Both the Lyriq and R1S have child safety locks to prevent children from opening the rear doors. The Lyriq has power child safety locks, allowing the driver to activate and deactivate them from the driver's seat and to know when they're engaged. The R1S’ child locks have to be individually engaged at each rear door with a manual switch. The driver can’t know the status of the locks without opening the doors and checking them.
In the past twenty years hundreds of infants and young children have died after being left in vehicles, usually by accident. When turning the vehicle off, drivers of the Lyriq are reminded to check the back seat if they opened the rear door before starting out. The R1S doesn’t offer a back seat reminder.
The Lyriq’s standard pretensioning seatbelts also sense rear collisions and remove slack from the front seatbelts to help protect the occupants from whiplash and other injuries. The R1S doesn’t offer a whiplash protection system.
Over 200 people are killed each year when backed over by motor vehicles. The Lyriq has standard Reverse Automatic Braking that uses rear sensors to monitor for objects to the rear and automatically applies the brakes to prevent a collision. The R1S doesn’t offer backup collision prevention brakes.
Both the Lyriq and R1S have rear cross-traffic warning, but the Lyriq has Rear Cross Traffic Braking (automatically applies the brakes) to better prevent a collision when backing near traffic. The R1S’ Rear Cross-Traffic Warning doesn’t automatically brake.
Both the Lyriq and the R1S have standard driver and passenger frontal airbags, front side-impact airbags, driver and front passenger knee airbags, side-impact head airbags, front seatbelt pretensioners, height adjustable front shoulder belts, four-wheel antilock brakes, traction control, electronic stability systems to prevent skidding, crash mitigating brakes, daytime running lights, lane departure warning systems, blind spot warning systems, rearview cameras, rear cross-path warning and available around view monitors.