Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Rivian CEO, RJ Scaringe, talks R1S and the Future of Rivian

Episode Date: April 7, 2023

This week we have an interview with RJ Scaringe, the CEO of Rivian! He stopped by the Studio to chat with Marques about the new R1S and the future of the company as a whole. They go over the adventure network, the quirky features of the R1S, and the upcoming R2 platform as well. As a bonus, this entire episode was recorded inside of an Rivian R1S. We hope you enjoy! Shop the merch: https://shop.mkbhd.com Twitters: Waveform: https://twitter.com/wvfrm Marques: https://twitter.com/mkbhd Andrew: https://twitter.com/andymanganelli David: https://twitter.com/DurvidImel Adam: https://twitter.com/adamlukas17 Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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visit connexontario.ca. T's and Z's apply. We're literally using this like a... Like a podcast studio. This is super fun. Yeah. First time podcasting in a Rubion? This is my first time podcasting in a Rubion, yeah.

Amazing. RJ, thanks for doing this. Yeah, for sure. Thanks for spending the time. Welcome to the Waveform Podcast. Yeah. Oh, we have so much to talk about. So, you're the CEO of Rivian.

Yep. And I've owned and used a Rivian that I've talked about in the past. Mm-hmm. And I love the thing. It's a truck. We've got this R1S here that we're doing the podcast in. It's a full-size, three-row SUVS here that we're doing the podcast in. It's a full-size three-row SUV. With the ocean coast interior?

With the light interior, which is pretty sweet. And this is limestone, is what it's called on the outside? Yep. On the paint? Talk to me about how you got started with getting into cars and how Rivian started. What's the origin story that you give people? Yeah. Well, it's funny.

We were just talking about origin stories. Yeah. Started the company about 13 years ago. Okay. And initially, we were focused on a very different product, so more of a sports car was the initial thought, and we spent a couple years iterating through that, but ultimately really shifted to largely what you see today,

but it wasn't as if it was a we went to bed on a Friday and woke up Monday and knew what it was. It took us a lot of time to really think through the position, the company, the brand, how we can create something that was different than what was out there but also helped really advance thinking around what could electric vehicle be, what could you know new form of mobility be so yeah yeah that that um journey was was a twisty path but ultimately started to align around the idea of products that both enabled and inspired people to go do the kinds of things you want to take

photographs of funny as we sit here with cameras um but a brand built around adventure and enabling those types of experiences that's really interesting I didn't know you started on the sports car path. I did see that the original name for Rivian was something else. And that it was Mainstream Motors. Is that true? And if so, what? I'm glad you didn't go with Mainstream Motors. That just feels like a very bland, generic Megacorp name.

How did that choice happen? Yeah, so I started the company. And when you start a company, you have to have a name to start with. I didn't have the final name in mind, so I used that as a placeholder. My dad has a business called mainstream engineering so i used that name got it uh which is fun but then we very quickly switched to avera a-v-e-r-a so we're avera motors uh for about a year and a half and it was sort of a plan words it was playing on the word verde and terra so green earth nice um but the name actually

sounded phonetically similar to hyundai had a product the azera and so this was back in like 2010 2011 hyundai's basically said you need to stop using the name or we're going to sue then we had no money of course i'm not going to fight with hyundai over a name that nobody knows about so yeah keep it um so we then went through this long exercise of figuring out what the name should be and um arrived at rivian which i'm so glad that all happened yeah uh i like that name a lot more than than avera same uh but it was something we wanted to find something that phonetically was sounded like flowing and moving but um of course didn't have a meaning in any language and yeah we could get the rights to so it was a hard process to come up with a name.

I can sympathize. We're working on a name for a product that we're making, and it's been, like, weeks of debating. Different words and different made-up words and just trying to think of what will work and looking up what's out there. Piece words together, yeah. Yep, same thing.

And when we were doing it, we went out and talked to some third parties that do like naming and branding and i thought how hard could this be and we got a quote back for what they'd charge us i'm like whoa okay so it looks like uh it's a it's a real myself and the five or six other engineers at the company had to figure that out without the support of any branding experts that's funny but so you you got the logo out of Rivian, you got the sort of font and everything, the branding is all set, and Adventure Vehicle is the theme and it's sort of pieced together in that puzzle piece.

