The Vergecast - Rivian’s last chance to take on Tesla

Episode Date: July 1, 2026

For years, Rivian has looked like one of the most compelling electric vehicle companies in America — and maybe the car maker most equipped to take on Tesla. All that potential comes down to this: the R2, the long-awaited and more affordable car that Rivian hopes can make it truly mainstream. After a journey to the R2's factory earlier this year, The Verge's Andrew Hawkins explains what the R2 is, why it matters, and what happens to Rivian if it's a hit — or a flop. Further reading: ⁠Range anxiety⁠ ⁠The Rivian R2 is too much fun to let drive itself⁠ ⁠Rivian surprises with R3 and R3X electric SUVs⁠ Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of midsize SUVs. I'm your friend David Pierce and on today's episode we're going to talk about Rivian. Rivian is a fascinating company at a fascinating point in its life. It has been around a long time as one of the most interesting and consequential and in some ways successful competitor to Tesla in the EV space. But Rivian is also at a point now where if it can't figure out how to start selling mainstream cars at mainstream prices, it might look like a very different company soon. Meanwhile, the whole idea of EVs, especially as a political thing, have changed a lot

in the couple of years. Tariffs have changed the price of EVs. Some of the Trump administration's policies about energy have changed the price of EVs. Gas prices, believe it or not, have changed the price of EVs. All of this stuff is so tied up together, and Rivian is just about to come out with a car, the R2, that it is hopeful will be its true mainstream success story. The Verges, Andy Hawkins, was actually in normal Illinois at one of Rivian's factories a couple of months ago and put together a big story all about everything Rivian is up to and why this moment matters so much. He's going to come on the show and we're going to try to figure out whether Rivian is really going to make it. But first, here's a look at everything else happening on the Verge today.

This is 90 seconds on the verge for Wednesday, July 1st, 2026. The age of the physical video game appears to be almost over. Sony announced today that starting in January of 2028, it will no longer produce physical PlayStation disks at all. Sony's argument is that that's because most game buying has shifted to digital anyway, which is certainly true. But no discs means you can't resell games. It means you can't share them with friends, and it means you can't even really preserve them over time. It also just gives Sony more control over its games. Sony's announcement here is obviously the big deal, but this trend has been happening for a while. Just last week, we learned that Grand Theft Auto 6 will have a physical

edition, which is actually just a download code in a box. There's probably a middle ground here that is something like Nintendo's virtual game cards that attach the digital game to a more generic physical object. Personally, I totally get this trend, and I really hate it. And I suspect there are more weird bad ideas to come. Meanwhile, meta is starting to paywall its smart glasses. Starting now, you will need a $20 monthly Meta1 premium subscription, which is a real thing that exists, if you want to use more than a few hours of a feature called conversation focus.

But the bigger bummer here is that meta is also making clear that there are more premium features to come. Actually, I expect a lot of the AI in your AI glasses to eventually come at an additional price. Everywhere you look right now, there are stories about AI companies running out of compute or having to throttle users or raise prices. Frankly, we've had it good with AI, and the price is about to go way up. And finally, the Virgins Gen 2E published a review of the Google Home Speaker, which is Google's latest attempt to bring its AI assistant into your house. Long story short, is a good speaker, actually a surprisingly good speaker for such a little guy. But the AI is too slow and sometimes, frankly, just too stupid.

I do still love the red one, though. You can read more about all of this at Theverge.com. That is 90 seconds on The Verge for Wednesday, July 1st. Here's something most wellness influencers won't tell you. Obsessing over supplements, powders, cold plunges, wearables, and hacks, that's going to undermine your goals. I call it majoring in the minors. And it is one of the five mistakes I see people make most on their wellness journeys.

I'm Rapid Dachson, VPN head instructor at Peloton. And this week on my podcast Project Swagger, I'm sharing all of those mistakes and what I want to see you do instead. Follow Project Svager now wherever you get your podcasts. All right. Now let's talk cars. Andy Hawkins, the Virginist Transportation Editor is here. Hi, Andy. Hi.

