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Rivian’s Electric Truck Is a Cutie and a Beast

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The redoubtable Rivian R1T, the first crusher in a coming wave of electric pickup trucks, can soar unscathed over gnarly boulders, hitch an 11,000-pound load and scorch 60 m.p.h. in about 3.5 seconds. The truck brings everything and the kitchen sink, with outdoorsy options such as a rooftop tent and a track-mounted Camp Kitchen, which lets owners whip up a trail-side omelet and wash up afterward. And after its hot-starting initial public offering, Rivian is already valued at nearly $100 billion, more than such behemoths as Ford Motor and General Motors.

All good so far, for the company’s fingers-crossed shareholders, stakeholders (including Amazon and Ford) and 9,500 employees. Some consumers may still have a question: What in the world is a Rivian?

The R1T, now emerging from a former Mitsubishi factory in Illinois, must navigate that awkward getting-to-know-you stage, just as a then-obscure Tesla did with its Roadster in 2008 and Model S in 2012. Unlike Tesla, which created the electric vehicle market and once had it mostly to itself, Rivian faces immediate competition from G.M.’s 1,000-horsepower GMC Hummer EV pickup, and from a Ford F-150 Lightning — based on America’s best-selling vehicle for 39 straight years — set to arrive in spring. Tesla has pushed Texas production of its outré Cybertruck to sometime in 2022.

Rivian, based in Irvine, Calif., took 12 years to get to market, but its timing appears ideal. Pickup trucks continued to strong-arm market share as the pandemic hammered sales of traditional cars. A residential flight from big cities, such as New York’s exodus upstate, may have played a role. (Home project, meet pickup truck.) One in five vehicles sold in America is now a full- or midsize pickup, or well over three million sales in a normal year.

Where Ford’s Lightning appears to be a more conventional, task-oriented truck, the 16-inch-shorter Rivian is a born adventurer. A pioneer, too, proof that an electric four-by-four can tackle the most forbidding backcountry. This summer, an R1T successfully navigated the TransAmerica Trail, a roughly 5,000-mile crucible from North Carolina to the Oregon coast. If most buyers are content with only a dirt road to a cabin or campground, they can always dream.

Starting at $68,575, the Rivian becomes the market’s first E.V. to integrate four independent electric motors, each spinning at up to 18,500 r.p.m. That allows all manner of “torque vectoring” tricks, apportioning real-time power to any of four wheels to maximize performance. All while barely making a sound. “Tread lightly” is the mantra of any conscientious off-roader, and the Rivian eliminates a noisy internal combustion engine and its tailpipe spew.

“You can hear the stream trickling when you come down the trail — and the birds,” said Brian Gase, Rivian’s director of special projects.

Yet little will stand in the way of the R1T or its sport utility offshoot, the R1S. An adjustable air suspension and four off-road modes — Auto, Rock, Rally and Drift — allow up to 15 inches of ground clearance. That’s a stunning 4.2 inches more than a Jeep Wrangler Rubicon, a touchstone of overland ability.

Move to city-slicker surfaces and this 835-horsepower beast will outrun or dance around any petroleum pickup I’ve tested, claiming a 3.0-second dash to 60 miles an hour. That’s despite a curb weight of nearly 7,150 pounds, about a ton more than a typical full-size gasoline pickup. This truck doesn’t defy physics so much as stage an open revolt.

The Rivian never feels quite that quick, and auto publications are finding 3.5 seconds to 60 m.p.h. is more like it. Even that is ridiculous acceleration for any bona fide four-by-four, let alone one that weighs as much as two BMW 330i sedans, and could tow three Bimmers at highway speed. Like most whispery E.V.s, the Rivian plays tricks with one’s somatic system. Without aural cues and frenzied pistons, a more-reliable calculus for forward progress is to watch small cars turn to smaller specks in the mirror.

On hilly roads girdling New York’s reservoirs, the Rivian carved up those BMWs and Benzes as if they were holiday turkeys, its clever hydraulic anti-roll system keeping the truck’s body as flat as a platter. A roughly 135-kilowatt-hour battery pack, shielded by composite underbody armor, provides up to 314 miles of range, as rated by the Environmental Protection Agency — reasonable, considering all that mass and drag. Switching into Conserve mode lowers the ride height and operates front-axle motors alone to save juice.