Yeah, I mean the logo, we call it the Compass, it's a graphic representation of the Compass and it's just beautifully scalable. You can imagine it's a brand that can go anywhere, it can take you anywhere yeah and that's what we wanted i think the paint colors are a surprisingly good indicator of what the vehicle is designed to do do you feel that way i feel like i look at the adventure vehicle theme and then i see your paint colors and i agree with all of them as choices for that specific vehicle the canyon red the red is just like that is just rust and dirt enough to feel like yeah i can get this thing dirty yeah the limestone one the blue turquoise one which i'll

tell you the story is i wasn't planning on getting one but i did have a reservation in for a cyber truck and we're going to do the whole tow hitch rig and thing with the cyber truck to shoot videos and then we got an r1t in blue in to do a video with okay so we did the video we i lived with it for a week i had almost nothing negative to say about it i really enjoyed it and within you can ask people at the studio like within a week i was just like i kind of think maybe we get one of those instead that seems pretty great and it's not going to be gigantic and it's going to do all the same stuff we want and it's and so that's when i place my orders like that's great when the product speaks to me that's that's the most important thing so i feel like strong product thank you does the

talking for itself and i think that's pretty sweet thanks yeah and my sort of initial question is like all right every company's got plans they sort of have this vision of how they want things to go and i think famously elon's detailed a master plan where you make a low volume high priced car and that fuels the next one which is higher volume lower price so rivian starts with a truck a smaller pickup truck adventure vehicle type thing r1s the suv is next what is the what is the thinking behind this these two being the first two and how does the rest of the plan look yeah uh the so as i said when we pivoted the first the sort of core idea was let's build a brand that enables and inspires these types of adventures as i said and we then identified the flagship

products to do that with which we're sitting in one of them now the r1s but the sibling product the r1t really intended to be the truly the flagship following those uh we have a smaller set of products creatively we call r2 r3 but they move into different form factors obviously different sizes and the goal of those is to continue to take the essence of what we've done here in terms of, you know, it can fit your gear, your kids, your pets, do it in a really sort of refined and fun way, but in different packages and smaller form factors. You know, one of the advantages of starting with the flagship product,

though, is it gives you the room to put a lot of content in the vehicle. So in the case of these vehicles, electrohydraulic suspension in terms of damping, air suspension, quad motor. So really sort of full content in terms of everything you can put into the vehicle. The future products will have a little less stuff, but still deliver on the essence of the brand. stuff, but still deliver on the essence of the brand. Yeah, that's really interesting, because I talk about, and this video's not even out yet, but it will be soon, which is why I talk about why EVs are generally expensive. And it's, obviously, every company has to, at some point, come out with their first electric car, whether you're a startup, and it's an EV startup, or you're Ford, or whatever, and you're coming out with your first ev and it's like you can either differentiate

yourself on features and like building it interestingly and having a bunch of cool things that it does or competing on price and it's way more compelling to compete on how good the vehicle can be and useful it is um there's a lot of really interesting features with r1t like the flashlight in the door i mean talking through some of the more interesting decisions that you thought would separate r1t when it came out as a first EV pickup truck. Yeah, when we were sort of at the drawing board stage, there was all kinds of things. We said, well, if you electrify the vehicle, what can you do differently?

Of course, obvious ones like the front trunk, less obvious, like the gear tunnel in the R1T, which goes through the side of the vehicle. But then we started to look for opportunities to just create these little like almost magical moments and the flashlight was one that we were really drawn to just because it's it's it has a place it's always there it's always charged um it's a lithium battery so it's you know it can last for a really long time wasn't there a thing about how many cells are in the battery versus the total number in the yeah so in the truck the like in the s3 as well there's 7776 cells okay and so the cool thing about the flashlight is also gives you that last cell to get to four sevens um that was coincidence but we were pretty excited when that

worked out that way that's hilarious because most companies would be like oh yeah we designed it this way. We were going to do exactly 7777. I'm glad you're admitting it was a coincidence, but it worked out nicely. It was a lucky coincidence. We really enjoyed, yeah. But, yeah, all those types of little features, one of the biggest challenges in developing a product like this is you have to decide what you're going to say yes to, what you're going to say no to. And you have to make lots of tradeoffs.