I am going to fight my instincts to talk about the bike bus because I'm desperate to talk about the bike bus. Wrap it up another great year of the bike bus. I'm glad to hear it. Yeah. But today we're going to talk about Rivian. And I want to start with a trip you took a couple of months ago to. to Rivian's factory a few days after Rivian's factory was hit by a tornado. Yes.

Tell me, just tell me about that day. What was the scene like? Set the scene for people a bit. Sure. Yeah, it was, first of all, it was not planned. Obviously, I did not anticipate there being a tornado that hit the factory. Ford and booked that three months ahead. Didn't know.

Wasn't on the schedule. But yeah, four days before I was planning on flying out to the factory, I had arranged with Rivian to go out. and see the R2 come off the assembly line and interview a number of their executives. A tornado did indeed hit the factory. It took a sizable chunk out of part of the complex that is actually specifically involved in producing the new R2 vehicle,

this very crucial make-or-break vehicle for Rivian. There's like a wall that's missing. There's a huge hole in the ceiling. They had a lot of flooding. There was a lot of damage. But from what I was able to see, they were cleaning it up. Things were still moving.

they had this event to commemorate the R2 coming off the assembly line. And there was a lot of talk amongst the workers and amongst the executives there about sort of resilience and sort of in the face of adversity coming together and tackling this challenge. And you can tell that it wasn't just the tornado they were talking about. There were obviously a lot of other things that they were referring to with some of that language as well. Yeah, there's a certain push and pull between. in your telling of this that is like, Rivian has gone through this hard time

and you happen to be there at this moment of like, we're gonna make it through sort of a rah, raw moment for everyone at Rivian, we've been through this trauma together, we're gonna come back stronger, but also sort of a real moment of, like, I don't wanna call it desperation,

but I almost wanna call it desperation of like, this is the car we need to work. Like I wanna spend a bunch of time on the R2 because I think to me this the story of Rivian and the story of in some ways this era of EVs is kind of about the R2. Did it did it did you get that sense of like oh my God we need this car to work so so so badly even in the room on that day? Yeah it absolutely was I mean there was obviously a lot of you know it was sort of through the lens of this is a great car right obviously everyone there has drank the Kool-A they firmly believe in the R2 as the

vehicle that will sort of get them to catapult to that next level of success as an EV company. And that was very much the message that was coming down from the top, that they had sort of come together, they had tackled this challenge, they had made this car, it's going to be a huge success, and Rivian's future is nothing but bright. But no, yeah, you could obviously sort of under the current of all of that is there is a very much a recognition of the enormous challenge that still remains. that the current climate around EVs is extremely bad. You know, the sales have essentially stagnated.

Ravine does not expect to sell any more R1 vehicles than they did last year. Like, that's not a segment that they see is growing. They see all the growth, basically, in this new vehicle, but that's going to obviously rely on their ability to successfully produce the vehicle in enough time to deliver it to customers in getting those cars to customers. in getting those cars to customers, getting, making sure that those customers are not experiencing any delays. There are one, the very first vehicle, the truck and the SUV was very delayed when it first came out about five years ago, and they're trying to avoid some of those similar delays while also dealing with some of these more macro concerns that they have that are sort of looming over them,

like a tornado, you could say. Right. Yeah, I'm struck by how little has changed. since you came on this show a little over two years ago, and we talked about Rivian. And this was right after the launch of the R2 and the R3, the first time they showed them off. They were super exciting.

People immediately Gructus as like, oh, this is Rivian's turn toward the mainstream. This makes total sense. The sort of immediate response was hugely positive. But even then, you came on the show and were like, there is absolutely no guarantee that any of this is going to work for Rivian. Rivian is going to have to endure enormous cause. to make this happen.

Scaling production is incredibly hard. The wins against EVs in the sort of political space we're blowing, even then, has the situation changed for Rivian in those two years? Like, have the headwinds gotten stronger or less strong for sort of Rivian as a company in the two years since that car came out? Yeah, I think you could arguably say that they have gotten more strong. You know, the last two years alone since Trump has come into office, you know, the regulatory environment has gotten very dire around EV.