For an extra $10,000, a roughly 180-kilowatt-hour battery extends range past 400 miles. That bests the $112,595 Hummer EV, which should manage about 350 miles with its roughly 200-kilowatt-hour pack, the largest ever fitted to an electric vehicle. Rivian also plans to offer a more affordable 105-kilowatt-hour pack with a roughly 230-mile range.

The R1T’s brake pedal feels a bit squishy for my firmer tastes, but there’s no denying the truck’s awesome ability to shed speed. In objective testing, Edmunds.com found the Rivian set lofty new pickup records for stopping distance, acceleration and road-holding grip. Less-hurried owners can drive for hours or even days without ever brushing that brake pedal: A smartly chosen, driver-adjustable regenerative function allows effortless “one-pedal” driving to smoothly halt the truck by lifting off the accelerator.

For all its crushing strength, the Rivian is a cutie. Today’s pickup vogue, embodied by the Hummer or Cybertruck, is to resemble a Mechagodzilla, all stomping, fire-breathing menace. The Rivian’s oval, translucent LED eyes, clean lines and cheerful mien are more Iron Giant: rated for all ages, genders and personalities, not just Costco cosplayers in trucker hats.

The interior takes a safe path with the Apple-esque minimalism that is in vogue for E.V.s. A mite longer than midsize trucks, much shorter than full-sizers, the R1T offers a back seat comfortable for two or three adults. Most traditional switch gear is shorn in favor of controls on a 16-inch center touch screen, not always for the better.

Company representatives believe the cloud-based navigation system will handle directional tasks, and an 18-speaker Meridian audio system will play nicely with onboard apps such as Spotify, or link smartphones via Bluetooth. But the lack of available Apple CarPlay and Android Auto — standard fare on most budget cars — may demand a course correction.

Yet design, materials (including vegan leather and genuine ash wood) and craftsmanship are convincingly luxurious. And ingenuity rules. A portable Bluetooth speaker detaches from the center console, ready for campfire singalongs, with a 1,000-lumen flashlight in the driver’s door. USB ports and 110-volt outlets are sprinkled through the cabin and cargo bed. That bed features an electric tailgate, and an optional air compressor to “air down” tires for off-road exploration and refill them for the ride home. There’s no need to pack light: A big storage “frunk” rests below the hood and another beneath the 4.5-foot cargo bed, with a drain plug to double as an ice chest for tailgating.

The so-called Gear Tunnel will bore into outdoorsy hearts. This door-to-door abdominal cavity behind the passenger cab, made feasible by the lack of an internal-combustion drive shaft, swallows cargo or extras such as the optional, $5,000 Camp Kitchen. That à la carte item is not cheap. But unfurled from the Rivian, the industry-first unit will stop traffic at any tailgate bash or bonfire, with a two-burner convection cooktop, a collapsible sink with spray faucet and water tank, and a 30-piece Snow Peak kitchen set.

Now all Rivian needs to do is cook up sales. Like a baby Tesla, the company expects to burn through a few billion dollars before it can generate positive returns. Amazon owns a 20 percent stake — currently worth about $20 billion, more than five times its original investment — and has ordered 100,000 last-mile Rivian delivery vans through 2030. We will see if such fleet vans become Rivian’s side hustle or the main job.

Whichever electric truck early adopters prefer, one had best get a place in line. Ford says it has 160,000 customer reservations for its Lightning, but expects to build just 15,000 next year before rapidly expanding production. Rivian, in a federal filing, cited a backlog of 55,400 orders for the R1T and R1S.

Ford lowballed the Lightning’s starting price at roughly $42,000, but for a work version with a modest 230-mile range. Good luck finding one at dealers. A higher-volume Lightning XLT will start closer to $55,000, with a loaded Platinum edition brushing $90,000.

Ford (along with G.M.) touts massive scale, dealership networks and manufacturing experience, albeit in fossil-fueled trucks. Like Tesla, Rivian plans to forgo traditional showrooms in favor of direct sales in all 50 states. The company plans to open dozens of service centers in North America, but is also banking on remote diagnostics, over-the-air updates and mobile technicians who can service Rivians at homes, even when owners are away.

