Rivian’s CEO on Tesla’s Cybertruck, Ferrari’s Luce, and What Happens If the R2 Fails

RJ 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.)

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.

Do you like the Luce, though?

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.

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 s