He got rid of the tax credit. He got rid of basically any emissions regulations at all, which was very beneficial for pure EV companies like Tesla and Rivian because they used to be able to sell these regulatory credits, and that was like hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue every quarter that they could rely on. That's gone. Sales are obviously stagnated without the tax credit in place. People are, you know, I think there's still a demand out there.

People still want good EVs. like EVs, they're interested in them, but the cost is still extremely high for most people. The cost in general for all cars across the board is high. It's over $50,000 on average. So people are absolutely feeling the pinch. But at the same time, you have gas prices rising because of the war with Iran. And people are certainly sort of trying to overcome some of their skepticism and their concerns about those costs to look at EVs because there is this sort of this broader issue with rising gas prices. So there's just all this in the mix right now around Rivian.

And I do think that despite these headwinds, the company is sort of projecting that this is going to be a modestly successful vehicle. Maybe it won't be, you know, the Model Y necessarily. And I think that there is some question, does this need to be like on the level of the Model Y? Does the R2 need to rise to that level and be that successful? I mean, the Model Y, you know, is the best-selling car in the world, you know, it has been for several years in a row.

And that is despite, you know, Tesla's own sales dropping on a year-by-year basis. So it's, there's just a lot to take in at the moment. I think Rivian is hoping for obviously great success with the R2. And I think that they've got production and the manufacturing sort of squared away. I don't think they're going to run into barring, you know, any, and any more last-minute tornadoes. They're not going to run into any of the problems that, you know, like Elon Musk and Tesla ran into with production hell and the Model 3. Somewhere as you're saying this, RJ Scarron, the CEO of Rivian,

is like knocking on every piece of wood he can find as you're saying this out loud right now. But I do think, yeah, I think the major question is going to be, are the customers going to be there? Is the demand going to be there? Is this car going to be a hit in the same way that the Model 3 was for Tesla?

I think that we won't know that necessarily. We'll have a better sense, I think, by the end of the year, once we start to see some of the sales numbers, you know, Rivian is banking on the R2 being, you know, sort of one of the most successful and the fastest new EV launches in history. They're projecting between 20 and 25,000 delivered to customers this year alone.

We're talking just the second half of this year. That would be an enormous, enormous figure if they're able to achieve that. You know, that would essentially double their customer deliveries in a year. So that would be a huge success for them if they're able to achieve that. But, you know, we're going to have to wait and see. Well, so I want your read on it as somebody who has now seen the car and person. One of our writers has driven the car. I think we know a lot more about what this car actually is in the real world in all of these contexts you're describing. What do you make of the R2 so far?

Obviously, like you said, there are a lot of things left to come, but I think we have some real information about whether this car is any good that we didn't, not very long ago. What's your current temperature on the R2 itself? It seems like it's a big win. I have not personally driven it yet. I just want to sort of clarify that at first. Did you take a selfie next to it? That's like half of that at this point. I basically did. I've gotten to sit inside it and check it out and sort of get the feel of it. And it is a really, I mean, it's, you know, it's everything about the R1T and the R1S that so many people were drawn to and liked about the company, right? It's the, the attention to

detail, the design, obviously the software and, you know, the ability to have all of these, like this tech just works seamlessly in many ways. You can tell the difference between these vehicles that were designed from the ground up to be all electric versus some of the more retrofitted cars that we've seen and trucks that we've seen over the last, you know, half a decade or so that have been less successful, things like the Ford F150 Lightning and, you know, some of the cars that, you know, that GM was putting out. I do think that there is a lot that is attractive. winning about this car, and you can see why so many people are cheering for Rivient and like the