Either way, Ford can win: It owns 12 percent of Rivian, though it just dropped a plan to develop an E.V. in partnership with Rivian. Founded by R.J. Scaringe, Rivian hopes to fulfill its existing orders by the end of 2023, from a factory that can build 150,000 units a year.

Whatever else happens, Rivian can claim to be first mover in the electric truck space. From this electric David, the R1T lands an impressive first shot. Let’s see what the Goliaths do when they get off the mat.

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Business

Rivian’s IPO filing reveals Amazon’s prime influence

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EV startup Rivian has spent most of its life shrouded in secrecy, but now that it’s going public, that protective veil is lifting. And nothing has been more revealing to date than the regulatory filing made public late Friday night, which provides new information on the startup’s relationships with its major backers, Amazon and Ford, details about how much money it has spent so far (a lot), and projections for how much it expects to spend now that its first EV is in production (a lot).

The filing, known as the Form S-1, serves as a sort of ultra-detailed pitch to the financial markets. It has a letter from Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe. It outlines the company’s recent financial history and details its three launch vehicles: the R1T pickup, R1S SUV, and the Amazon delivery van. It also lays out the startup’s ambitions — both the gauzy ones, like its mission to “Keep The World Adventurous Forever,” and the more concrete, like “sell lots of electric vehicles” (not an actual quote).

Rivian’s S-1 is notable for what’s not in it, too. There are a bunch of key numbers still missing that we won’t get until the startup files subsequent amendments, including exactly how much voting power or ownership any one company or person currently has. Also absent: any unseemly self-dealing like what doomed WeWork IPO, though Scaringe did receive an equity award this year that could one day be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Let’s jump in.

Amazon on top

It’s no secret that Amazon is heavily invested in Rivian and has announced plans to buy up to 100,000 custom delivery vans from the startup. Rivian also disclosed in a legal filing earlier this year that Amazon (and Ford) own at least 10 percent of the startup’s shares. But the S-1 and the supporting documents filed with it offer a much greater window into this relationship.

While it’s hard to put an exact number on it until Rivian discloses more information, we now know that Amazon probably owns somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the EV startup. Amazon purchased some 26 percent of the 576 million shares Rivian offered during its Series A through F funding rounds (which spanned from February 2019 to January 2021). It will net a few million more when Rivian lists on the Nasdaq, too, in exchange for participating in the startup’s most recent rise in July. (Instead of selling shares this time, though, Rivian essentially borrowed a total of $2.5 billion from Amazon, Ford, T. Rowe Price, and Mannheim Investments. Those debts will convert into shares in the IPO.)

Rivian doesn’t detail how many shares existed before its Series A fundraising round or how many Scaringe owns, all of which would affect the final tally. (Scaringe does have voting control, according to a few allusions made in the filing.) But Amazon owns more than any other outside firm. T. Rowe Price is second, with around 22 percent of the shares sold from the Series A round onward, and Ford comes in at about 17 percent. In total, Amazon has committed around $1.83 billion to Rivian to date.

What does all that money buy Amazon? The collaboration on the electric delivery van, for one thing. That partnership will not only help Amazon start to electrify its fleet, but it carries an almost intangible value — because, like rival shipping giants, Amazon had previously wasted a lot of time talking to other EV startups about going electric, only to run into trouble.

All that money also seems to have bought Amazon a little freedom. As part of the agreements with Rivian — redacted versions of which were filed alongside the S-1 — Amazon can develop, or tap other third-party manufacturers to develop, similar electric delivery vehicles.

In fact, until the van is ready for production and has passed all government approvals, Amazon has the right to mix up what it’s ordering from Rivian in a number of ways. It can go ahead and buy the 100,000 electric vans as advertised. Or, Amazon can just purchase Rivian’s electric drivetrains (or “skateboards”) and have another company develop matching cabins, or “top hats.” If it wants to, Amazon has the contractual right to only buy “certain Component Parts of the Skateboard (but not the full Skateboard).” And if Rivian runs into real trouble, Amazon could walk away with the tooling for the top hat it co-developed with Rivian.

Amazon gets to approve certain vendors for things like battery cells and autonomous technologies, too. It’s also possible that it may get a cut of any government incentives or credits that Rivian’s vans are eligible for — though that particular section of the agreement is redacted.

