LoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyRJ Scaringe got his PhD from MIT studying internal combustion engines. Then he founded a company to make them obsolete. In 2009, fresh out of grad school, he launched what would become Rivian. The company spent nearly a decade in stealth mode before arriving at the 2018 LA Auto Show with two electric rides nobody had seen coming.
The road, however, hasn't been easy. Rivian lost $3.6 billion in 2025, and has burned through nearly $25 billion in the past eight years. It has spent more money over the same period than almost every other pure EV maker. Rivian's IPO was the largest worldwide in 2021, and one of the largest in US history, within days valuing the company at over $100 billion. Its stock has dropped from a high of $130 to around $16. Since the R1 went on sale in 2021, Rivian has sold 175,000 cars. In the same time, Tesla has sold 8 million.
But in 2024, Volkswagen Group committed up to $5.8 billion to co-develop software and electrical architecture technology with Rivian in a huge joint venture. This year, Uber announced it will invest up to $1.25 billion in Rivian to build and deploy up to 50,000 fully autonomous robotaxis.
Regardless, the company needs its new R2 SUV to work. Not just sell, but sell in large numbers.
I sat down with Scaringe for a candid, wide-ranging discussion on what happens if the R2 fails, why the R1 launched with dead-end tech, how to compete with China, the Cybertruck’s failure, and the virtue of buttons inside cars. But we started on easier ground: his thoughts on the most polarizing EV of 2026. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
RJ Scaringe, CEO of Rivian Automotive, apparently hoping to be better off-road than an R2.
JEREMY WHITE: What do you think about Ferrari’s Luce?
RJ SCARINGE: The way Jony [Ive] and Marc [Newson] approach design is incredibly intentional, so there's not a decision on that car that’s unintentional. Through that lens, you have to like look at it in a different light. It's definitely different than what people were expecting.
Would I buy it? I don't own a Ferrari. There are things about it I really like. Parts of the interior are just phenomenal, like how beautifully well executed the haptics, the switches, the buttons are. You can see Jony's fingerprints all over it.
It’s just great to see more EV choice, because, particularly in the United States, there’s such a void. About 50 or 60 percent of the market share is two vehicles: the Model 3 and the Model Y. These have been on the road for a while, yet they outsell everything else. If we want to electrify, we need to have a lot more choice than just those two.
Have you been surprised at the Cybertruck’s failure?
You sometimes take big swings with something that’s wild, and they definitely took a very big swing. It’s turned out it’s not a mass-market product, but it was pretty clear from the beginning that it wasn’t going to be. It was very, very niche in terms of some of the design decisions and product trade-offs [Tesla] made. Cybertruck is the exact opposite of the Model 3 and Model Y. Those aren’t products that push anybody away. I applaud the courage in doing a product like that, but it's going to end up very niche for them.
Polestar’s in a bit of a mess, isn't it?
To be an at-scale player, the price needs to be right, the technology integration needs to be solid, and the overall package has to be compelling to a broad enough audience: things like acceleration, efficiency, packaging. Then there's the intangible. Does the design have enough interest that it draws people in, but at the same time inviting and broad enough to appeal to large numbers?
That is the challenge Polestar has. They haven’t gotten that combination quite right. The cars look great. I don’t think it’s a design issue. But I do think the whole package—price, content, features—just hasn’t connected with consumers in the way that we hope R2 does, or certainly like a Model Y has connected. The fact that Tesla vehicles have such significant market share [in the US] is not a reflection of a healthy market. It’s a reflection of a wildly underserved market.
Scaringe hopes the company’s new R2 is set to be the Rivian for the masses.
So much is riding on R2. What's the plan if it fails?
We build software in-house, electronics in-house. We build our own in-house silicon. We design and build all of our motors, all our own gearboxes, all of our power electronics—everything completely in-house. And if Rivian stayed a 50,000-unit-a-year company, that would be an extraordinarily expensive way to do that.
We have our own sales locations. We've built out our own service network. Many billions of dollars have flowed into that. We own parts distribution, we own vehicle distribution. We have giant parking lots and vehicle prep centers across the country. We built all that contemplating R2.