company. They like what sort of the brand represents this sort of outdoor adventure, you know, in touch with nature kind of vibe that they've been putting out. That is certainly carried forward with the R2. I mean, it is in many ways. It's, it is an R1S in miniature, right? It looks very similar. They are not, you know, sort of like cracking open a whole new design language or anything like that. This is not a Ferrari luce moment, right, where people are rejecting this is looking nothing like a Rivian. It obviously looks very much like a Rivian. And I do think people are obviously very excited about the R3, which is still, you know, sort of like a question mark in the future. But this is, I think, it's, you know, one of the major things that they had as an obstacle

was the cost, right? The R1 was too expensive for most people. It started at around $70,000, but could easily be optioned up to about 90,000, over $100,000. That was just something that was never going to have as big of a fan base as you would like. So this is Rivian's obviously big play to expand that fan base, get more people into the brand, into experiencing Rivian. And, you know, I do think there will still, there's still going to be some challenges, right? It's still not as cheap as I think a lot of people would like. It starts like right under 50 grand, right?

The first versions are over $50,000 or are going to be in the $57 to $58,000 range because we're talking the sort of premium performance versions. This is like a well-worn tactic in the auto industry, right, to put out your more expensive versions first and then gradually work your way down to like the cheaper base model version. That version, the one that starts under $50,000 is not going to be available until late next year. So people who are still waiting for that version.

And Rivian claims this is not a decontented. you know, sort of like base model. This is not the slate auto truck or anything like that. It has power windows, has screens. It will have paint. It has a radio. But there is only one paint color, actually, for the base model. But that one's not going to be available to the end of next year.

And then after that, you know, Reveen has said that they're going to make the R3, which is going to be even cheaper than the R2. So that will be a major moment for them if they can actually get to the point where that vehicle becomes available. And we'll see if that demand is truly there. This spring, denim gets a softer, lighter update. Introducing Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg. A new fit that moves with you.

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the ones most don't consider marketing at all, contribute to either creating value or destroying it. Each week I sit down with CMOs, CEOs, founders, cultural thinkers, the people building, breaking, and reimagining how businesses grow or don't for conversations about what creates value and what destroys it. It's a business show, it's a marketing show. Creator destroys the show that argues. They've always been the same thing from the Vox Media Podcast Network and the Wisdomus Company. New episodes drop weekly on YouTube and your favorite podcast app. What's your sense of how much price is guiding the whole EV market right now?

Because I'm forever torn between this idea of clearly there were a lot of people with a lot of money with appetite to buy EVs. And I think to some extent, the market feels. a little bit to me like Peloton where all of those people already bought them, right? And it's like, and everybody's like, oh, this will scale forever. And then it's like, no, the number of people who want an EV and have $100,000 already bought their car. And some of them bought Rivians, like kudos for Rivian. But now there's this bet that, okay, we can, we can bring it down in the market a little bit and find a whole giant new group of people. But then I look at something like the Nissan Leaf and some of these other relatively, I say relatively, less

expensive EVs that have just not worked. And like, I wonder if your Rivian is the only positive case of if we make the thing cheaper, more people will buy it Tesla. And if so, is it possible that Tesla is just a weird, unique company that came at a weird unique time that is actually not a model to follow in any possible way? Like, again, back to my original question, like, how much do you think price is the game in EVs right now? I think it's a major, major part of it. I think that For a long time, it was range and it was charging, right? Those were the main concerns from people that were reluctant to maybe take the plunge into electrification. And they were worried about how far they would be able to drive on a charge, where they would be able to charge,

and whether or not the public infrastructure was keeping up. I think since then, even despite like Trump throwing up a lot of obstacles, the charging has improved dramatically. there are more charging stations. They tend to work more than they don't. That's still sort of a challenge. They win in the EV world that most of the pumps work. I know that you need to have an actual, the electrons need to flow,

and the software needs to work. And I think it's getting a lot better. This is from personal experience. I own an EV. I'm out there driving. I'm having a lot easier time charging at public stations that I have in the past. And this is also backed up by the data as well.