Amazon’s influence over Rivian can be found in the startup’s bottom line, too — Rivian admits in the document that a “significant portion” of the “near-term” revenue it generates will come from the conglomerate. Amazon also has exclusive rights to the vans for four years and the right of first refusal for two years after that.

Rivian’s prototypes were Built Ford Tough

Rivian and Ford were up front about collaborating when the Detroit automaker announced its initial investment in 2019, though one project — an electric Lincoln — has since been abandoned. But Rivian reveals in its S-1 that it has been getting help from Ford, as one of the automaker’s subsidiaries (Troy Design and Manufacturing Co.) developed and built all prototype and pre-production “bodies-in-white” for the R1T pickup, R1S SUV, and even the electric delivery vans for Amazon. (Body-in-white is an industry term that essentially refers to the skeletal frame that sits atop the chassis.)

Rivian paid Ford $74 million for this work through the end of 2020 while it built out its own stamping and assembly lines at its Normal, Illinois factory. The startup says it will stamp and assemble its own bodies-in-white for production vehicles, but it will continue to lean on Ford in other ways. In April of this year, the companies struck a deal where the startup will buy “certain vehicle components” from Ford, “including related engineering work and tooling,” for the entire R1 lineup of vehicles. In total, Ford has committed just shy of $1.24 billion to Rivian to date.

Rivian has raised a lot of money — but will need a lot more

It is not new information that Rivian has raised more than $10 billion to date, but Rivian takes some time in the S-1 to shed light on how it has spent — and how it plans to spend — that money. It also alludes to needing much more.

Some $2 billion has already gone to getting the factory ready in Illinois, while a much smaller sum of around $30 million has been spent on marketing. In all, Rivian says it lost $426 million in 2019, $1 billion across 2020, and $994 million in the first six months of 2021.

It will continue this pace of spending, too, as Rivian is eyeing a spot for a second factory and has other vehicles in the pipeline. The company says in the filing that, to meet those ambitions, it expects to spend $8 billion through the end of 2023. In fact, Rivian says the $3.67 billion it has in cash, the proceeds it raises from the IPO, and $750 million in pre-approved loans backed by its assets is enough to cover “at least the next 12 months” but makes no guarantees beyond that.

What’s the plan, exactly?

Rivian says in the filing that it has logged just over 48,000 preorders for the R1T pickup and R1S SUV. But it’s not as open about how quickly it plans to scale up production for those eager customers. The startup says the current version of the Illinois factory could produce as many as 150,000 vehicles annually and that, by the end of 2023, it plans to increase that to 200,000. It does not, however, provide estimates or targets for how many it actually wants to make.

In fact, this is one of the “risk factors” in the filing:

Our passion and focus on delivering a high-quality and engaging Rivian experience may not maximize short-term financial results, which may yield results that conflict with the market’s expectations and could result in our stock price being negatively affected.

It’s a cautionary approach compared to how some of Rivian’s rivals have behaved, though going through a traditional IPO process (versus a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC) means Rivian is more restricted in how optimistic it can be when pitching investors.

Still, Scaringe told Bloomberg last year that he expected it to take two years to get through the order book his company had accumulated at that time. And on Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that the majority of the focus will be on the Amazon vans in the early going. Rivian has already had to delay the launch of the R1T and R1S due to the global chip shortage, meaning customers who placed a refundable $1,000 deposit may think twice as the wait stretches on and more electric trucks and SUVs hit the market.

Perhaps that’s why Rivian is already spending millions of dollars on marketing. Though, it is taking a page from Tesla in eschewing traditional advertising. From the filing (emphasis mine):

We generate awareness without sacrificing authenticity. The Rivian brand keeps an honest, approachable, transparent tone and is designed around adventure. We have built our brand and its expressions in-house, spanning creative, marketing, design, digital development, content production, events planning, and analytics. No agencies of record. No paid media. We rely on both shared and earned media to connect directly with our community through engaging content, rich digital experiences, and immersive events. Building awareness organically creates deeper bonds with our community and draws even more people in.

Immediately after that, Rivian writes:

Every consumer interaction comes directly from Rivian; whether it is attending an event, subscribing to our digital content, or purchasing one of our vehicles. We do not rely on third parties or franchisees to engage with our consumers. This one-to-one connection starts at the earliest stages of our relationship, allowing us to form stronger bonds and more deeply understand our consumer.