decide what you're going to say yes to, what you're going to say no to, and you have to make lots of trade-offs. So the size of the vehicle, the seating configuration, and some of those decisions are really big. They sort of set the tone for the whole product. And some of those are small, like let's say like a radius on the instrument panel, but the collection of those millions of decisions ultimately feels like a product that either is like coordinated, like all those decisions were cohesively made across the board, or you can sense an org structure. And so our goal has always been to have it feel as if one united team made several million decisions together over the course of a couple of years. And the result is, of course, what we're sitting in today. And I'm sure that comes from teams within Rivian working together, communicating often, all of that.

Yeah, yeah. And one of the challenges in automotive historically is the teams in a lot of the technologies either siloed or very often outsourced. So electronics, software, infotainment, these are not typically things that car manufacturers do themselves. So for us, vertically integrating our electronic stacks stacks that's all the computers in the car the software stack that sits on top of them allowed us to integrate features in a way that you typically don't see honestly i think this is one of the differentiating features of this ev which is this software is really good uh and I think that's also kind of curious because a lot of traditional car companies are,

I've described them as hardware companies first, really good at manufacturing, and then they happen to also have to do software to make it all work. Where some of the really good ones, Rivian, Tesla, Lucid you might throw in there, really good software companies that are also making a car that works well around it.

Do you think of that as an advantage for Rivian? it's a huge focus for us and when we talk about software there's the things we see you know that manifest in the ui here but the everything that exists under the surface so the way the chassis controls work powertrain controls battery management all of that being developed in-house allows us to quickly iterate and improve the product and add new features, add more range. This year's product has more range than last year's product, but it's largely through software updates, which is really fun. But you have to control the entirety of the software stack to really fully leverage all the capabilities.

So no Android Auto, no CarPlay. Correct. Which is what a lot of people... It's kind of surprising. Have you seen the stat Apple posted about like 75% of people won't even consider a car without CarPlay? I don't even know if that's true or not, but it just strikes me as like every car video I watch, they at least have to mention, oh yeah, you can just put CarPlay on it. The software, it doesn't even matter. Just put CarPlay on it. How do you, I'm assuming that's no plans to add those things but it's sort of a

balancing act you have to make this as good as yeah i mean a lot of the things we do like whether it's music or mapping you know we have to make sure we integrate in with the the best in class platforms but by controlling the system it just allows us to be the you know the the arbiter the the head chef in terms of the experience that you get versus handing over control of what we think is one of the most important parts of the experience. Yeah, I saw Lucid added the Android, I know, they added CarPlay, and it was just like a little square in the corner. Okay. It didn't look well integrated.

Well, you kind of get the feeling like they were pressured into adding it, and now it's there and people are going to use it, but, like, imagine how good they could make their own software to accomplish all those things yeah yeah and the thing about controlling the software stack is we get to continually make it better so you've had your r1t you've hopefully seen this so each every few weeks we have a new software release that either adds features addresses gaps we listen to feedback. Our head of software development is on Reddit all the time. That's amazing. Yeah. Like hearing what people are saying and interacting. So it's, it's great to get the feedback and then we, it drives our,

our software roadmap and make sure we're delivering on what customers want. Do you guys feel like you're like lean enough to respond to like, you mentioned Reddit, but like YouTube videos, like literal customers and forums talking about things that they would like. Are you like actively going in there and going, you know what, this is a good idea. We haven't thought of it. Let's add this to the roadmap. Yeah. All the time.

I mean, whether it's Reddit, videos, my dad sending me a text today, I had some feedback and we integrated it. You gotta add that. You gotta add that. Dad feature, yeah. So, I mean, there's all that kind of content that comes in and we have a roadmap that roughly every three weeks we have a new software release.