So I do think that now the concerns are certainly around price. And this has lots to do with the rising prices across the auto industry. Cars have gotten more luxurious. They have gotten more expensive. People want more of these features than a lot of them can afford. And we're starting to see they're starting to buy vehicles that they really can't afford to begin with. Right. People are taking out longer and longer car loans that are more and more expensive.

these predatory loans are becoming a really big problem for people in the auto market. And I think we're also seeing in the used car space prices increasing dramatically. And that's also having an effect too, right? So usually if you were price sensitive, you would just buy something you use. Now those used cars are also going up at a pretty high rate. So I do think that overall people are feeling extremely pinched. We live in a country where if you don't own a car, it's very hard to have a job and to have a life. you know, public transportation is lacking in so many places. And so it is something that,

you know, it's the largest purchase that a lot of people will make and still make. And so I do think that the bet on affordability, which is what Ruby is doing, but is also what some of these legacy auto makers are doing as well, right? This is sort of at the crux of what Ford is trying to do with this new universal EV platform that they're building out in California, trying to find a way to make things more aerodynamic, reduce the cost of the battery, slim things down, make things a lot more affordable, but also it has to be profitable for the company. And this is something when you come back to Rivian, they've never had, you know, they've had a few moments of gross profitability, but they have not been overall on a yearly

basis been profitable. They still lose thousands of dollars on every R1 vehicle that they sell. This is going to be their big play to bring those costs more in line so that they can get out of the Valley of Death, as it's called, and into a more stable position. They have these partnerships with Volkswagen and Uber, these major investments that have provided them with some lift over the years. But I do think that if the R2 is not successful, especially not as a profitable vehicle, then the company is going to be in big trouble. Yeah, you made a case in a piece you wrote for the verge that there's a world in which Rivian's future looks more like software company than car company if the R2 doesn't go well. How does that play out? Yeah.

So a couple of years ago, they made this deal with Volkswagen that would eventually, you know, net them about $5.8 billion in investment. That was basically made software, Rivian, the software provider for all of the Volkswagen group electric vehicles and gas vehicles going forward. So this is a project. They created this joint venture project. Rivian's head of software was seen by Ben Saeed is the head of this JV, along with he has a counterpart at Volkswagen. And they're basically designing, they're taking sort of, you know, Rivian software platform and using that as sort of like the foundation to create a software experience for all of Volkswagen's vehicles. Lamborghini, Audi, the VW brand itself. Is this good software news, by the way?

Like, people generally like Rivian software, right? It's, you know. If you were like GMs doing its weird Android thing in every car everywhere, I would be in like a full-blown panic attack right now. But people like Rivian stuff. There's a lot to like about Rivian software. That said, there have been some noticeable glitches and problems over the years as every car company has had. I don't think that they've been immune from some of those problems. And Rivians R1 vehicles, while they rate very high on the scale of customer satisfaction,

they also rate at the bottom for reliability. Interesting. And a lot of that has to do with some of the tech problems that they had over the years. Rivian claims that they're aware of this, you know, that they're very much working to fix any problems and bugs that come up, that they are creating what is essentially a software-defined vehicle, a vehicle that can be updated and fixed over the air constantly, much in the way that Tesla does and much in the way that everyone's phone does, right, that this is going to be something that if there do end up being problems so that they can fix them remotely and fix them quickly. The R2 is on a brand-new platform. We have yet to see any Volkswagen vehicles yet with the RIVAN software, so that still remains to be seen. But it's going to be, you know, I do think that, like,

if the R2 is not as much of a hit and RIVAN continues to sort of struggle as a manufacturer, as an OEM, they could potentially have a future in the software space. And also, you know, there's the autonomy piece on top of all that as well, the robotaxies. Yeah, there's a really interesting piece of it with the robo-taxies. Yeah, there's a really interesting piece of it with the robotaxies and the autonomy thing, because when you were talking to the folks there, they seem very excited about autonomy all of a sudden. They're all in on robotaxies. And then you sort of peel it back a little bit, and it's like, oh, it's because Uber gave you a lot of money based on the premise that you're going to be able to give them robotaxies. And I think there is this fascinating through line of Rivian where it has made a bunch of decisions just in order to survive, right?

