RJ ScaringeFounder & CEO

I have been enamored with cars since my earliest memory, drawn to the freedom of exploration they offer. The idea of thousands of people working together to build a complex vehicle fascinated me, leading me to tell my dad at age ten that I wanted to start a car company.

My dad was an engineer's engineer. He raised me to understand how things work by taking them apart and building them. Being around his firm taught me how companies are put together, and we fixed everything in our house ourselves.

As I grew older, I realized that transportation was at the root of many of society's biggest environmental challenges. I studied how industrial advancements changed human lives and wanted to contribute by making vehicles more sustainable for future generations.

We started with zero momentum. I refinanced my house, and my dad refinanced his house, raising a couple hundred thousand dollars. We used that to make tiny progress, which eventually allowed us to raise small rounds of under a million.

The meetings were comically bad. GM and Chrysler were going through bankruptcy, and VCs had no interest in hardware. Well-respected investors told me I was wasting my intelligence on a silly idea like starting a car company.

Storytelling is about describing a future state that does not yet exist. If you cannot explain why your company deserves to exist, you do not understand your vision. The story must evolve to remain investable to VCs and attractive to potential employees.

We aligned with Amazon's mission-oriented goals and focused on proving we could deliver a highly compelling electric fleet. Preceding the deal, we ran extensive internal analyses to ensure we could scale, which led to a one hundred thousand vehicle order.

Your launch product is your handshake with the world. We chose the pickup and SUV segments because they are platforms for adventure, ripe for a rethink. Launching with high-end flagships established our brand before introducing affordable mass-market models.

The R2 targets the five-passenger SUV segment, which represents half of the U.S. vehicle demand. Priced around fifty thousand dollars, the R2 will significantly grow our volumes, representing an order of magnitude increase in revenue.

Today, the EV market is highly concentrated around Tesla's Model 3 and Model Y. To scale electrification beyond single-digit market share, the industry requires choice. The R2 and R3 provide consumers with high-quality alternatives.

We establish frameworks so that thousands of parallel decisions feel like they were designed by a single brain. We coordinate the drive unit, software, and physical components through multiple iterations of prototypes, testing hundreds of cars before the first sale.

The complexity of managing thousands of sub-tier suppliers is enormous. For example, ninety-three percent of the world's nickel comes from Indonesia. Geopolitical trade policy shifts there can dramatically disrupt our battery production capacity.

Policy changes do not alter the inevitable end state: all new vehicles will eventually be electric. However, recent rollbacks have caused legacy OEMs to pull back, leaving less competition for dedicated EV companies like Rivian and Tesla.

You must be comfortable being misunderstood for a while. We invested heavily in building a vertically integrated business, designing our own software, electronics, and sales network. While this creates high early opex, it pays off at scale.

The most expensive part of a self-driving system is the brain, not the cameras or sensors. Developing our own inference platform in-house allows us to build extremely cost-effective, high-compute vehicles prepared for autonomous driving.

Our chip is an eight hundred TOPS processor. We install two of them in each vehicle, offering trillions of operations per second. It processes five billion pixels per second and is specifically optimized for vision-based robotics.

Legacy cars contain up to one hundred and fifty separate computers running isolated software from different suppliers. Rivian uses a zonal architecture with a few central computers, allowing a single codebase for over-the-air updates.

Self-driving will be a larger shift than electrification. By 2030, vehicles must have level four autonomy, meaning they can drive empty. Companies lacking this tech will lose massive market share, while leaders can monetize via licensing.