And so that means, leading up to R2, we spent a lot of money. It’s not an accident. It’s an intention. It’s the plan. But the plan is to be a large company. The plan is for R2 to work. So if R2 doesn’t work, if R2 were to be a flop, we would have to really take a step back and really reconfigure the business. To have a 6,000-person engineering team to sell 50,000 vehicles just wouldn't make sense. To be vertically integrating deep down to the silicon as we have would be impossible to rationalize.
So, absolutely, the future of the company as we’ve designed it depends on R2’s success. The goal was to be a big company, so the intention was for R2 to grow significantly. But to prepare for a product that’s going to be high volume, we had to make all these decisions to support it.
One thing we've done that’s also been helpful is that the Normal facility [in Illinois] has 155,000 units of capacity. We’ve started construction on the follow-on facility, a plant in Georgia that’s going to be built across two phases. Originally it was going to be 200,000, but we made the decision to increase phase one because we’ve seen such positive reaction around the product. So phase one is now 300,000 units, and that will support other variants [including the R3] and expansion to Europe.
You own your complete autonomy stack, and that’s not part of the VW deal. Licensing this tech to other OEMs could be lucrative for Rivian. Will that become more important than selling cars?
It’s an end. So in a world where R2s are selling really well, we’d still pursue this. A world where Rivians are not selling well, we’d still pursue this. It just becomes really critical in a world without R2. But we're playing to win. I spend a tiny fraction of my time even considering what things would look like if we didn’t ramp in the way we’re working towards.
Your Gen 1 autonomy launched in the R1s is now a write-off. Early customers are unhappy about that. They paid $80K for something that’s not really capable anymore. Why should a customer buying an R2 today trust that your current software won’t be the next thing that you describe as a dead end?
R1 Gen 1 launched end of 2021. The architecture was a mix of things, some of our cameras, but primarily a Mobileye-based system. We realized as we were launching that it was the wrong approach. A very different approach was emerging, which has now become so well understood because of LLMs: this idea of using transformers to do encoding and to be able to build very complex models that represent human understanding.
So nearly the same time we launched R1, we completely reset. We realized that what we had was not going to scale. We recruited a team to design a [new] system around a data flywheel, and teach it with accumulated miles. That launched on Gen 2 in late 2024. When it launched, the features were like OK-ish. It did highway lane keep, but it didn’t have a lot of data. The data flywheel started to spin up as we put more Gen 2 vehicles on the road.
What we’re launching with R2 is actually an in-between step; better than what’s on R1 today, but not what’s going to be coming to the R2. Internally we call it [Gen] 2.5. Our coming Gen 3 for autonomy uses in-house silicon, so it’s 800 trillion operations per second per chip. We have two of those, so 1,600 in total. That’s a 4x increase over the Nvidia-based solution we have today. And it has better cameras, and it has a lidar.
This in-between step is still going to be very capable. It’s the same model, running what we call LDM, our large driving model, that will grow to point-to-point supervised. You can get in the car, type in the address, it’ll drive you anywhere. But getting to eyes off—unsupervised Level 3 and then Level 4—[the launch R2] will not be capable of. We’ve been careful to be very clear on that.
But if the first R2s are Gen 2, or 2.5, why should people buy these and not wait for the Gen 3 versions of the R2 with better cameras, lidar, the new in-house silicon and Level 3 capability?
Why does someone buy an iPhone 17? People buy an iPhone 17 fully knowing there’s gonna be an iPhone 18. Why buy an 18 when you know there will be a 19? You could talk to Siri in 2013. It wasn’t very good. You could talk to Alexa in 2018. It wasn’t very good. Now we’re in a world of real AI, highly complex understanding of really complex systems. Autonomy is going to develop faster than society is ready for. In many ways, one of the challenges we have on autonomy is, as much as we’re putting effort and time into it, it’s still not a major purchase criteria for people. Maybe 20 to 25 percent of customers really pay attention to it.
One thing that does figure in car purchasing choice is the knobs and buttons. Your head of tech thinks voice control is the future, but you just mentioned how you love the Luce’s buttons.