Like Amazon says, we want delivery vans. And Rivian says, tight, we'll give you delivery vans. And then VW is like, we want software. And Rivian's like, tight, we'll give you software. And then Uber is like, well, we want robotaxies. And Rivian's like, tight, we'll give you robotaxies. Like, at some point, this just comes back to, like, maybe this is why the R2 is the thing. Like, either this company can make it as a car company or it can't.

And I just sort of wonder, like, has this company just spent most of its life sort of chasing the ability to continue? to exist at the expense of being able to make and sell cars. It's like, and again, I feel it's important to say that like this seems to just be the life of any automaker, right? Like, people forget now, but Tesla went through a version of this. Like, Elon Musk loves to talk about how many times Tesla almost went out of business before getting some kind of investment. Like, it is very hard and very expensive to make cars, particularly in America.

So I don't think this is unique to Rivian, but I am just struck by like it really seems like this company is just flailing around trying to keep existing. and if maybe this new focus on autonomy is just that. Am I being too cynical here? I don't think so, but at the same time, I do think that there is an element of it that is working for Rivian, right? They have made it this far, and the brand does have a lot of fans and success,

and there's a lot of excitement around the R2. So I do think that that needs to sort of be, you know, we need to have that qualification, that if this is what you need to do to make it as a brand new, brand in America, of which there have been very few, right? Like, beyond, like, the legacy automakers, pretty much Tesla is the only one that has succeeded in launching a brand new car brand that has volume and scale and profitability. All there's been dozens of other attempts, and for the most part, they have all miserably failed,

especially in the EV space, right? The EV, the road to the EV future is lined with the corpses of all of these. dead companies. It's lined with Fisker Oceans. Yes, Fisker Oceans, which you could still hail as an Uber in downtown Manhattan anytime you want. That's going to be, you know, sort of the legacy of that company. Or, you know, like these zombie companies, like Faraday Future and others that somehow still are kind of like trucking along despite not having any products to speak of that they are selling. So it's, it is a, you know, I think Rivian has, you know, like RJ is a very smart person. He got his, you know, doctorate at MIT. It's not, no dummy. And he seems like this has been

something that he has been working on his entire life, right? As I was reporting this story, I dug in really into his history, in the history of Rivian, how he got started first as mainstream motors in small town in Florida on the coast. The other idea was that they were going to take a mini-cooper and re-body it as a sports car. Then eventually they decided maybe they'll make dune buggies because they got all this investment money from Saudi Arabia. And then they, you know, decided they landed on an electric truck as being the thing that the market was missing, right? And that they could, that was going to be something that they could, they could offer. So I do think that there has been sort of like this track record and this history of some of these radical pivots, right, that they're going to do this.

And then they decided to pivot and do this. And we're seeing that still. That is still as the company matures and now they've sort of reached this next level. They're still doing these pivots, right? Software, autonomy, robotaxies. But they are still kind of keeping their core principles, right? They believe strongly in vertical integration that they need to make all of their own stuff so that they can be more insulated from some of these market fluctuations and supply chain chaos

that we're seeing across the board. And they need to obviously be sort of protected from the futures of, you know, Waymo and autonomy and everything that people are predicting about how that's going to change, how, you know, our relationship with the car and transportation. So I do think they made the right bets and the right choices. That doesn't make them any less risky. And doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to succeed. But I do think that they are thinking very, very deeply about this stuff.

