Everyday, Rivian owners access and drive their vehicle by using a phone key that lives within the mobile app.
In partnership with Apple, Google, and Samsung* we’re bringing our phone key to device wallets as a more accurate and secure digital key for our newest generation of vehicles and any future vehicles.
Rivian Digital Key
* Collaboration as part of the Car Connectivity Consortium (CCC)
As the lead designer on this project my responsibility is to work with a large engineering team to figure out how an industry standard key experience fits into our existing digital ecosystem. From setting up new users to migrating existing users to sharing and managing keys, there are hundreds of different flows and edge cases to consider when creating a seamless UX experience.
Role
Lead UI/UX Designer
Launching
June 2025
Our current key solution leverages the mobile app to create a bluetooth powered phone key. Our new digital key solution brings that key to the device wallet, similar to a credit card or event pass. This allows the key to be used on both the phone and watch.
Benefits of the new digital key
Our team believed it was important for us to move towards this new digital key standard as it added a variety of benefits to our consumers. Most importantly by leveraging UWB (Ultra-Wide Band) technology we are able to provide them with a more responsive, secure, and accurate experience.
No app required
More accurate
More secure
Watch enabled
NFC capabilities
More keys supported
Today, our physical key cards only exist in one style regardless of what level of trim you have. We wanted to introduce dynamic key card art that would reflect the type of configuration you had. This opened up unique opportunities for customers that purchase limited models such as our California Dune edition vehicles.
Dynamic artwork
Working with our partners we have to consider setup not only in the Rivian ecosystem, but also the wallet ecosystem.
Integrated setup
Because keys can be set up outside of the Rivian ecosystem we needed to create a way for keys to become linked to a Rivian account therefore enabling remote commands.
Key Linking
Our drivers and keys experience needed to be updated to reflect the new digital key and associated non-credentialed drivers that could be updated once keys were linked to a Rivian account.
Key Management
We had to reflect new deletion states that could occur in one of three places: the wallet, the vehicle, or the mobile app. States like lost mode would affect the digital key since it lived in the wallet.
Key Deleting
Our unique passive entry implementation
One of the UX gaps we identified early on was that new phones without UWB would not be able to leverage passive entry.
We were able to work with Google and Samsung to support our unique passive entry solution, expanding our supported customer base.
This was a big win for the team as this is a unique Rivian solution.