Which brings us to the last point…

Rivian plans to make lots of money off its customers

However many Rivian-branded vehicles the startup sells, it’s hoping to harvest thousands of additional dollars beyond what customers plop down at the outset. The startup says it believes the “lifetime revenue” opportunity for each vehicle from software services alone is as much as $15,500 — $10,000 for autonomous driving features (sound familiar?) and the rest for “a monthly subscription plan for infotainment, connectivity, diagnostics, and other services.”

Since Rivian wants to own the insurance and service pieces of the customer experience as well, it believes it can make $8,700 and $3,500, respectively, per vehicle from those offerings. Add in what Rivian will make on trade-ins and resales, and on charging, and it says it expects to be able to make nearly $70,000 per vehicle over its lifetime and a similar amount for its commercial vehicles.

Especially when compared to other EV startups, Rivian played a very slow hand since its founding in 2009 — but it’s one that paid off in billions of dollars of investments from some of the biggest companies and financial institutions in the world. And it’s now one of the very first to follow Tesla into the extremely challenging arena of mass-manufacturing electric vehicles.

Only one other startup has followed a similar trajectory: Lucid Motors, which is also finally going into production at the moment. Some of the beats of Lucid Motors’ story are different — it went the SPAC route instead of an IPO, for instance. But the same core question remains: what sacrifices or tradeoffs were made in order to achieve this goal?

In Lucid Motors’ case, it found salvation and the necessary funding by handing over ownership of the company to Saudi Arabia. Rivian’s S-1 doesn’t reveal the same kind of transfer of power, and common sense provided that Amazon was going to be an important part of its future. The S-1 helps describe Amazon’s gravity in this relationship — an immeasurable force that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos teased at in a rare tweet earlier this week.

“Rivian team is world class, and @RJScaringe is one of the greatest entrepreneurs I’ve ever met,” he wrote. “Now, RJ, where are our vans?!”



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To the mountain and back: Rivian’s electric truck and its 314-mile range

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  • The Rivian R1T is the first electric pickup truck to reach the market.


    Jonathan Gitlin

  • It has a range of 314 miles (thanks to a 135 kWh battery pack) and is aimed at the adventure crowd.


    Jonathan Gitlin

  • The bed is 4.5-feet long when the tailgate is closed, but there’s seating inside for four adults.


    Jonathan Gitlin

  • We put the R1T to the test by driving up to the top of a mountain in Colorado.


    Rivian

  • The R1T can raise up to allow more than 14 inches of ground clearance. And unlike a conventionally powered off-roader, it has a completely flat underfloor with no exhaust or differentials to catch on rocks.


    Jonathan Gitlin

  • The charging port is hidden next to the front wheel and opened via a capacitive button next to the reflector.


    Jonathan Gitlin

  • A closer look at the daylight running lights that give the R1T such a distinctive look.


    Jonathan Gitlin

  • The only casualty during the day was a flat tire on one of the trucks.


    Jonathan Gitlin

BRECKENRIDGE, Colo.—Hats off to Rivian. Until 2018, almost no one had heard of the company. Now, it has brought the first battery electric pickup truck to market ahead of electric vehicle giant Tesla and just-plain-giant Ford, and this vehicle is aimed at a distinct buyer when compared to the everyman F-150 Lightning or the Mars colonist’s Cybertruck. The $67,500 R1T is for people who like exploring the outdoors—this is an adventure truck. And to put that claim to the test, last week we drove one up a mountain and back.

Rivian got started in 2009 and toyed with the idea of a number of different vehicles until it settled on a pair of battery electric vehicles—a truck and SUV—to begin with. Both were to be built in a former Mitsubishi factory in Normal, Illinois, that the company bought in 2017. The following year, the company emerged from “stealth mode,” and in 2019, I got to check out the concept R1T at that year’s New York auto show, where it pushed all the right buttons.

The company also started raising billions of dollars from investors like Ford and Amazon, the latter also placing an order for 100,000 electric delivery trucks. Production of the R1T was originally slated to begin in 2020, but as with so many plans, that went out the window in March of that year. But the trucks are beginning to roll out of Rivian’s Normal factory and into the hands of customers who ordered the (now sold-out) $73,000 Launch Edition.