And so we'll review what the plans are for that release and I'll spend time with our head of software and the team and we often bring things in and say, hey, look, this is something, it was a great idea, let's get it in as soon as possible. So it might be a matter of weeks before it gets into the vehicle nice so if you have any ideas oh i can we can i can put some things in for the next release full of ideas i mean i talk about this on the autofocus channel where i like i give my feedback and it's been cool to see companies take that feedback and then i see a software update or maybe it's the

next car and they're eager to point out like hey look at check this out we fixed just make sure you're in the release things yeah exactly um okay something else about r1t uh is when you look at the other ev pickup trucks that are out now like f-150 lightning and even cyber truck pre-orders a lot of people's first truck which is really interesting to me is that also true about r1t do you you know a lot about the typical R1T buyer? Yeah. So most of the customers at R1T haven't owned a truck before. And one of the things that we're seeing is that often there's the desire for the function that a pickup would have provided in terms of like an open bed storage,

the ability to throw things in very easily. But the inefficiency the the sort of the ride dynamics the clumsiness of a traditional pickup pickup truck has kept them from making a purchase so maybe they had a sgv maybe they had a hatchback so it's it's just it's a very large percentage of customers um that just haven't owned a pickup before so it's not only in many cases the first ev but it's the first ev and it's their first pickup. Yeah. And so we've had folks that just fall in love with the fact that they can put stuff in the back, and then the gear tunnel feature is something we're finding is really heavily used as well. Yeah.

Yeah, first EV is also interesting because then you get to the, how do we design this truck in order to accommodate people who have only ever driven a gas car and make them feel familiar with it, but also give them the advantages. Like, a lot of things, what i think about a lot driving my tesla is that it is really just geared to an ev it's not really trying to accommodate people who have driven a gas car meaning lift off to coast doesn't happen anymore uh lift off the brake pedal to creep forward doesn't happen anymore but if you drive an ev cadillac or an ev for like a lot of them will have those features by default the taikan um what's the balance like in this car is it mostly optimizing for what evs do best or do you think about like yeah i think gas car people

would like this yeah you referenced regen that's that's a big one we um you have two yeah we have two regen modes we have what we call standard and high um we don't have a regen off and what we found is for those that are like used to coasting once you use it for just a little bit of time the ability to do one pedal driving it's just a better driving experience um so we haven't added that uh And we don't have a creep feature either. So we don't sort of emulate or simulate a, you know, automatic transmission. Do you think that's silly for others to do it? It feels like a lot of them make the decision to add that ability specifically, just to give, I believe it's for the familiarity of like, I don't want to stop this behavior I've learned for the last 20 years of driving gas cars. It's hard to say.

I think what we've found is a lot of, more of our customers, it's like three-quarters of our customers have never owned an EV before. So I think it's like 80%. So they come into an EV for the first time, and very quickly you reorient around regen, you reorient around sort of when you actually need to use the brake pedal which is not that often and um and it you know it's like you learn in a few days and so we haven't had the need to add it it is it's an interesting question though because it's it's really simulating something that's not mechanically here like you're simulating a torque converter you're simulating a

an automatic transmission which is sort of a funny... Simulating an inefficiency, which is interesting. It is funny. That's weird. Well, something else I think a lot of first-time EV buyers have to contend with is charging. That's like the number one question I get when I'm out in the Rivian or any other EV people ask about it. What are your thoughts on the current state of EV charging? Yeah, it's a challenge.

In the United States, there's been a massive underinvestment in charging infrastructure. And realizing that, we decided to build out our own infrastructure. So it's early stages, but we call it the Rivian Adventure Network. It's a DC fast charge network.

We have about, I think we're early today, we have about 30 sites that are up. Each one has six DC fast charge network. We have about, I think we're early today, we have about 30 sites that are up. Each one has six DC fast chargers that can charge. The charger can charge up to 300 kilowatts, which means it's protected for future products as well. These take up to about 220 kilowatts today, but as we have new products come out, that'll continue to grow to fully utilize the charging capability of the chargers. But in terms of independent networks, there's only a couple that are out there outside of Tesla, and they're not very good.

