2025 Rivian R1T, R1S California Dune Editions Look Fit for the Desert
Rivian has launched its first special-edition models, the and California Dune Edition.
Their exteriors wear a tan paint job, with the option to match the same hue on the 20-inch wheels that come as part of the standard All-Terrain package.
The cabin features a two-tone look, with a Black Mountain upper section and a Sandstone lower section.
The Rivian R1T truck and R1S SUV received comprehensive updates for the 2025 model year, bringing tweaked exterior styling, a lithium-iron-phosphate chemistry in the standard battery, and a new drive unit in the Tri-Motor and Quad-Motor powertrains. Now, Rivian is enhancing the R1 duo even further with the California Dune Edition, a special version of the R1T and R1S that gets a desert-inspired paint job and standard off-road gear. This marks the first time Rivian has launched a limited-edition variant of its R1 line of vehicles.
The special-edition model is differentiated from standard Rivians by an all-new paint color called, unsurprisingly, California Dune. The color was inspired by Southern California's beautiful dunes. The vehicles also wear an exterior Darkout package to accentuate the contrast between the badging and the tan paint job.
Inside, each California Dune Edition sports a hue called Sandstone on the lower section of the cabin with a Black Mountain upper half. The interior also features flooring material that's supposed to be easy to clean, with Sandstone floor mats to match the seats, center console, and door panels.
The California Dune Edition is based around the R1 models' Tri-Motor setup, which packs three electric motors spitting out a whopping 850 horsepower and 1103 pound-feet of torque. This allows the electric SUV and electric truck to rip from zero to 60 mph in a claimed 2.9 seconds. The Tri-Motor powertrain also features a Soft Sand drive mode, which ties in nicely with the California Dune theme.
The special Rivians also come fitted with the All-Terrain package as standard. Normally a $3700 add-on, the package adds 20-inch wheels, a spare tire, and a reinforced underbody shield. The wheels are offered here with two finishes, either a darkened look or a California Dune paint that matches the rest of the body. The inclusion of the All-Terrain package does knock the Tri-Motor powertrain's EPA-rated range from 371 miles to 329 miles.
The California Dune models also feature a couple of unique accessories. There are black MAXTRAX traction boards that live atop the roof rack, which also get a darkened appearance. On the R1T pickup truck, there is also a standard powered tonneau cover, which got a revised design for 2025.
Rivian didn't say how many examples of the California Dune models will be built, but it did describe the model as limited editions. The special Rivians are available to order now, with the R1T California Dune Edition starting at $99,900 and the R1S California Dune Edition starting at $105,900.
You Might Also Like
Car and Driver's 10 Best Cars through the Decades
How to Buy or Lease a New Car
Lightning Lap Legends: Chevrolet Camaro vs. Ford Mustang!

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles

The Drive
2 hours ago
- The Drive
GMC Hummer EV Quietly Loses Apple CarPlay For 2026
The latest car news, reviews, and features. GM wasn't kidding around, it has no interest in an Apple CarPlay future, at least not in its EVs. Buried in the 2026 GMC Hummer EV fleet vehicle order guides is a nugget of news that the hulking electric SUV and truck will lose wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto support. Pour one out for smartphone mirroring and actual Apple Music onscreen interface usage. The Drive reached out to GM for comment and will update this story if or when we hear back. The GMC Hummer EV launched for the 2022 model year at the tail end of 2021. The SUV variant arrived in 2023. Both versions launched with wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. The end was in sight not long after. In 2023, just two months after the SUV model went into production, GM announced its new EVs would not have Apple CarPlay and Android Auto starting in 2024. Predictably, consumers were not amused and the people want Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. GM has claimed all along this is about the user experience and not having to flip in and out of various interfaces. It's the same argument Rivian and Tesla have used throughout, through, notably, those two automakers have eschewed the usage of buttons and have almost all controls locked into the onscreen interface. It's a key difference. Also different: Both Tesla and Rivian have natively integrated the Apple Music app, among others while not relying on the Google Play store. At the time of the announcement in 2023, then Executive Director of Digital Cockpit Experience Mike Hermiche told Reuters, 'we have a lot of new driver assistance features coming that are more tightly coupled with navigation.' Hermiche also said, 'we don't want to design these features in a way that are dependent on a person having a cellphone.' To date, these features had yet to appear. For 2026 GM's Super Cruiser hands-free driver-assist system is said to integrate with Google Maps to navigate the correct lane for a chosen route . GM's latest infotainment systems run on Android Automotive OS, which also has the Google Store built in for native apps such as Spotify and Pandora. The system also features built-in navigation via Google Maps. Bluetooth streaming works, but is a mess with Apple Music. The rollout of moving away from Apple CarPlay has been a little messy. The Hummer EVs launched with CarPlay as did the Cadillac Lyriq, the latter of which we don't know what 2026 will bring, yet. While the Lyriq's cousins, the Chevrolet Blazer EV and Equinox EV arrived without CarPlay, ironically, the Honda Prologue and Acura ZDX, both of which are reskinned Blazer and Lyriq twins, launched with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Consumers wanted CarPlay in their Blazer EV so badly an aftermarket solution was whipped up. GM claimed it was 'unauthorized' and 'could affect critical safety features.' The automaker shut the retrofit kit down. The 2026 GMC Hummer will lose the CarPlay and Android Auto, but it's gaining King Crab mode, which GM said all Hummer EVs will get thanks to an over-the-air software update. The King Crab model is said to turn the rear wheel faster than the front wheels for extra maneuverability in tight spaces. Though, this will only be standard on the 2X and 3X trims. The new Carbon Fiber Edition Pickup is even quicker then the already quick Hummer EVs thanks to revised software dropping the 0-60 mph sprint to 2.8 seconds. Got a tip? Send us a note: tips@
Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Yahoo
The DeepSeek R1 update proves it's an active threat to OpenAI and Google
This week, DeepSeek released an updated version of its R1 model on HuggingFace, reigniting the open-source versus closed-source competition. The updated version, called DeekSeek-R1-0528, has 685 billion parameters, an upgrade from January's version, which had 671 billion. Unlike OpenAI and Google's models, which are famously closed-source, DeepSeek's model weights are publicly available. According to the benchmarks, the R1-0528 update has improved reasoning and inference capabilities and is closing the gap with OpenAI's o3 and Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro. DeepSeek also introduced a distilled version of R1-0528 using Alibaba's Qwen3 8B model. This is an example of a lightweight model that is less capable but also requires less computing power. DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B outperforms both Google's latest lightweight model Gemini-2.5-Flash-Thinking-0520 and OpenAI's o3-mini in certain benchmarks. But the bigger deal is that DeekSeek's distilled model can reportedly run on a single GPU, according to TechCrunch. To… distill all this information, the Chinese rival is catching up to its U.S. competitors with an open-weight approach that's cheaper and more accessible. Plus, DeepSeek continues to prove that AI models may not require as much computing power as OpenAI, Google, and other AI heavyweights currently use. Suffice to say, watch this space. That said, DeepSeek's models also have their drawbacks. According to one AI developer (via TechCrunch), the new DeepSeek update is even more censored than its previous version when it comes to criticism of the Chinese government. Of course, a lot more happened in the AI world over the past few days. After last week's parade of AI events from Google, Anthropic, and Microsoft, this week was lighter on product and feature news. That's one reason DeepSeek's R1 update captured the AI world's attention this week. In other AI news, Anthropic finally gets voice mode, AI influencers go viral, Anthropic's CEO warns of mass layoffs, and an AI-generated kangaroo. On virtually every social media platform, users are freaking out about the new Veo 3, Google's new AI video model. The results are impressive, and we're already seeing short films made entirely with Veo 3. Not bad for a product that came out 11 days ago. Not to be outdone by AI video artists, a reporter from The Wall Street Journal made a short film about herself and a robot using Veo 3. Mashable's Tech Editor Timothy Werth recapped Veo's big week and had a simple conclusion: We're so cooked. After last week's barrage, this week was lighter on the volume of AI news. But what was announced this week is no less significant. Anthropic finally introduced its own voice mode for Claude to compete with ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini. The feature is currently in beta on mobile for the Claude app and will even be available to free plans with a limit of 20 to 30 voice conversations per day. Anthropic says you can ask Claude to summarize your calendar or read documents out loud. Paying subscribers can connect to Google Workspace for Calendar, Gmail, and Docs access. OpenAI is exploring the ability to sign into third-party apps with ChatGPT. We don't know much yet, but the company posted an interest form on its site for developers using Codex, its engineering agent, to add this capability to their own apps. It may not sound like a big deal, but it basically means users could easily link their personalized ChatGPT memories and settings to third-party apps, much like the way it works when you sign into a new app with your Google account. Opera announced a new agentic AI browser called Neon. "Much more than a place to view web pages, Neon can browse with you or for you, take action, and help you get things done," the announcement read. That includes a chatbot interface within the browser and the ability to fill in web forms for tasks like booking trips and shopping. The announcement, which included a promo video of a humanoid robot browsing the robot, which is scant on details but says Neon will be a "premium subscription product" and has a waitlist to sign up. The browser has suddenly become a new frontier for agentic AI, now that it's capable of automating web search tasks. Perplexity is working on a similar tool called Comet, and The Browser Company pivoted from its Arc browser to a more AI-centric browser called Dia. All of this is happening while Google might be forced to sell off Chrome, which OpenAI has kindly offered to take off its hands. