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Would you let your kid get behind the wheel of a 1,025-horsepower vehicle? What about a 656-hp mainstream crossover? I sure wouldn’t let 16-year-old Joel get behind the wheel of those vehicles. I’m lucky to be alive after my teenage years, if we are honest about it.
In an exclusive interview, Rivian Chief Software Officer Wassym Bensaid told The Drive the automaker is developing a Teen Mode and Valet Mode for its vehicles.
Bensaid noted parents outside the Feder household understand the dangers of these 5,000- to 7,000-pound EVs having the ability to rocket from 0-60 mph in just 2.5 seconds. So it’s doing something about it.
“We got that feedback from the community. The only reason we did not get it yet is we really wanted to do it right, and it will leverage on all the framework of the digital key integration that we have,” Bensaid said.
“When the kids register, if they put their true age, the app will behave in that case in teen mode,” he explained. But we all know that 16-year-old Joel would’ve never admitted when setting up his Rivian profile that he was actually 16. That would have kept him from having up to 1,025 hp at his disposal.
“You as an owner can associate and say my first kid, this is a teen profile, my second kid is not a teen profile,” Bensaid said. This will give the owner the ability to create profiles for various kids who are various ages and/or maturity levels.
“I think the magic there is with that new framework of digital key management, and what we call the new user profile architecture; we will be able to set a ton of preferences. So some of them will be we will limit the horsepower or we will limit access to off-road modes.”
But who’s choosing what is and isn’t limited? The owner or Rivian? I asked.
“That’s a great question. So what we will do as well is provide optionality in terms of how you want to configure it. So, we will not necessarily give you the option to say, okay, set it to have a slider [of] 500, 600 [hp], but here will be a category which is limit the horsepower. There will be another category which is can’t limit the stability control, another category which is off-road, yes or no? And then, from five to ten settings, we will basically enable the owner to configure that in a generic way for 10 months. So this is one of the reasons why we really want to get it right, because we believe that it will provide so much flexibility and control for parents,” he added.
The software boss confirmed the entire setup will be comparable to Rivian’s RAD Tuner with sliders and toggles on the screen to control the settings.
Should your child be like 16-year-old Joel, Bensaid noted, “That’s the beauty with digital key, you can not get out of it unless you have a password. The physical key and the keycard will not have access to defaults. It means that we will give you the possibility in the profile menu to say, I associate the key card or key fob with a specific profile.”
Valet mode will be separate from Teen Mode. “We will give you the optionality to lock some of the closures, don’t allow access to the front trunk, don’t allow access to the gloveboxes,” he explained.
Teen Mode and Valet Mode are currently slated for early 2027 across all Rivian models, including the R1T, R1S, and R2.
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As Director of Content and Product, Joel draws on over 15 years of newsroom experience and inability to actually stop working to help ensure The Drive shapes the future of automotive media. He’s also a World Car Award juror.
