By now, the Rivian R1S and R1T have established themselves as class-leading, off-road-capable, truly software-defined electric vehicles. At the same time, Rivian’s future rides on the more affordable R2 crossover, and after that, the R3 and R3X hatchbacks.
But as Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe indicated in a recent interview with InsideEVs’ Plugged-In Podcast, the EV startup isn’t stopping there. He said the company’s engineers, designers and product planners are already starting to think about what could be done with a Rivian R4 and R5.
“There’s actually a whole series of things that happen way before we get deep engineering of the vehicle, which is conceptualizing: what are the products?” Scaringe said on the podcast. “We have a design-engineering team that does a lot of this advanced work, and was already thinking about, ‘What is R2, what is R3?’, well before we had moved our full engineering team to work on those.”
Right now, Scaringe said, engineering work at Rivian is laser-focused on the R2, slated to debut next year with a $45,000 starting price, and the platform it uses. That platform will be significantly more advanced and cost-effective to make than even the current flagship R1 models, and it will also underpin the R3 and R3X.
But then there’s the question of what comes next. “We want a very small number of people thoughtfully defining some of those big decisions, like what’s the personality of R4? What’s the size? What’s the type of vehicle? What does it look like?” Scaringe said. “What is R5?”
While Scaringe declined to elaborate on what form an R4 and R5 could take, he did say they’d be related, potentially priced even more affordably than its next round of EVs and potentially on an entirely new platform than even the immediately upcoming cars.
“We contemplate [R4 and R5] as a sibling set, where you have two very different vehicles that share the same platform,” he said. “But it would be lower cost than even R2 or R3. But there’s no engineering teams on those today. They’re very much conceptual.”
If their costs are low enough, then Rivian may just do what Tesla seems unwilling to do: become more of a full-line automaker, invested in making more mainstream EVs.
Photo by: InsideEVs
While analysts, investors and fans alike have called for Tesla to make a sub-$30,000 EV, such a project seems to be a point of contention with CEO Elon Musk. The world’s richest man says the company is all-in on artificial intelligence, robotics and robotaxis, not making more cars. Last year, Musk said he was opposed to a cheaper EV program that could share a platform with its planned Cybercab, saying a $25,000 EV “is pointless” because it’s human-driven rather than fully autonomous.
While Rivian continues to invest in autonomous driving technology in its own right, however, Scaringe’s comments indicated that the company is thinking about its EV future beyond the current lineup and the concepts that have been shown to the public. But he also indicated that Rivian won’t stray far from its current naming system. “We like the naming conventions. It’s pretty simple,” Scaringe said of names like R4 and R5.
Check out the full interview below.
Additional reporting from Tim Levin.
