guards on the feature, including limiting the speed and only allowing it to spin into dirt.
Second-generation review
Rivian first revealed his second generation square-engine setting during a press drive from May 2024 in Washington, to try to show the Review of its flagship R1 line. This reboot affected every inch of its interiors from the battery package and suspension system to the electrical architecture, internal chairs, a sensor -stack and a user interface.
The effort, which led the company to build more of its main components in the house, aims to reduce the cost of manufacturing and improving the performance and appeal of its EVs.
Deliveries of the new double motor and actions two-engine trims began almost immediately, with the three-engine configuration following before August 2024. The Square engine, which is its most expensive and powerful garrison, took another year to develop and refine the software functions and inserted systems, and how they worked with the engines, and the motors,
And the stakes are high that Rivian authorizes the square engine. The highly expected and cheaper R2 vehicles of Rivian do not expect to produce until the first half of 2026. Rivian hopes that the new square engine that will start between $ 125.990 and $ 115.990 depending on the vehicle garrison, will give a boost. And the software is a critical piece of its offer.
If the four engines (one located at each wheel) are the heart of the second-generation square engine, the software is the brain that it works together.
Bensaid has shown the development of advanced vector and balanced algorithms introduced in the second-generation square engine.
“Consider it as over complex mathematical processing behind the scenes to allow real -time usage and decisions based on information from the four wheels and then from the four engines, while keeping security guards,” he said.
What this means in practice are numerous sensors about the square-motor R1s SUV and R1T truck gives information about Yaw rate, driving corners and other inputs, which are then inserted into software models to control a torque. In other words, Rivian’s inner house and software works together in real time to distribute power at each wheel electronically.
Software performs hardware
This allowed the EV manufacturer to introduce kicking turns as well as other programs-meeting-in-top functions to the square engine, including its “RAD Sintonist”, which allows users to change the vehicle’s vehicle dynamics by the central touch screen. The RAD tuner was developed by a team of engineers, developers, and designers nicknamed the “Rivian Adventure section.”
The original story began a few years ago, according to Bensaid.
“Every time we would go and test and qualify a version of the software or the car, we have an engineering screen that is hidden with the secret code,” he said. It was here that early RIVIA employee and R2 chief engineer Max Koff and R1 chief engineer Luke Lynch would tune the car as they wanted -an exercise that often pushed the vehicles to new limits. “And that has evolved into this idea to make this tuner available to customers.”
With Rad Tuner, drivers can create their own tuned drive mode from zero or based on presets such as “rally” or “sport.”
“We really give users full control with software so they can calculate their unique personality of the car,” Bensaid said, adding this particular feature really for experienced drivers.
Bensaid emphasized that this is more than a simple change to the user interface, which allows drivers to surround with balance, stability and riding height.
“I think the technology behind it really matters,” he said. “For example, this torque, the fact that we are capable of setting this with a very simple slide-this are years of engineering development to have a very sophisticated torque vet algorithm with a really high precise control that allows us to change values as we travel. It is technically extremely, extremely difficult to make this type of changes.
The company also launches a launch cam feature, which uses an external camera recording to automatically capture a so-called “launch mode”, which can catapult the new R1-square-square engine from a stop up to 60 miles per hour in less than 2.5 heart pumping seconds. Users can reproduce the videos, view real-time statistics such as speed and distance overlaps calculated by in-house controls. Users can also export videos to mobile device with USB port to save and share.
NACS loading and more
The 2026 R1T and R1S vehicles, including the square engine, are also built with the North American load standard, which was originally developed and popularized by Tesla.
This gives owners of the 2026 models access to Tesla’s vast network of fast chargers, known as overloaders. Rivian also delivers square motor clients with a free CCS DC adapter, which was the longtime EV load standard until recently, allowing them to insert other networks.
As part of this hardware upgrade, the company has also updated its program, specifically the EV loading travel function. Now, when a client opens the travel planner and chooses a NACS station, the information is updated in the travel planner to reflect that they do not need an adapter.