On voice it’s going to be a journey. We’re bullish on voice, but it’s not replacing UI.
To an extent. It’s probably 40 million decisions to make a vehicle. There are so many that customers will never pay attention to. But then there’s a bunch, not millions, but thousands, that are very much customer facing.
There are going to be decisions we make that some people don’t like. One of those, admittedly, is the decision to be very multi-touch heavy. It wasn’t an accident, it was a principled decision to have a very high degree of updatability in the vehicle where features can evolve. But on R2 we also decided we wanted to have some mechanical interaction that was still software defined. We developed the haptic wheels.
Yes, they really are good. [The R2 has a pair of “Halo Wheels” on the steering wheel that provide haptic clicks as you push and spin them to navigate the settings on the display.]
These have feedback, but as much as it feels like it’s clicking, it’s all software. This allows us to adjust that over time. There are going to still be customers who prefer a bunch of buttons. I think the Luce did a really interesting job of trying to explore multi-touch and buttons together. I actually think the car will end up being quite influential on how people do interiors.
The haptic Halo Wheels on the R2’s steering wheel are a solution to a lack of buttons and knobs in the cabin.
Rivian has very high customer satisfaction but, paradoxically, very low reliability ratings. A neat trick. Which would you prefer: a reliable car or evangelical customers?
Oh, for sure, we'd rather have a super-connected customer base. But the goal is to build a highly reliable car. Part of the challenge on that data is it’s a lagging indicator. That data is built off of 2021 to 2023 R1s.
When you look at Toyota’s score, it’s not reflecting Toyota’s first three models it launched in the US, it’s reflecting the last couple of years. We think R2 is going to represent a significant step up in our performance in reliability.
Xiaomi announced it was making cars in 2021, the same year you launched R1. It then released its first car in 2023. That’s an enormously fast turnaround. When you launch in Europe you’ll be going toe-to-toe with the Chinese makers. How will you compete?
What has happened in China is they started as fully capitalized businesses. Xiaomi was already a very successful tech company with a very strong cash flow. But I don't want to dismiss the strength of what they’re doing. We own a couple of their vehicles. Very impressive. The product is differently positioned, so that matters. But the reason we own Xiaomi vehicles isn’t because we’re selling against them today, it’s because we have to compete with them from a tech point of view on our own products when we go to Europe.
Importantly, our tech stack is actually already starting to experience competing with the Chinese. The first deployment is in the Volkswagen ID.1 [which will use Rivian tech], so that’s a $20,000 car, one of the lowest-cost EVs in Europe, but it has to compete against the BYD low-cost EVs. The joint venture has forced us to make sure our tech in Europe is right there against China. So we're working with the Volkswagen Group, including the sub-brands Porsche, Audi, and so on.
But these very brands are struggling to compete themselves.
Where the West—North America and Europe—cannot compete today is on cost.
With that in mind, you're charging $2,500 for Rivian’s autonomous features. How long do you think you’ll be able to charge so much for something others, like BYD, are giving away free?
I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. In a world where there’s a very small number of people that develop autonomous capabilities, it will likely still carry some charge or premium. Once enough companies have developed it, what you can charge will become much lower. But in either scenario it’s very important. Where it becomes free, then it becomes a necessary component to sell vehicles.
I think this will become a feature that’s embedded in the purchase price. Do you remember when we used to pay for airbags? There was a time where it was an option. Now it's just in the car. So, I think there is a very clear case that this could happen [to autonomous features], but it doesn’t make them less important.
It’s massively important. It’s just whether you can still charge $2,500 for it.
Well, we can today. Just like you could in 1991 on airbags. If you can, you should—if it supports building your business, building your technology.
Finally, I know you’ve only just launched the R2, but the people want to know: When will we get the R3? The Georgia plant isn’t fully funded yet. Will this hold things up?
We do love to see everyone’s excitement around R3, which will be an incredible vehicle. But R3 will come after R2. We’re focused on ramping up production and delivering R2.
We’re making rapid progress on the Georgia facility, and we’re on target to begin producing R2s on the line by the end 2028. Our plan is for 300,000 Rivians to be built per year in Georgia in that initial phase of construction.
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