- Rivian’s commercial van has already been delivering Amazon’s packages for years.
- But now the company’s exclusivity deal is up, and Rivian’s rolling out the van to a wider audience.
- It’s now open to all fleet customers, which means it has to be registered to a business.
Rivian’s Electric Delivery Van (EDV) has been on the road for years, faithfully delivering your Amazon packages if you live in a more urban area. But the automotive upstart has long had broader ambitions for its van platform, and today they’re being realized. The Rivian Commercial Van (RCV)—on which the EDV is based—is now available for all business customers.
Rivian announced Monday that it would begin selling the vans to fleet customers. It’ll come in two configurations: The smaller RCV 500 and the larger RCV 700. The RCV 500 comes with up to 161 miles of range, while the 700 can cover 153 miles on charge. Both are exclusively available with front-wheel drive.
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Pricing will start at $79,900 for the 500 and $83,900 for the 700, a company representative confirmed to InsideEVs. And because these are fleet-only vehicles, they must be registered to businesses. That’s a bummer if you want an EV van life rig—though I will note that there’s nothing stopping you from buying it through an LLC—but one benefit is that commercial EVs all qualify for a $7,500 federal clean vehicle tax credit.
Rivian says the vans provide up to 2,663 lbs of payload capacity. That’s less than you’d get from most variants of the gas-powered Ford Transit, but roughly in line with a long-wheelbase Mercedes Sprinter. Either way, any of these vans will out-haul your average gas-powered pickup truck. The 2025 Ford F-150 tops out at 2,440 pounds of payload capacity.
The Rivian vans also get the company’s fully integrated software stack, which should give you good fleet analytics, great navigation software, plenty of cameras and keyless entry and start. As we saw in an Amazon driver’s YouTube review, these small features can make a huge difference when you’re hopping in and out of the van dozens of times per day. So if you have a delivery or service business, it could be helpful. Plus, we’ve already covered how great EV vans can be so long as you can set up a consistent charging location for them. But since most fleet vans drive predictable ranges and sit overnight, that should be doable.
This is also important for Rivian. The company is in an awkward time, with its flagship R1 products already on sale and its higher-volume R2 and R3 vehicles still a ways out. The company needs to keep convincing investors that it is building out a sustainable business. Ford Pro has proven how profitable commercial vehicle sales can be for an automaker going through a complicated transition, and if Rivian can capture a sizeable share of the commercial van market it’ll prove that it has a future beyond selling high-margin luxury goods.
Yet the expansion comes with challenges. Fleet owners rely on their vehicles for revenue, and are far less willing to deal with downtime and service visits than luxury buyers. Rivian is still building up its service network, so making sure fleet customers get the service support they need will be vital. This is part of why the U.S. truck market has been hard to crack: Ford, Chevy and Ram put a lot of emphasis on fleet sales, and customers know they’ll be able to quickly service vehicles and get them back on the road.
Photo by: Rivian
Rivian isn’t new to those challenges. The vans have already proven to be a hit for Amazon, and that’s a high-utilization business with little tolerance for vehicle downtime. But Amazon also had Rivian’s ear as a major investor, and could press the company to meet its needs. The local HVAC company isn’t going to have that kind of pull. So this will be one of Rivian’s greatest tests yet. If it can prove to business owners that it can build robust, dependable vans that can be serviced in the field, it should have no issue winning retail customers’ trust when it launches the R2 and R3.
Contact the author: Mack.Hogan@insideevs.com
