The Rivian R2’s New Pet Cam Lets Owners Check On Their Pets From Anywhere

The feature uses a hidden camera in the rearview mirror to stream a live feed directly to the owner’s smartphone.

Photo by: Rivian

By: Iulian Dnistran

Sep 30, at 3:46am ET

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Rivian is adding a new pet-friendly feature to the R2.
An upcoming software update will enable owners to keep an eye on their pets from their smartphone.
Pet Cam is only available in the R2, as the R1S and R1T don’t have a color in-cabin camera.

Rivian is making the R2’s in-cabin camera do double duty. A new feature called Pet Cam is coming to the startup’s newest EV, which will enable owners to keep an eye on their pets from anywhere, simply by using Rivian’s smartphone app.

Pet Cam is part of the Pet Comfort Mode, which keeps the cabin temperature at a comfortable level if there’s an animal inside. The new feature, which is coming to all R2s in the next over-the-air software update, uses the hidden RGB camera in the central rear-view mirror, the same one that’s used to monitor the driver for attentiveness while the car is moving.

When Pet Comfort Mode is active, owners can get a live view of the car’s interior in the Rivian app. They can also choose to receive snapshots every minute, which show up directly on the smartphone’s lock screen—if there’s a widget configured.

The keen-eyed among you might have noticed that there’s no mention of the R1S or R1T, and that’s because the company’s flagships are not getting the Pet Cam feature. It comes down to hardware, as the R1 lineup uses an infrared camera to keep track of what’s going on in the cabin, which is unsuitable for a color live stream.

But swapping an IR camera for an RGB sensor is not the only thing keeping Rivian from beaming images of your pet from afar. According to Wassym Bensaid, the startup’s software boss, privacy has been a major concern during the feature’s development.

In an interview with The Drive earlier this year, Bensaid said that Pet Cam will be off by default, and that the feature will not work if the camera detects a human in the cabin.

Gallery: 2027 Rivian R2: First Drive

Source: Mack Hogan/InsideEVs

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“It’s really super important for us to protect from cases like domestic violence. So we don’t want, if you’re not on good terms with your spouse, we don’t want to give you a tool to spy on them. So that’s why it’s super important that we will only activate the feature when there is a pet,” Rivian’s software chief said.

The latest software version that shipped to both the R2 and R1 EVs is 2026.31.40. That brought the new Rivian OS 2 interface to R1 models, but its release notes don’t mention Pet Cam. This means the feature will go live with a later release, though Rivian hasn’t revealed a date for the upcoming version.