There’s a meaningful milestone this week for Rivian owners following the Openpilot ecosystem: Gen 2 support has officially been merged into the main codebase. The change comes via a recently accepted pull request to the opendbc repository, which is where a lot of the low-level vehicle integration work happens. In practical terms, that means Gen 2 Rivian compatibility has moved out of the experimental, developer-only phase and into something much closer to real-world readiness.
If you’ve been tracking progress over the past few months, this moment has felt inevitable. Developers have been steadily chipping away at Gen 2 integration behind the scenes, with early reports and test builds floating around the community. But until now, it all lived outside the core Openpilot experience. With this merge, Gen 2 support is no longer a side project. It’s part of the official foundation moving forward.
That said, there’s an important catch: you still can’t go out and install it. The software may be ready enough to merge, but the hardware ecosystem hasn’t caught up yet. Specifically, there are no publicly available Gen 2 harnesses at the moment, which means most users are effectively in a holding pattern. As with Gen 1, the harness is what bridges Openpilot to the vehicle’s systems, and without it, the merge is more of a signal than a solution.
What makes this update especially interesting is how different the installation story sounds compared to Gen 1. Early feedback suggests that Gen 2 setups are expected to be significantly simpler. That’s a notable shift. Gen 1 installations—particularly on Rivian—have involved a mix of custom harnesses, power considerations, and in many cases additional modifications for full functionality. The idea that Gen 2 could streamline that process points to a more mature understanding of the platform and a cleaner integration approach overall.
The broader implication here is less about what you can do today and more about what’s coming next. A merge like this typically marks the transition from “active development” to “ecosystem rollout.” It opens the door for hardware partners to finalize harness designs, for forks like Sunnypilot to begin integrating support, and for more widespread testing to take place. In other words, this is the point where things tend to accelerate.
For Rivian owners who have been waiting on Gen 2 support before jumping into Openpilot, this is the clearest signal yet that the wait is nearing its end. There are still a few pieces missing, but the hardest part—the underlying integration work—now has a home in the official codebase. From here, it’s a matter of hardware availability and refinement, not possibility.
You can check out the merged pull request here: https://github.com/commaai/opendbc/pull/3227