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned in an interview with Axios that AI could "wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs." Amodei's predictions might be spot on because a new study from VC firm SignalFire found that hiring for entry-level jobs is down to 7 percent from 25 percent in the previous year. Some of that is due to changes in the economic climate, but AI is definitely a factor since firms are opting to automate the less-technical aspects of work that would've been taken on by new hires. Google wants you to know its AI overviews reach 1.5 billion people a month. They probably don't want you to know AI Overviews still struggles to count, spell, and know what year it is. As Mashable's Tim Marcin put it, would AI Overviews pass concussion protocol? The proposal of a 10-year ban on states regulating AI is pretty unpopular, according to a poll from Common Sense Media. The survey found that 57 percent of respondents opposed the moratorium, including half of the Republican respondents. As Mashable's Rebecca Ruiz reported, "the vast majority of respondents, regardless of their political affiliation, agreed that Congress shouldn't ban states from enacting or enforcing their own youth online safety and privacy laws." In the private sector, The New York Times signed a licensing deal with Amazon to allow their editorial content to be used for Amazon's AI models. The details are unclear, but from the outside, this seems like a change of tune from the Times, which is currently suing OpenAI for copyright infringement for allegedly using its content to train its models. That viral video of an emotional support kangaroo holding a plane ticket and being denied boarding? It's AI-generated, of course. Slightly more obvious, but no less creepy is another viral trend of using AI to turn public figures like Emmanuel Macron and Judge Judy into babies. These are strange AI-slop-infested times we're living in. AI has some positive uses too. This week, we learned about a new humanoid robot from HuggingFace called HopeJr (with engineering by The Robot Studio), which could be available for sale later this year for just $3,000. And to end this recap on a high note, the nonprofit Colossal Foundation has developed an AI algorithm to detect the bird calls of the near-extinct tooth-billed pigeon. Also known as the "little dodo," the tooth-billed pigeon is Samoa's national bird, and scientists are using the bioacoustic algorithm to locate and protect them. Want to get the latest AI news, from new product features to viral trends? Check back next week for another recap, and in the meantime, follow and for more news. Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable's parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.


Tom's Guide
6 hours ago
- Tom's Guide
OpenAI's new device could replace your phone — here's what we know so far
We've seen what ChatGPT can do on a screen. But what happens when AI steps off the screen entirely? That's the question swirling around OpenAI's rumored upcoming device; a physical AI assistant designed in collaboration with legendary Apple designer Jony Ive and his hardware details are still under wraps, early rumors suggest this could be the beginning of an entirely new product category, and potentially a direct challenge to the role of smartphones in our lives. The first thing to know is that this device might not look anything like what you're used to. According to leaked reports, OpenAI's hardware concept is expected to be pocket-sized, screenless, and contextually aware, with microphones and cameras that let it 'see' and 'hear' your environment. Think of it as ChatGPT that follows you around, minus the screen fatigue. One version of the device is said to resemble an iPod Shuffle (remember that?) worn around your neck, with subtle touch or voice-based controls that could let you interact with OpenAI's models in real time. Whether you're walking down the street, cooking in your kitchen, or out running errands, the goal seems to be a more seamless, natural way to integrate AI into everyday life, but without needing to tap or type. If OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has his way, this device could eventually replace your smartphone entirely. While that may sound bold, it's part of a growing industry shift toward ambient computing, where AI assistants blend into the background and proactively help you, rather than waiting for you to open an app. And OpenAI isn't the only one betting on this future. Humane's AI Pin, Rabbit's R1, and Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses have all staked claims on the idea that AI will soon become a wearable, conversational companion and go beyond smartphone apps. Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. But OpenAI's advantage is clear: it's building on top of ChatGPT's massive capabilities, which already include vision, voice, memory and real-time reasoning. Combine that with Ive's design legacy (he helped shape the iPhone, iMac, and Apple Watch), and you've got a dream team capable of defining the next major tech category. We're still a couple years away. According to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the first OpenAI device is expected to debut in late 2026 or early 2027, with mass production possibly starting soon after. My industry research indicates the following regarding the new AI hardware device from Jony Ive's collaboration with OpenAI:1. Mass production is expected to start in 2027.2. Assembly and shipping will occur outside China to reduce geopolitical risks, with Vietnam currently the… 22, 2025 That gives OpenAI time to figure out not just the hardware, but also how users will actually want to interact with a screenless, AI-powered device. Will it whisper reminders in your ear? Will it help navigate traffic while you walk or bike? Could it even summarize your emails before you sit down at your desk? The details remain to be seen — but one thing is certain: OpenAI is going beyond making ChatGPT as an occasional tool, into something that feels human, wearable and ever-present. And if it succeeds, your next assistant might not live in your pocket, it might live around your neck or clipped to your t-shirt.