Conceptually, the R1T is closer to a body-on-frame pickup like the F-150 than a unibody construction, but the effect of bolting the battery pack to the aluminum ladder frame creates a far stiffer foundation onto which to attach the body. That body is unambiguously a pickup truck, but one that thankfully eschews the recent trend for trucks so supersized you can run over dozens of small children without noticing. In fact, I found the R1T downright friendly to look at—no doubt the pareidolic effect of those oval daylight running lights. (Others thought they looked more like fangs; to each their own.)

At 217.1 inches (5,514 mm) long, the R1T is shorter than something like a four-door F-150, and it’s a little less tall even in off-road mode (height varies from 72.1 inches (1,831 mm) “kneel mode” to 78.3 inches (1,989 mm) in the highest ground-clearance setting). But at 81.8 inches (2,077 mm) with the mirrors folded, the truck is a little wider than the best-selling Ford.

Rivian hasn’t published a curb weight, but the R1T’s gross vehicle weight is 8,532 lbs (3,870 kg), which includes the maximum permissible payload of 1,700 lbs (771 kg). The cargo bed is 54 inches (1,371 mm) long with the tailgate up and 83.6 inches (2,123 mm) long with it flat, and the bed can store 29.2 cubic feet (826 L) with the tailgate and bed cover both in place. There’s also another 14.3 cubic feet (405 L) of storage area underneath the cargo bed, although you’d have to leave the full-size spare wheel at home in order to use it all.

The cargo bed also has a pair of 15 A, 120 V AC outlets, a gear lock for an eight-foot cable that ties into the camera-based security system, cargo tie-downs, and an air compressor that, among other things, you can use to reinflate the R1T’s tires.

The ultimate camping truck

The frunk (front trunk) gives you another 11 cubic feet (311 L) of storage. As long as the truck is unlocked, the frunk is easy to open and has 12 V outlets and a drain. An R1T party trick is the third storage area, known as the gear tunnel. This runs the width of the truck, just behind the rear doors and above the battery pack. The tunnel can hold another 11.6 cubic feet (328 L), with 12 V and 120 V power outlets within. There’s a hatch to access the gear tunnel from inside the cabin, and the doors to the gear tunnel are both able to support loads of up to 300 lbs (136 kg), so you can use them as steps or seating.

The interior is stylish and accented with open-pore wood. The seats are artificial leather, the headlining is microfiber, and the lightweight floor mats are made by Chilewich. One thing you won’t find are buttons—like a Tesla Model 3 or Porsche Taycan, the HMI is entirely touchscreen.

Rear-seat passengers might like some kind of sunshade thanks to the panoramic glass roof, and while I’m giving Rivian advice, grab handles would make ingress much easier, particularly on the trails. But there’s a useful amount of storage in the center console, door cards, and under the seats.

Other convenience features include a flashlight stored in the driver’s door, similar to the umbrellas you’ll find in a Rolls-Royce, a removable bluetooth camp speaker that docks with the center console, as well as six USB-C ports, a 120 V AC outlet, and a 12 V DC outlet.

  • The view from the R1T’s driver’s seat.

  • The infotainment screen is the sole means of interaction with the R1T’s systems and settings.

  • The gear tunnel is one of the R1T’s coolest party tricks.


    Jonathan Gitlin

  • The center console has plenty of storage and a pair of wireless chargers for phones. The R1T key is modeled on a carabiner.

  • There’s no shortage of open-pore wood trim.

  • What’s cooler than a gear tunnel? How about a Snow Peak camp kitchen. I have the same kettle at home.

  • The onboard air compressor will reach a maximum of 150 psi. It took a few minutes to inflate each tire from 22-48 psi after off-roading.

  • Rear-seat passengers have USB-C ports and coat hooks.

  • There’s a flashlight in the door.

  • The R1T’s map knows the location and availability of lots of EV chargers.


    Jonathan Gitlin

  • Like a Tesla Model 3 or Porsche Taycan, you use a touchscreen to control the climate.


    Jonathan Gitlin

  • Car settings. On the right side of the screen are the controls for the antitheft cameras.


    Jonathan Gitlin

  • The drive-mode screen.