A lot of them have real reliability problems or uptime problems or are not very predictable. So this is one of the reasons we're investing so much money and so much capital into building out a very large network. What we've said publicly is we'll have over 600 charging stations within about two years. Or a lot. Well, first in the States, just in the U.S. And really opening up, as you'd imagine, the key corridors up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, and then connecting the West Coast to the East Coast. So that's the prioritization. I think Tesla's network is a very strong network,

clearly the best network that's out there today. In what we're building, we hope to create a network that has equal level of density in terms of chargers, but also in terms of uptime. Yeah. Do you think of it as competing with Tesla? Because I feel like with the Rivian, the more you can build out your own network, the better experience it will be for Rivian customers. And the better the public charging experience gets, the better it is for going on road trips. And if you get a home charger, the whole thing starts looking really good.

But there's just like a couple of Tesla chargers that have added this adapter that can work and they'll show up in the map, which is great. Do you wish there were more open on Tesla's network? Yeah, I think more will open on Tesla's network? Yeah, I think more will open on Tesla's network. Rivians can charge on Tesla's network where they're open. The way I think about it is, over time, I hope, charging starts to become more ubiquitous and it becomes less of an issue.

Because we can't rely on that happening independently from us, we've decided to build our own network. It's many hundreds of millions of dollars to go do that, but it creates a much better customer experience. So a year from now, the density of Rivian chargers will really help solve a lot of these core issues. And we'll see third-party networks start to build up as well. But because our chargers are, we design them, we build them, we build them actually in the same plant we build the vehicles. They're really high quality, so the uptime is high. We monitor them.

It's a key part of the customer experience. Yeah. And so one of the challenges with the independent networks is if you're a first-time EV buyer and you're on a road trip and you go to one of the choices, let's say Electrify America, and it doesn't work. That's a really frustrating experience. Agreed. It's not something Rivian can control. It's outside of our control. And so by building our own network, we can ensure that the chargers themselves are well-maintained and working.

So you kind of have an infrastructure in place to keep the uptime high. There's people monitoring them, that type of thing? Oh, for sure, yeah. Because that seems like the biggest difference between a well-maintained and a not well-maintained charging network is it's just like there has to be some level of effort to maintain quality.

Yeah, so I mean, I review every week. I get the uptime report for every one of our chargers. Okay. And that's one of the things is we deployed these first initial sites with mostly concentrated on the West Coast. We wanted to make sure the systems were all working, our teams were able to service them. The uptime is extremely good on those.

What is a good uptime on a charger? Like as a percentage? 99. 99, okay. Yeah, 5, something like that it needs to be. Because if it doesn't work... If it doesn't work, it's like immediately it starts affecting people. It's a very bad experience, yeah. I'm on a road trip, charger doesn't work if it doesn't work it's like immediately it starts affecting it's a very bad experience yeah i'm on a road trip charger doesn't work um that's not good

yeah so the also having multiple chargers per site ensures that if there's an issue with one of the dispensers uh there's another one there okay yeah so every one of our sites has two cabinets that do um that do all the power conversion then we have six dispensers gotcha are there i guess i always ask about future plans but potentially larger sites in the future because other cars can charge on rivians network right and we're going to open it up right now it's rivians only but it's six nine twelve sort of groups of three yeah cool i like that i think we have two sites of nine chargers today got it are there any on the east coast i feel like i've looked for them.

There's a couple. Okay. But in like a month, there'll be more. In a month after that, it'll start populating and growing quickly. As a Fizz member, you can look forward to free data, big savings on plans, and having your unused data roll over to the following month. Every month. At Fizz, you always get more for your money.

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You never know. Ambition is on the inside. So that thing you love, keep doing it. Drive your ambition. Mitsubishi motors support for the show today comes from netsuite anxious about where the economy is headed you're not alone if you ask nine experts you're likely to get 10 different answers so unless you're a fortune teller and it's perfectly okay that you're not nobody can say for certain so that makes it tricky to future proof your business in times like these. That's why over 38,000 businesses are already setting their future plans with NetSuite by Oracle.

