Comparing Rivian's Autonomy+ to Ford's BlueCruise

Added: 2026-06-06

[00:00:00]All right. So, let me show you the universal handsfree mode. Okay. So, to engage it, you pull back on the stock twice. If you pull it back once, it goes into adaptive cruise. And then twice goes into universal hands-free. And you'll know if you're in an area where you can do it. Um, if you see this little icon with the hands on the wheel like this. And then your scroll wheel here on the right will adjust the speed for you. Uh with the Blue Cruise system, you know, in these types of roads, it wants my hands to be on the wheel, where with the Rivian uh on highway, off highway, it seems like as long as it can see the lines on the road, it'll let you do universal hands-free. Now, this is not, you know, like Tesla FSD self-driving because it does not stop for traffic lights, stop signs, anything like that. So, you're going to have to take over. The only reason it's going to slow down for a stop sign or something like that is if there's a car in front of you that's also slowing down. If you want to disengage the system, you just push the stock forward and it'll disengage and then you're back to driving. You can also hit the brakes uh and to take over as well. So, we re-engaged it here. And then you can see it puts a little animation there when a car is close to you. Here we're coming to this traffic light. So, you can see it's yellow and the car is just going to keep going. So, I'm going to I'm going to take over here and stop. I hit the brakes. You could also use the stock. If you press and hold left or right on the left side of the wheel, you can pull up a map over here if you want. If you click the center button on the right, you can switch between the autonomy display or a maps and navigation display. And then you can get your whole map back if you want.

[00:01:53]one. Now you can see there's a car next to me. So it's still doing the little, you know, yellow arrows there like, "Hey, watch out. There's somebody right there." Now I'm a little bit too far away from them, so it went away. Now, as far as I can tell, I don't think it shows you brake lights or anything for the other cars. It does show the Rivian if it's breaking. It'll show that. I, you know, I'm actually driving the car.

[00:02:15]It's just showing you what it can see.

[00:02:16]So, we'll switch back to the hands-free here. Now, I do want to make a lane change.

[00:02:23]I'm not on the highway, I don't think.

[00:02:26]Yeah. Okay. Lane change command unavailable on this road. So, I can I can still change lanes if I want to.

[00:02:39]Okay.

[00:02:45]So, it's switched back to adaptive cruise there. And then I just put it back into hands-free.

[00:02:52]And we're making a turn here. So now it should slow down because there's cars in front of me. So let's just see what it does here.

[00:03:03]So maybe a little jerky on the braking.

[00:03:04]You can see it does know there's a traffic light up here, but it's not going to stop the car or start the car.

[00:03:10]You can see we're still in the universal hands-free.

[00:03:14]So let's see what it does here. So the truck in front of me is moving. Okay, so the Rivian auto resumed there, which is nice. Now, the Mache in this situation, it allows you to resume, but you have to click like a the resume little icon on the wheel when you're off highway. If you're on highway on a fully blue cruised mapped highway, then it will autoresoom like in stop and go traffic.

[00:03:40]Okay, so it's resuming here now. I'm going to I'm going to go ahead and take over here.

[00:03:48]Don't fully trust that there.

[00:03:54]Okay. And then let's try and put it back in. Unavailable right now. There's not very good lane markings here. There's Okay, now we're going to have lane markings on both sides. Let's see if it's happy about that. Okay, so it seems happy about that.

[00:04:10]Doesn't know what this uh speed recent speed limit is here because it's grayed out up top. Okay, we're going to have to get over here.

[00:04:20]Okay, now I'm kind of doing that driving with the car. It wasn't totally doing that all on its own. Go back to universal hands-free.

[00:04:32]We're going to get on the interstate here.

[00:04:37]Now, it's switching back just to adaptive cruise.

[00:04:41]I'm back. Put it forced it back into universal hands-free.

[00:04:46]Let's see. It's following this. Oh, traffic. Saw the traffic light over there. A little rocky on this. I I took over because there's a car right there.

[00:04:56]Okay. So, we're in universal hands-free on the highway. Now, once we're on the highway here, we can change lanes. So, I'm going to change lanes. Now, it's okay. This part it's doing all by itself. Now, one other difference that stuck me in the Rivian here is when I want to make a lane change in my Mache, I just tap the blinker. Uh, and then if I put the blinker all the way down, the car will keep the blinker on indefinitely until you, you know, turn it back off. Well, in the Rivian, if you just tap the blinker, it'll it'll run your blinker, but it won't attempt a lane change. So, you need to push the blinker all the way down for it to actually attempt to do a lane change with the autonomy mode.

[00:05:36]So, yeah, if you're like on the highway and you're like, "Why won't my Rivian change lanes?" It's cuz you need to push your blinker either all the way up to go right or all the way down to go to go to the left.

[00:05:48]So, you can see what it looks like here.

[00:05:50]We've got a little bit of traffic. Um, you know, it's got the, you know, it can it can see that car up there is moving over, moving out of the lane. So, I push all the way down, making the lane change here, and then the Rivian will turn the blinker back off. So, that works pretty well.

[00:06:11]Now, there are a few additional settings you can change with how aggressive you want the the autonomy mode to be. Um, if you press left and right on the right side here, you can switch between it's basically your salsa settings, spicy, medium, or mild. So, I had it in spicy.

