As Rivian starts accepting orders for its 2026 Quad-Motor pickup truck and SUV, customers may initially be enticed by the power and tricks the four motors in these rebooted EVs can unleash.
After all, four motors delivering a combined 1,025 horsepower and 1,198 pound-feet of torque — and the ability to accelerate from a standstill to 60 miles per hour in less than 2.5 seconds — is hard to ignore.
But they should also pay attention to the software.
“The quad is really the pinnacle of everything that Rivian has done so far,” Wassym Bensaid, the company’s head of software, told TechCrunch, quickly providing a punch list on acceleration, speed, torque, and an estimated 374-mile range. “Now that we have full in-house motors, we have full control on the stack, hardware and software.”
That control has allowed Rivian to introduce several new features, which will roll out via software updates in the quad-motor this September. (Customers can order the quad-motor trim starting today with deliveries beginning as early as this week, according to the company.)
The feature that will likely inspire the most TikTok videos and Instagram reels is “kick turn,” a feature that adjusts the power to the inside wheels and lets the vehicle spin about its center — even as it’s moving. Kick turn, which TechCrunch tested during a press drive in June, allows a vehicle traveling under 20 mph on dirt to kick out its back end and swing it to the right or left without moving the steering wheel. The idea is to give off-roaders the ability to make tight turns on trails by pushing a button and without going through the tedious task of a 3-point turn.
Rivian fans and followers might recall a promoted, but never released, feature called “tank turn.” Kick turn, which controls power and tire grip, is the real-world and toned down version of tank turn. Rivian told TechCrunch tank turn was never released because its founder and CEO RJ Scaringe and others worried that tank turn would ruin trails. Not the best look for a company that has made outdoor activities and preserving the environment a big part of its brand.
Kick turn could still be abused if the driver stayed in the same spot and continued to spin the vehicle in a circle. However, Rivian has placed some software-powered guardrails on the feature, including limiting the speed and only allowing it to spin in dirt.
Second-generation overhaul
Rivian first revealed its second-generation quad-motor configuration during a May 2024 press drive in Washington, in a bid to showcase the overhaul of its flagship R1 line. That reboot touched every inch of its insides from the battery pack and suspension system to the electrical architecture, interior seats, sensor stack, and software user interface.
The effort, which has led the company to build more of its major components in-house, is aimed at reducing the cost of manufacturing and improving the performance and appeal of its EVs.
Deliveries of the new dual-motor and performance dual-motor trims began almost immediately, with the tri-motor configuration following by August 2024. The quad-motor, which is its most expensive and powerful trim, took another year to develop and refine the software features and embedded systems, and how they worked alongside the motors, suspension, and thermal management, according to the company.
And the stakes are high that Rivian gets the quad-motor right. Rivian’s highly-anticipated and cheaper R2 vehicles aren’t expected to go into production until the first half of 2026. Rivian is hoping the new quad-motor, which starts between $125,990 and $115,990 depending on the vehicle trim, will give sales a boost. And the software is a critical piece of its bid.
If the four motors (one located at each wheel) are the heart of the second-generation quad-motor, the software is the brain making it all work together.
Bensaid pointed to the development of advanced torque vectoring and balancing algorithms that have been introduced in the second-generation quad-motor.
“Think about it as super complex mathematical processing behind the scenes to allow real-time usage and decisions based on information from the four wheels and then the four motors, while obviously keeping safety guards in place,” he said.
What this means in practice is numerous sensors on the quad-motor R1S SUV and R1T truck provide information on yaw rate, steering angles, and other inputs, which are then fed into software models to control torque. In other words, Rivian’s in-house hardware and software work together in real-time to distribute power at each wheel electronically.
Software meets hardware
That has allowed the EV maker to introduce kick turn as well as other software-meets-hardware features to the quad-motor, including its “RAD Tuner,” which lets users change the vehicle’s driving dynamics via the central touchscreen. The RAD Tuner was developed by a team of engineers, software developers, and designers nicknamed the “Rivian Adventure Department.”
The origin story began several years ago, according to Bensaid.
“Every time we would go and test and qualify version of the software or the car, we have an engineering screen which is hidden with the secret code,” he said. It was here that early Rivian employee and R2 chief engineer Max Koff and R1 chief engineer Luke Lynch would configure the car as they wished — an exercise that often pushed the vehicles to new limits. “And that evolved into this idea of making this tuner available to customers.”
With RAD Tuner, drivers can create their own customized driving mode from scratch or build upon presets like “Rally” or “Sport.”
“We really give users full control through software so that they can figure their unique personality of the car,” Bensaid said, adding this particular feature is really meant for expert drivers.
Bensaid emphasized this is more than a simple change to the user interface that lets drivers tinker around with balance, stability, and ride height.
“I think what’s really important is the technology behind it,” he said. “For example, this torque balance, the fact that we’re able to configure this with a very simple slider — this is years of engineering development to have a very sophisticated torque vectoring algorithm with really a high-precision control that allows us to change values while we’re driving. It’s technically extremely, extremely difficult to do this type of changes.”
The company is also rolling out a launch cam feature, which uses an exterior camera recording to automatically capture so-called “Launch Mode,” which that can catapult the new R1T quad-motor from a standstill to 60 miles per hour in less than 2.5 heart-pumping seconds. Users can replay the videos, view real-time stats like speed and distance overlays calculated by in-house controls software. Users can also export videos to a mobile device via USB port to save and share.
NACS charging and more
The 2026 R1T and R1S vehicles, including the quad-motor, also come built in with the North American Charging 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 Superchargers. Rivian is also supplying quad-motor customers with a complimentary CCS DC adapter, which was the long-standing EV charging standard until recently, allowing them to plug into other networks.
As part of this hardware upgrade, the company has also updated its software, specifically the EV charging trip planner feature. Now, when a customer opens the trip planner and selects a NACS station, the information is updated in the trip planner to reflect that they don’t need an adapter.