    Jonathan Gitlin

Optional accessories include a three-person Yakima tent ($2,650) that fits over the cargo bed and perhaps the coolest camp kitchen I’ve ever seen. At $5,000, this feature isn’t cheap, but it includes a pair of 1.4 kW induction burners, a collapsible sink with a 4-gallon (15.1 L) water tank, and a full set of kitchen tools and utensils from cult Japanese camping company Snow Peak. Rivian used one of these kitchens to prepare all the meals for our trip, which numbered about 40 people in total between the journalists and Rivian staff. (The food was both healthy and delicious.)

The R1T isn’t only the first battery electric pickup to reach market—it’s also the first four-motor BEV. Wheel-mounted hub motors were tried and discarded: the concept sounds good but adds too much unsprung weight and would be too fragile for off-road use. Instead, each axle has its own drive unit, which combines a motor for each wheel, together with the transmission and power electronics. These are almost identical front and rear, except that the rear motors are longer and, therefore, more powerful.

And this is a powerful truck. The front drive unit packs 415 hp (310 kW) and 413 lb-ft (560 Nm); the rear drive unit is much torquier at 420 hp (313 kW) and 495 lb-ft (671 Nm). The combined output of an EV is always more complicated than just adding all the numbers together, since it’s more often a factor of how much power the battery can supply; Rivian quotes “800+ hp” (597+ kW) and 900+ lb-ft (1,220+ Nm) combined.

There are no traditional differentials as you might understand them in a more conventional off-roader like the Ford Bronco, Land Rover Defender, or Jeep Wrangler. Instead, the computer that oversees the Rivian’s powertrain and dynamics apportions torque and power to each wheel based on the drive mode you’re in as well as input from the car’s sensors and accelerometers. As we’ll find out later, that makes the truck remarkably easy to drive even on difficult trails or while rock crawling.

Enlarge / The R1T chassis and battery, as seen from above.

Rivian

For now, all R1Ts come with a 135 kWh (gross capacity) battery pack—called the Large pack—that gives the truck an EPA range of 314 miles (505 km). There is also an optional battery with an even higher capacity—the Max pack can store 180 kWh and provide 400 miles (643 km) of range. That adds another $10,000 to the price, however. And at some point, we believe Rivian will build cheaper R1Ts with a smaller 105 kWh pack, but as yet there’s no date for that version.

However, all the range estimates are for R1Ts on 21-inch road wheels and tires; when fitted with 20-inch wheels and off-road tires, or the larger 22-inch wheels, you can expect to lose anywhere from 5 to 15 percent of range.

When the time has come to charge, the R1T can DC fast-charge at up to 200 kW (and eventually 300 kW), which Rivian says will add 140 miles of range in 20 minutes. To that end, it’s also building its own network of DC fast chargers, with 600 locations planned by the end of 2023. These will just be for Rivian owners, but unlike Tesla and its proprietary Supercharger network, Rivian will still use the industry-standard CCS plug. This means that you can also fast-charge a Rivian at public DC fast charging locations operated by companies like ChargePoint, EVgo, and Electrify America, and the R1T supports the new plug-and-charge standard, which handles billing information when the car completes its handshake with the charger.

The R1T can accept an AC charge at up to 11.5 kW, which adds 25 miles (40 km) of range an hour over the industry-standard J1772 plug. If you don’t have an 11.5 kW wall charger but do have a 240 V power supply, the portable charger will add 16 miles of range per hour and can also charge the truck from a 110 V source, albeit very slowly.

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Rivian’s first production R1T electric pickup truck rolls off the line – TechCrunch

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And beats Ford, GM and Tesla

The first production Rivian R1T electric pickup truck in “Rivian blue” rolled off the assembly line Tuesday morning at the company’s factory in Normal, Illinois, marking a milestone more than a decade in the making for the automaker and its founder and CEO, RJ Scaringe.

The company, which started in 2009 as Mainstream Motors before adopting the Rivian name two years later, has undergone explosive growth in terms of people, backers and partners in the past few years. Today, Scaringe tweeted the news and a photo of the first production truck painted in Rivian Blue.

“After months of building pre-production vehicles, this morning our first customer vehicle drove off our production line in Normal,!” he wrote. “Our team’s collective efforts have made this moment possible. Can’t wait to get these into the hands of our customers!”

What isn’t clear is who will get this first customer vehicle.