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Has it surprised you at all how much investment is required to also build out the charging network aside from the vehicles? No, we sort of went into it knowing it's going to be expensive. I think what's more surprising is sometimes just how hard the process to get everything approved is. the process to get everything approved is building the site. Sometimes everything from a zoning and permitting point of view takes more time than the site itself. Right. Interesting. So the pipeline, we have several hundred sites in the pipeline that are in various stages of permitting and zoning. Paperwork stages. Interesting.

Chargers are being built, and then the charger gets set up really quickly. Got it. Okay, that's cool. So you've got R1T is out. Then you get to R1S for customers. There is also, and I don't know if you even know this, like a quarter mile down the road around the corner, there's an Amazon facility. Okay. Sometimes I'll drive in here, and I'll see like nine Rivian delivery vans passing in a row.

And I'm like, they're doing it too. They're also doing that. What's that business been like is that a huge part of what keeps rivian afloat is that uh sort of a 50 50 split with the customer business what does that look like for you yeah the one of the challenges we've had in the last uh in the last year really if we look at 2022 as we launched the truck the r1t we launched this the r1s and we launched two versions of the van a 500 cubic foot version a 700 cubic version and a product launch you know launching manufacturing on something like this is any vehicle is really hard there's several thousand

parts that have to come together from hundreds of suppliers and um the wipers going on out there uh and she's got hundreds of suppliers with thousands of, the wiper's going on there. Uh, and she had hundreds of suppliers with thousands of parts, all of them to be synchronized and coming together. And to do that on any vehicle is hard to do that in a vehicle. When you've got this supply chain crisis happening in the backdrop, it's really hard. And to do that, when you've got the challenges of operating with COVID, it was, it was incredibly hard. Um, to stack those four different vehicles over the course of the last year was tested our operational capabilities. And it showed all the gaps that we had

and we learned so much in the last year. But as it stands today, the T and the S, the R1 platform is ramping. And the van program, while it's a completely different vehicle top hat, we do share some of the electronics, share some of the propulsion elements of the propulsion platform,

but it's a much easier vehicle to build. It's like one seat and a jump seat. It's like a big box with shelves in the back. So it's a different kind of vehicle than this. When you look at this, there's a lot of content. It's a complex vehicle to build. Definitely.

So the Amazon vans and the commercial vans, we're ramping those. When you look at this, this is a lot of content. It's a complex vehicle to build. So the Amazon vans and the commercial vans, we're ramping those. As you say, you're going to start seeing a lot of them on the roads. I feel like that's the most common Rivian vehicle I see on the road right now. Maybe it's just because of being in New Jersey, being around the Amazon facility. There's more R1s on the road.

There are a lot around here. The key is we deploy those in clusters. I see. So there's probably a big cluster here and The key is we deploy those in clusters. I see. So there's probably a big cluster here, and then they also have to have their own charging setup. Do they get walked through the advantages of the vehicle and what to do versus not to do? For a driver, I mean, imagine you're in a van all day long driving.

This is your office. So the comfort, the drivability, things like regen, driving this is this is your office yep so the comfort the drivability things like regen these all become really key elements of of your of your what it feels like to be at work during the day yeah so we've spent a lot of time on driver comfort and with drivers in the feedback loop through the development process and one of the things we found was um most important was actually getting in and out of the vehicle you have to get in and out of the vehicle about 300 times a day jeez so the van is asymmetric so on the driver's side there's a forward hinge door right uh which actually on a route you don't use that often and on what we would call the passenger side there's a pocket door so door that sort of slides into the body itself and so the ease at which you

can hop out of the driver's seat grab a, and then get out of the vehicle through this open pocket door makes just that whole process a lot easier. And so that, coupled with, of course, the drivability of an EV, and then a really heavy focus on thermal control, so the seats are cooled and heated. And when I say cooled, not just vented, but actually cooled refrigerated air blowing up through the seat, which on a hot day feels really nice to sit down on a seat. It's almost like when you go into the kitchen, you open the refrigerator to cool off, and it blows a burst of cool air. It's like your seat does that to you.

