To be a "rigger" is not simply controlling vehicles and drones. Riggers do that, too, but that's not what makes a rigger.
Rigging is the act of jumping into a vehicle or drone. You are not simply controlling it at that point, you become the vehicle or drone. If a paraplegic dwarf uses a control rig to jump into a rotodrone, she is the rotodrone. She does not have crippled meat legs. She has rotors. That drone's narcoject rifle is not some tool she controls with a joystick and AR input; that is her hand, real as meat, or even more real. She is not strapped into a chair; she is free, the meat of no concern. And when that Lone Star fragger blows you out of the sky with an Ares Alpha loaded with stick n shock, you didn't lose a toy. You just died an agonizing, crashing, fiery death as your entire body locked up and careened through the air until it met pavement and you were born again in some alien pile of skin, now with internal bleeding, wondering why the frag you can't feel your gyrostabilizers.
The control rig fully integrates your mind into an exterior vessel. Motor controls, nervous system, all the conventional five senses, some modified to allow you to comprehend the data output by nonstandard sensors, proprioception, vestibular sense, the works, while completely blocking off those inputs from your meat body. This is what makes a rigger, and the reason they're the term used for the 'wheel man' archetype; they're the only ones good enough to do it.
The only way to do that without a control rig is for a Technomancer to submerge and take Man and Machine.
For an adept to be a rigger, they need that control rig. They can still be a fantastic rigger, using Adept powers from the remainder of their magic after augmentation to crank up their already considerable Vehicle skills in their domain of choice, or better yet, to crank up Gunnery. But you can't be a rigger as an unaugmented Adept.
