How Rivian and VW's Joint Venture Uses AI to Ship the Future of Vehicle Software

Overview

Rivian and Volkswagen Group formed RV Tech to build and deploy a shared software-defined vehicle platform—combining Rivian's proven SDV software and electrical architecture with Volkswagen Group's global manufacturing scale and brand portfolio. The platform will power vehicles across Volkswagen Group and Rivian's portfolios, at a scale that could reach 30 million vehicles.

With the R2 launching in 2026 and the first Volkswagen Group models to follow in 2027, RV Tech invested in AI tooling to accelerate delivery—automating high-volume engineering work and adding new layers of quality assurance to safety-critical code.

The results have been significant: substantial engineering capacity redirected to product work, and a 10x increase in test generation velocity on propulsion and dynamics software.

How the team evaluated AI tools

Arjuna Siva, VP of Infotainment & Connectivity, has been leading the initiative to use generative AI as a force multiplier for the engineering organization.

RV Tech had adopted several AI coding tools across its workflows, but as the team scaled, they needed a solution that could meet the full scope of enterprise requirements, including support for their existing IDE workflows, a context engine that could handle large legacy codebases, a mature security posture, and dedicated enterprise support.

"The first thing that really piqued our interest was the culture match with Cognition. We're a very fast-moving team—we're lean, very practical, product-focused, and customer-focused."

Arjuna Siva, VP of Infotainment & Connectivity, RV Tech

After evaluation, they adopted both Windsurf for interactive coding assistance—chosen for its enterprise readiness across all of these dimensions, and Devin for autonomous, background work—tasks that can run without constant human supervision.

"It's not a vendor-customer relationship. It's a true partnership, where we feel that our requests are heard and we're really at the forefront of what the technology can offer today."

Wassym Bensaid, Co-CEO & CTO, RV Tech

Results from the rollout

Vehicle Access Ticket Triage

Vivek Ravi is an engineering manager on the Vehicle Access team, which builds the software that enables vehicle lock, unlock, and start. The team integrates car keys into phone wallets using Bluetooth Low Energy and Ultra-Wideband technology. It is a full-stack team spanning firmware, wireless protocols, cloud infrastructure, mobile app interfaces, and infotainment integration.

One area where the team spent time was customer-reported vehicle access issues. Before AI tooling, the triage process was manual: an issue comes in from front-line customer support, an on-call engineer picks it up and triages it. Each ticket is time sensitive. At peak periods, this consumes the full capacity of multiple engineers every sprint.

RV Tech had been close to assigning dedicated engineers for exactly this workload. Instead, the team piloted Devin. A Devin Slackbot gets tagged on an incoming report, extracts the VIN and timestamp, pulls the relevant logs, runs the parsing scripts, and performs first-level triage. Engineers then review Devin's analysis.

Devin triage enabled RV Tech to redirect 3-4 engineers from customer support back to product work, meaningfully expanding the team's capacity for core development.

Beyond reactive triage, the team sees a second application: proactive fleet monitoring. RV Tech already tracks fleet-wide metrics and can see issues customers never report. Today, the team has no capacity to investigate those failures. With Devin, they plan to pull logs for affected vehicles and run first-level triage automatically, surfacing issues before they become customer complaints.

SIL Testing

Brian Harries leads the dynamics and propulsion controls team—all the application software governing how the car drives and handles.

In automotive, traceability from requirements to code to tests is essential. The traditional process for enforcing that traceability relies heavily on brute-force meetings—systems engineers sitting down with software engineers, going line by line on every requirement, mapping coverage, and reviewing repeatedly.

Brian's team has been using Devin to generate SIL test cases. Devin ingests the simulation framework structure, the codebase architecture, and the relevant requirements, then generates test cases that validate the implementation, raises a merge request, iterates until the tests are functional and passing, and submits for review.

Devin writes approximately 100% of the test code in most cases. The engineering review focuses on verifying that the tests are actually checking the right logic.

Where an engineer might write one or two tests per day manually, Brian estimates the team can reach 10 to 15 tests per day using Devin.

The team appreciated how shareable Devin was across the team. One person invested the time to build a playbook with the right context, and then the entire team could use it to generate test cases immediately.

The impact went beyond speed. In at least one case during the pilot, Devin identified conflicting logic between two requirements, suggesting the requirements themselves needed revision. A human reviewer confirmed the finding.

Brian described this as the broader opportunity: AI tooling lets the team catch quality issues across the whole V-model in systems engineering—requirements, code, test cases—much faster, without the traditional slow review cycles.

What's next

The auto industry's shift to software-defined vehicles opens up something genuinely new—cars that improve after they leave the factory, new features delivered to millions of vehicles overnight, and a driving experience that gets better over time. RV Tech is pioneering what it takes to deliver on that promise: autonomous software engineering that triages issues, generates test coverage, and scans for regressions, so engineers can focus on building the features that make vehicles better.

"What really makes me excited is this will help us be way more predictable in our execution, deliver software with way higher quality, and dramatically increase the velocity of our engineering team so that we get more and more features to our customers."

Wassym Bensaid, Co-CEO & CTO, RV Tech