So it's really something that the drivers have responded to positively, and it's the sought-after vehicle within the distribution centers. That's centers that's really interesting you know yeah i've seen a lot now which is funny but i guess that that kind of reminds me of like all the decisions that have to go into making like each every little thing was someone's like real choice they had like an abc choice and they were like right we're going to put the little logos here on the wireless charger and i've even mentioned in some of the autofocus videos like a little tiny feedback on what I might have done a little differently. Like in this one,

I'll say when I pop something on the wireless charger, it slides around. We're fixing that. A little ridge. Are you? This was, there's a lot of things that aren't right about the charging pad,

but it's, phone slides around too easy. The way the induction coils are set up and it's spaced well enough to allow for such a wide variance in phone sizes so this is uh this is going to get updated pretty soon you're already here first it's it's being updated absolutely it is super frustrating right now okay the phone slides but they're on top of that there's a lot of really well thought out things like the charges back here

and then the cable routing coming out here so if you do a wired phone that works great there's also the the speaker that's more of like an that's okay there are some features that skirt the line for me right between feature and gimmick i'm like am i going to use this speaker yeah where is this skirting a line for you too just like a fun thing let's just add a speaker just we got the space why not the speaker is fun um we have a option that's coming going to come out soon which there's another first uh that speaker when it goes in there's a look on the back of it yeah can i pull this out uh tripod's probably in the way but i think on the bottom there's like a little retaining hook what that's for is if the

vehicles when the vehicles in drive that latch closes yeah so that if you were to break hard or get into an accident the speaker doesn't become a projectile. Yep. But that latch and the whole electronic mechanism around that creates an opportunity for this to be a modular space. So we actually have, instead of a speaker, we have a drawer module that's going to go in. So imagine like a little box that carries stuff. Yeah. That's going to be an optional base. You can choose the speaker or this drawer. Okay.

That's cool. But the thing about the speaker is it's okay that's cool but the um the thing about the speaker is it's really handy when you don't plan to need a speaker uh and you have a speaker so if you're at a campsite if you're at a friend's house helping to move a couch if you're have a garage dance party whatever whatever which my kids love to do okay like all those kinds of things you're not planning for um you have a really nice speaker with a big battery that can last a while yeah it's also a charging dock which is handy so we a lot of people use it for a charging dock which is like the most over-designed charging dock you can imagine it's pretty great yeah

yeah yeah and i think there's a lot of things that that are like that when i see a vehicle that has a feature i immediately think like is this designed for a person or for a demo and i wonder like okay yeah most of the features in here are like very well laid out and then there's a couple that are just like ah i think i might use that flashlight once in a while well it's flashlight i flashlight we find gets used a lot i use all the time yeah the theme is the speaker is probably bigger than it needed to be you probably we probably could have gone over a smaller one. I mean, I've literally used it where my phone's dead, and I'm like, damn, I need a phone charge.

I'll grab the speaker. I'm carrying the speaker out with a wire attached to it. I'm like, boy, I wish we'd made this a little smaller. That's funny. What is another thing that you find is something you don't use a lot? Okay, the one small detail with the gear tunnel on the r1t okay is if i have something that's not big enough and i'm driving and it slides around and i put it on the left side but when i arrive at my destination it's on the other side yeah

is a little ridge maybe a good idea or is it just like should i only ever put golf clubs in there like what's the usual use case for the gear tunnel? That's fun. So there's a whole group of people that have thought about, do we put retainers or different sort of cubbies, if you will, within the gear tunnel? There's a floor mat that we're working on that has a ridge. What we're finding most people use it for, duffel bags, which is very common. Not basketballs or things that roll easy for exactly that point.

But things that you put there, stay in place. Obviously golf clubs, snowboards is a really common one that we see all the time. Snow boots is a really common one. The camp kitchen's gone. The camp kitchen's gone. It is. Was it just not enough people? That's a good question.

