Much has changed for the EV industry in the past half-decade, let alone in the 16 years since Rivian, the California-based electric vehicle maker, was founded.
Legacy automakers, from GM to Volkswagen, have begun to build out their EV platforms. The Biden administration introduced unique measures to supercharge EV adoption, and China has emerged as a dominant electric vehicle player.
Yet, EVs remain a brutal business.
Sales have slowed worldwide. Tesla and Rivian are two of the few all-electric US automakers with any skin in the game, and the second Trump administration has moved to put the previous administration’s EV push to a screeching halt.
The Big Beautiful Bill, which cuts EV tax credits introduced by the Biden administration, was signed into law on July 4.
Rivian’s CEO, RJ Scaringe, has maintained that the EV credits will have minimal impact on his company. However, the CEO recently told reporters that the current administration’s posture could be bad for the overall US auto industry.
“I think that the move away from some of the tailwinds that were previously in place for electric vehicles is actually good for Rivian, it’s good for Tesla, it’s bad for the US auto industry, and it’s bad for my kids,” he said.
Rivian invited media outlets to preview the company’s latest quad-motor platform for its second-generation R1 truck and SUV, which is priced from $116,000 to $126,000, in South Lake Tahoe, California.
During a roundtable interview on June 25, Business Insider asked Scaringe for his thoughts on Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, what hurdles lie ahead for the industry, and why Rivian wants to produce a $120,000 truck and SUV as average consumers look for cheaper vehicle options.
The following, which only includes questions from Business Insider, was edited for length and clarity.
You talk about how one of the challenges in the EV industry is that consumers only have a few choices for a sub-$50,000 EV, e.g., the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y. Where does a $120K quad-motor vehicle fit into that equation?
Well, the quad is a flagship powertrain and a flagship vehicle. It’s great for the brand, but it’s sort of an exercise in unnecessary capability. It’s so quick, it’s so capable off-road. The torque factoring characteristics are remarkable and it’s well beyond what one would need, but it’s great for building awareness and brand. There are a lot of customers, particularly R1 customers, that just want the best of what we can make. And so it’s for that customer.
But it’s not a high-volume product, whereas R2, with a starting price of $45,000, will be very, very high volume. It’s a totally different customer demographic and totally different trade-offs we have to make at the product level, but it needs to feel cohesive and consistent with the brand and the way we approach solving the technical problems in the vehicle.
Rivian is unveiling a lot of features in the quad, like the real auto dynamics tuner. I’m curious when you look at what the Jeff Bezos-backed Slate company is doing with a simple, bare-bones truck and the general direction of the market — I’m curious if you see that and think, “Do we need all this? Do we need all these fun features?”
Again, I think it’s awesome that there are different teams of people that come up with different answers to the question of how you design a car. So we’re obviously building a software-forward vehicle. It’s very tech-forward. The existence of a concept like Slate, of course, doesn’t challenge our perception of how we’re approaching inserting technology and having a really software-rich environment. But they’re going to go for a different customer, and the market needs lots of choices. So I think it’s good to see that.
On the way up, I spoke with a Rivian owner who said the biggest barrier for her right now is finding an available fast-charging station. We’ve been talking about EVs for decades. Here, we have a very capable EV car, but we’re still dealing with basic things like finding a working charging station. How do you react to that?
I 100% agree. If you’d asked me six or seven years ago, I would’ve said emphatically that charging is going to get built out. You’re going to see private investments flow into it. You’re going to see these big networks emerge in much the same way that gas station and that infrastructure was built out. We went from zero gas stations to 100,000 gas stations in like 10 years. Today, there are about 160,000 gas stations in the United States.
But charging stations have been woefully underinvested in such that you have one dominant strong network with Tesla. It’s a great network, with outstanding performance and high uptime. We’ve partnered with them to allow access to version three or newer chargers. But outside that, all the networks are really, honestly quite awful because the uptime is terrible. So you go to a charging location, and you expect it to work, but two of the three chargers, or four of the six, don’t work. You have to queue for the ones that are working. Because of that, we decided to build our own network as well — something we call the Rivian Adventure Network (RAN).
It’s small. I mean, it’s 4% the size of Tesla’s network, but it’s growing rapidly. And importantly, it’s one of two networks in the United States that have uptime north of 99% — obviously, Tesla being the other.
We designed all the hardware ourselves and then built it all ourselves. We build it all in our plants in Normal, Illinois. And so we’re going to be continuing to build that. And again, I never would’ve imagined we’d be building one of the strongest networks in the United States. I didn’t think we’d need to do that. But as it’s playing out, I think there’s going to be far fewer networks than we ever expected. Today, I’d say there are two networks that are great if the metric is uptime. There are maybe four or five networks that have more than, call it, 600 or 700 chargers. But it’s really, really underbuilt. And so we’re actively building that out. New RAN stations are popping up, a couple every week. So it’s a big focus for us and a huge spend category for us as well.
The current administration is a little more hostile to EVs. We have the Big Beautiful Bill, for example. Mike Murphy, a GOP operative and CEO of the EV Politics Project, told The New York Times that the bill was a “big win for China and bad for American manufacturing.” Do you share that sentiment?
I agree. I think that policy changes, in the end, don’t change anything. We’re going to electrify. And it’s really important the United States continues to lead there, and I think that the move away from some of the tailwinds that were previously in place for electric vehicles is actually good for Rivian, it’s good for Tesla, it’s bad for the US auto industry, and it’s bad for my kids.
Having more companies focused on the US auto industry would be much better for the US auto industry, much better for the US as a country, and certainly better for my kids.
We’re basically on an island fighting all the other OEMs. They would never say this publicly, because publicly they’re pro-EVs — but the biggest adversaries against electrification are big OEMs. So we fight that hard. It’s so frustrating to see companies talk out of both sides of their mouth when they say they’re pro-electrification, but they’re just gloves off on the policy side. So anti-EV. I think the challenge is, in the short term, that will maximize profits; in the long term, when you have a completely different set of leaders in place in the 2030s, it’s going to be really challenging for these companies that under-invest in this space.
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