[00:06:33]I'll I'll switch it to medium right now.

[00:06:35]And that will just be how aggressive the car is with any movements, lane changes, all that kind of stuff.

[00:06:46]Now, if if I'm looking away, you could see right there, it it it notified me and did a little bung bung say, "Keep your eyes on the road." Um, the eye tracking is done through the rearview mirror where in the Mache there's a little uh bar right here with infrared cameras that are doing the eye tracking.

[00:07:04]I I think both systems work really well.

[00:07:07]I haven't had any problems with either one. Um it it's pretty much accurate if I if I'm been looking at the center screen for a little bit too long in both cars. It it'll tell me. Getting into a little more traffic here.

[00:07:21]It's kind of funny this flatbed trailer.

[00:07:23]It thinks it's like a huge semi. I mean, it's definitely a truck. We're going to treat it the same way, but it's kind of funny. It's like where where the looking here it's like where's what happened to the top of the truck.

[00:07:40]Whoa.

[00:07:49]Whoa. I I don't know why it's like phantom. It seems like it's breaking kind of hard right there. I don't know if you can see that. Watch the speedometer.

[00:07:58]Now, the the trailer in front of me, either brake lights aren't working or they're very hard to see in the sunlight. So, it's kind of nice the car is taking care of that. But, it almost feels like we're surging a little bit.

[00:08:12]Like, we get going a little bit too fast and then it's like overorrecting. You can kind of see the the gauge here kind of pingponging there with accelerating and slowing down. I'm going to get away from this trailer.

[00:08:26]switch lanes here.

[00:08:29]Probably the biggest thing that I miss with the Rivian autonomy stuff over the Blue Cruise is it does not automatically scoot over in the lane on the interstate highway like this. My my car, even for a smaller truck like this, it'll automatically scoot over in the lane a little bit. Now, you can reposition the Rivian yourself and it'll stay in it'll stay in the hands-free.

[00:08:55]Um, so you can, you know, override it a little bit in the lane, which is nice.

[00:08:59]But the Mache just does that automatically and that that makes that experience feel a lot lot more fluid.

[00:09:06]You're feeling a lot less likely that you you need to take over and intervene.

[00:09:11]And yeah, here's here's another case where, you know, my car would be shifted over in the lane. So, I can I can move the Rivian over myself, but it sure is nice when the car just does that automatically. It gives you a lot more confidence in the system. What was that?

[00:09:28]Whoa. Why is it breaking? I don't know why it was just breaking right there.

[00:09:32]That I don't know what's going on there.

[00:09:35]Maybe I thought one of these cars was going to come over into the into this lane or something. That was a little weird.

[00:09:46]Now it's saying lane change command unavailable.

[00:09:51]Interesting.

[00:09:55]All right. So, we'll see how it does on this road. Uh if it does the same thing it did the other day. At some point, it's going to have us take over because it's a pretty sharp right turn, but the road curves. Um, so this one it's doing okay with. All right. Yeah. So, you can see the signs like a right turn 25 miles an hour advised.

[00:10:19]Let's see what it is. Sharp curve ahead.

[00:10:21]Take control now. It's okay. It's trying to do it by me moving the wheel. I took it out of the handsfree. All right. So, we'll see what it does here.

[00:10:38]If it's going to take care of it or what.

[00:10:47]Keep your hands on the wheel.

[00:10:50]Okay. So, it doesn't want me to take over, but it wants my hands on the wheel.

[00:10:55]Whoa.

[00:10:57]So, it kind of went over the center line there a little bit. Did not feel great.

[00:11:02]All right. Yeah. So, just some final thoughts there on the, you know, autonomy system and the hands-free stuff. You know, it it definitely is is promising, but it's certainly not perfect. I think Blue Cruise on highway, you know, where it's a mapped highway, interstate type road, and you can be hands-free, that feels a lot smoother. I love how it scoots over in the lane next to big trucks. Uh, you know, following distance and stuff doesn't feel quite as dramatic. You know, there was a couple times in here where it kind of felt like we were surging back and forth. you know, picking up speed, dropping speed quite a bit there. And then, you know, I think offhighway, I think the Rivian, you know, obviously the Rivian has the advantage of the hands-free. Uh, but aside from that, I I think it picks up the lines maybe a little bit better off highway. It lets you get into the hands-free mode uh a little bit more easily, a little bit more often. Um, so yeah, I think Blue Gruz has the edge on the interstate and Rivian has the edge when you're not on the interstate. And I suspect, you know, Riven continues to push out lots of updates for this system. And I suspect that, you know, in a year from now, the Rivian system will probably be quite a bit better than it is right now. Uh, interestingly enough, the price of both systems are the same.

[00:12:21]Both the Ford and Rivian system are 50 bucks a month or a onetime purchase of $2,500. Now, when you buy the car a new, you know, either for Ford or Rivian, there's all sorts of different options there to, you know, give you some trials for a couple months, uh, get your price down or whatever. Uh, but generally speaking, you know, for the subscription type service, they're the same price, which is interesting. All right, well, that about does it for the video comparing Blue Cruise and Rivian's autonomy plus system. Uh, thanks so much for watching. I'm going to have some other videos on the Rivian here on the channel, so check those out and I'll see you in the next video. Bye.