Rivian is engaged on a steer-by-wire system – and rear wheel steering (up to date)

Rivian has posted a job itemizing for a steering engineer, particularly mentioning work on a future steer-by-wire system for the corporate.

Replace, Aug 11: Rivian has now particularly talked about rear-wheel steering in a job posting.

Steer-by-wire is an automotive idea that has been round for a very long time, however hasn’t but reached mass adoption. The thought is to interchange (or complement) mechanical linkages between the steering wheel and the wheels with digital actuators as an alternative.

There are a selection of potential advantages to this, like permitting extra customizability or adaptability to a steering system, decreasing mechanical complexity, or including speed-sensitive variable steering ratios.

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Though there are additionally disadvantages, like a discount in steering really feel (though, since most vehicles are transferring to digital energy steering, that was already gone anyway).

However few vehicles have applied steer-by-wire methods, or a minimum of not absolutely dedicated to them, on condition that mechanical steering racks are a comparatively solved downside and the final inertia of the automobile trade which might somewhat follow an answer they know than change to one thing higher (haven’t we right here, at this EV publication, heard *that* one earlier than…). There’s additionally the matter of laws, which have usually been written to require mechanical steering methods, and might have updating to permit for steer by wire.

However, steer by wire made it into mass manufacturing with the discharge of the Tesla Cybertruck. This was huge information when Tesla dedicated to this – on the time, it was the one factor on the street to completely use a steer by wire system, although there are different vehicles with partial steer by wire (for instance, mechanical entrance wheel steering, and steer by wire rear-wheel steering).

Nevertheless it appears to have opened the floodgates, as plenty of different firms are engaged on or have since launched steer by wire methods (Lexusfor instance).

And now, it seems to be like Rivian is a kind of firms – although we don’t know if it’s for the entrance or rear. (Replace: Properly, now we all know, it seems to be like they’re on the very least creating a rear-wheel steering system, in response to one other job itemizing. Although the corporate would possibly nonetheless be engaged on steer-by-wire for the entire car, too)

The corporate posted a job itemizing for “Sr. Workers Technical Program Supervisor, Steering Actuator System,” based mostly at its Irvine, CA headquarters (noticed by Rivianforums). This wouldn’t be so distinctive, besides that the job posting additionally particularly factors out that “you’ll have full cradle-to-grave possession of the SBW subsystem.”

So – we all know they’re engaged on steer by wire, to some extent.

However a couple of different EVs, notably massive EVs just like the Rivian R1 platform is, use steer by wire only for the rear wheels – for instance the Hummer EV and Rolls-Royce Spectre. These methods are notably useful for large automobiles, as a result of it permits them to be extra nimble and make turns that in any other case would require much more… negotiation in an enormous land yacht.

So it’s potential that Rivian is simply engaged on rear wheel steer by wire right here, however we’d prefer to suppose there’s an opportunity it’s engaged on steer by wire for the total car.

We additionally don’t know if this may present up on all of Rivian’s automobiles, or solely on sure fashions – the R2 and R3 are in improvement, with R2 in fairly late phases, and the R1 simply received a huge refresh. However, maybe much more curiously (and really speculatively), VW has invested closely in Rivian for expertise assist, so we surprise if we’d find yourself seeing this in VW group automobiles, or Scout automobiles ultimately…

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