Rivian operated in relative obscurity, aka stealth mode, for years before it revealed prototypes of its all-electric R1T truck and R1S SUV at the LA Auto Show in late 2018.

Since then, Rivian has raised billions of dollars ($10.5 billion since 2019); expanded its Normal, Illinois, factory; hired thousands of employees; landed Amazon as a commercial customer; and, most recently, filed confidentially for an IPO. Today, in addition to its Illinois factory, Rivian has facilities in Palo Alto and Irvine, California; and Plymouth, Michigan; and an office in the U.K.

When it first revealed the two electric vehicles in 2018, Rivian had about 600 employees. Today, it has 8,000.

Scaringe’s announcement Tuesday, which marks the official beginning of R1T production for customers, comes after at least two delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and global chip shortage. Earlier this summer, Scaringe wrote in a letter to customers that R1T deliveries would begin in September, with the R1S to follow “shortly.”

Rivian has been juggling the dueling priorities of prepping and eventually producing the R1T and R1S for consumers and commercial delivery vans for Amazon. The Illinois factory has two separate production lines producing vehicles. One is dedicated to the R1 vehicles and the other line is for its commercial vans.

Amazon ordered 100,000 of these vans, with deliveries starting in 2021. Earlier this year, Amazon began testing the electric delivery van in several cities, including Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Earlier this month, Rivian announced that the first edition version of the R1T pickup truck has an official EPA range of 314 miles, while its R1T SUV comes in at 316 miles.

The official range and fuel economy values posted on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency website align with Rivian’s previous estimates, which it advertised as 300 miles.

The moment is also important because it means Rivian has the benefit of being the first electric truck on the market. Ford’s F-150 Lightning, which isn’t expected to come on the market until spring 2022, has a targeted range of 230 miles in the standard and up to 300 miles in the extended version. The EPA has not issued official ranges for the Ford Lightning.

Rivian’s “Launch Edition” R1T truck and R1S SUV come equipped with a 135 kWh battery pack that is branded as the “large pack.” Deliveries of the Launch Edition vehicles are slated to begin this month.

Clarification: Rivian has raised $10.5 billion since 2019, not in total. Rivian has not shared the total amount but sources have said it is around $11 billion. 



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MotorTrend shows off Rivian’s electric adventure truck in detail

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Rivian’s R1T electric pickup truck is finally set to ship next month after a series of delays — roughly three years after it debuted at the 2018 Los Angeles Auto Show. Ahead of the launch, though, MotorTrend got to spend a handful of days with the all-electric adventure truck, and the team there came away impressed by its performance. What’s more, they offer one of the best looks at the R1T’s interior, which borrows as much from Tesla as it does from other high-end off-road-focused vehicles.

None of this is exactly surprising — Rivian has actually been quite open about the development of the R1T since its debut, regularly posting its own articles, photos, and videos along the way — but the truck features two large, crisp displays on the dashboard, In the preproduction version MotorTrend tested, those screens were surrounded by a wood-grain dashboard with silver accents.

There are just two physical buttons on the steering wheel, which resemble the scroll wheels Tesla employs in its cars. That means a lot of the controls are routed through the touchscreen. Some people may not like that, though Tesla has proven that it’s not an approach that will hurt sales. But the R1T is supposed to be just as capable off-road as it is on the highway or city streets, and tapping a touchscreen while rumbling through the woods seems like it could get tricky.

It looks like all of the R1T’s exterior storage compartments can be opened through the touchscreen, like the massive front trunk, the doors to the “gear tunnel” that sits between the cab and the bed, and the tonneau cover. The main touchscreen is also where you’ll be able to toggle between the R1T’s suite of drive modes or adjust the ride height.

Over the years, Tesla has sort of redefined what “luxury” means in a modern car — or at the very least, it has been able to find buyers who care more about technology and minimalistic design than they do about the kinds of traditional luxury touches found in something like a Mercedes-Benz. Rivian looks like it’s going to try to straddle those two worlds a bit with the R1T, with the added complexity of appealing to buyers who want to use its vehicles in truly rough settings. We won’t know how that plays out until the first customers receive and start using their trucks next month, but MotorTrend seems to have stumbled on one potentially risky compromise: there are just two cupholders in the front seats.

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