Yeah, you can see a lot of Rivian bets as like if we get to the end, if we are actually able to execute on this whole plan, it's going to work and it's going to set us up in unbelievable strength position for success, right? That like all of the vertical integration you're talking about, like, if this works, which is the biggest, if you can possibly imagine, Rivian is going to be a very powerful, very independent, very successful operation. It's just the getting there that is forever the hard part. One last thing on the autonomy front. To what extent does betting on the sort of, you know, Robotaxy Future of Everything still feel to you like a futuristic idea about what might happen versus like a real growing car market today? I was really surprised when Rivian came out late last year and said that they were going to be

designing their own AI chips and that they were going to be building self-driving cars and that the R2 is going to eventually come out with LIDAR, for example, and have these growing capabilities, right, hands-free, eyes off, and then eventually like a full level four technology. I always assumed, obviously Tesla has sort of, you know, been like the most prominent example, but that Rivian as like more of like a Subaru range rovy type brand of adventure and off-roading. Like, why would, who wants that, right? Who wants to go off-roading and their autonomous Rivian. I'm still not sure if there is a market for that. But that said, I think that it is a recognition that this industry is moving rapidly, that Waymo is really changing the calculation

that a lot of these companies are making for their long-term success in future and how they are approaching this technology. And you're seeing it across the board, right? Like every company now, from Ford to BMW to Mercedes, they're all saying that eventually they're also going to have some sort of L3 and L4 capabilities at some point in the future. Maybe it won't be robo taxis. And I think that that's sort of like the interesting aspect of this bet by Rivian. And, you know, they had to do that, right? If they were going to get this cash from Uber, they were going to have to, you know,

sort of like make that, stake out that position as well. You know, I think it's still extremely early, right? We're still, we're talking only like 11 cities in the U.S. have Waymo Robotaxies right now. Those robo taxis are still seemingly running. into a lot of problems around things like red lights and flooded roads and, you know, school buses. and this is not a perfect technology by far, but there also is a lot of data that seems to suggest that it is exponentially safer than human driving,

and that does have obviously huge implications for the future of driving, for traffic safety, and all of that. So I think it was an interesting, surprising position for Rivian. And again, this company has never demonstrated an autonomous vehicle at all. And our tester got to try out the R2's universal. hands-free. This is basically like a full self-driving kind of like aspect or a super cruise from GM. And he was not that impressed. He's like, it had some positive things to it, but it also like tried to blow through a couple stop signs. And Rivian said that they're

going to have to push out a software update pretty soon. Yeah, good call, Rivian. Yeah. Super good call on that one. I'm not sure exactly Rivian is prepared for the, how should I say it, like the legal quagmire that is, you know, sort of like personally owned autonomous vehicles at the moment. And and whether they're going to be willing to take responsibility for things when and if, you know, it goes wrong. That's going to be, you know, something that they're going to have to think really deeply about. I'm sure they are. Their lawyers, I'm sure are on it right now. And I do think it's going to be something that I don't think will necessarily define the brand going forward,

but it will become something that potentially could be sort of like an added bonus, essentially. if RIVI is able to sort of figure this out. Like Google and Waymo, we're talking multiple decades, right, of working on this problem. And so, so, so much money. And so much money. I think that AI and a lot of these, you know, sort of like big developments that we've seen around transformers

and large language models and, you know, sort of like going from rules-based to, you know, sort of like the current standard around AI and how it sort of makes these decisions on the fly and can act sort of in a more human way has been a real game changer for the industry. And I think that that's why Ravian is feeling more confident about the potential to sort of push this technology forward.

But yeah, they got to put their money where their mouth is and start showing this off to people because that's going to be a big question hanging over them. Also, that exact same sentence, very true of the R2, which I think we're about to get a bunch of very real information about here in the very near future. Once you get one, once you've written in one,

you got to come back on the show and tell me about it. Yes, I would be happy to. The David and Andy do top gear in China thing, still in my mind. Don't worry about it. But first, the R2, we're going to make it happen. Let's do it. Let's do it. I'm excited. All right, Andy, good to see you. Thanks for being here. Thanks, David.

All right, that's it for the show. Thank you to Andy for being here. And thank you, as always for watching and listening. If you have a Rivian R2 that you would like to take me for a ride in, I would absolutely love to hear from you. And if you have thoughts, questions, feelings about Rivian Software, or anything. else about EVs, please call the hotline 866, Vorge11. Send us an email, vergecast at the verge.com. We absolutely love hearing from you. As always, a reminder that the best way to support The Verge and this podcast and everything

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