Munro & Associates is known for its teardowns of the latest and greatest vehicles, and CEO Sandy Munro is known for explaining technical engineering topics in an engaging, accessible style. In a new video on the Munro Live YouTube channel, Sandy pays a visit to Rivian’s Electrical Hardware Lab in California, and speaks with Vidya Rajagopalan, the company’s Senior VP of Electrical Hardware.
Rivian has picked up the torch of EV innovation—the company has been introducing a number of innovations designed to make EVs better, cheaper and easier to produce.
Ms. Rajagopalan explains that Rivian’s GEN2 architecture features a significantly reduced number of controllers compared to GEN1—7 ECUs now do the job of the previous 17. “Smaller, better, fewer connections, fewer wires,” says Rajagopalan. Rivian was able to eliminate 1.6 miles of wire, including entire wiring harnesses, and trim the vehicle’s weight by some 44 pounds.
The biggest change from GEN1 to GEN 2 was the move from domain-based controllers to a zonal architecture (also used in some Chinese models and the newest Teslas). Rivian has also eliminated physical fuses (sorry, DIYers), replacing them with printed circuits.
The story isn’t all about hardware—some of the biggest changes were enabled by software advances. That’s a theme you’ll often hear—software, a critical component of modern vehicles (and everything else we buy, it seems), seems to come naturally to keen young companies like Rivian, but most legacy OEMs are struggling to catch up.
As EV guru Pedro Pacheco noted on LinkedIn, even as Rivian moves on to GEN2, “practically all non-Chinese legacy OEMs are still to reach the level of Rivian’s GEN1 architecture. This speaks volumes on how much these companies need to catch up on hardware and software.”
The big boys aren’t standing still, however. Pacheco says, “a significant number of legacy OEMs will present their own centralized High-Performance Computing HPC architecture (not the one they bought from Chinese OEMs) between 2025 and 2027.”
Source: Munro & Associates