No, it's a really popular feature. It was more... There was more people that wanted it than... The take rate was higher than we expected. We're going through a redesign process to redesign it to something that... It's very cool. We're going to show it soon. That doesn't consume the whole space okay so one of the challenges with the kitchen as we originally designed it is people had this

painful uh decision between do i want to use my gear tunnel or do i want the entire thing the entire thing used up with the kitchen yeah so we have a cheaper lower cost updated design that that is much less that doesn't take up the whole thing. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like that's where we pulled it off of our configurator while we go through the redesign. Originally we thought we'd keep it the same, but it's changing so much that it's, it's going to be a reset to how we think about kitchens.

We think the kitchen space is really interesting for a vehicle. It's designed to, to be out, to go out doing things. It's, you know, we all congregate around food. It's a really great way to bond.

So, and you have enough power to cook many many meals in the vehicle so uh that was something we spent time on interesting yeah so i guess in the in the larger big picture you're the ceo of rivian i'm sure a lot of decisions get to the point where like other leaders have talked to me about this if it's an easy enough decision it gets solved quickly by people who work in that specific department and if it's a more difficult decision it gets escalated more and eventually your job just becomes sifting through the most difficult interesting decisions that you have to make along with strategy how do you think about steering the rivian ship and the decisions that you have to make and maybe if you have an example of some tougher decisions how you go through that process? Yeah, it's, you know, in something as complex as

a vehicle, you know, if our products were, you're making, I don't know, insulated cups or something much simpler, conceivably, like you could be, I could be involved in every decision. You know, what's the radius of the edge of the cup? How does the tops grow on? On something like a vehicle, there's so many millions of decisions that need to be taken that by very definition, I should be involved in a small fraction. And as you said, it's the really key foundational decisions or the really hard subjective decisions. So on these products, on R1, the team was a lot smaller when a lot of the core decisions were made. So I was very much in a lot of the details of R1.

As we're now working on future products, where I'm focusing a lot of my time is on the key technical decisions. So the decisions around compute platforms, battery cell architecture, network architecture. So what's our topology of computers within the vehicle and i get very involved in those items but then we have really strong teams that can do some of the detailed design work on let's say executing seats or executing body structures but of course when everything anything escalates around like a design trade-off that's a classic one like it would you like to look like this? It'll cost more.

It'll weigh more. I see. Or we can make it look less cool, but it'll cost less and weigh less. Those types of trade-offs, sometimes it's hard to have them made automatically. It requires some level of escalation. And they kind of, I guess, add in the compile. So you can make one of those decisions, and it might feel like just one. But if you made all of the decisions in one direction,

then you'd end up with a different product entirely, where maybe there's one thing that you steer one way, while another thing you steer the other way. For sure. I mean, on a vehicle with a cost target, you have to decide where you're going to spread investment. So do you want to put $1,000 more into the interior? Do you want to put it into the hood? Do you want to put it into the chassis? Do you want to put a thousand more dollars into the interior? Do you want to put it into the hood?

Do you want to put it into the chassis? Do you want to put it into range? So these are all this complex web of trade-offs. Yeah. Well, that trade-off web gets super complex when you aim for like a $35,000 car. This is the ultimate question I always get, which is, man, I want an EV, but they're all so expensive. When are they going to have like a Volkswagen Golf that's electric and it's

got all the same range and everything and it's the same price I don't know about you but I see that as like a horizon thing like the battery technology has to get cheaper there's a lot of expensive parts of electric cars how do you think about the eventual goal of potentially a much more affordable, attainable EV for the masses? Yeah, it's really important. And what we don't want to have happen as consumers or for us as a company is to just dilute it down to where there's no personality or excitement. So I think that's where we talk about this a lot is you can do innovation through additions. You add features, you add content, you add technology.

The ability to do innovation through subtraction where you really distill down to the core essence of what is the product and the brand stand for. So we're deep into our next set of programs on the r2 platform and those vehicles there's huge debates around like where we apply spending where we put building materials cost is it in the suspension you know how capable does the vehicle need to be off-road relative to let's say on-road driving dynamics or in terms of interior content and so these are these are really big decisions so you know something like this we have a sunglass holder here yep that adds money costs yeah do we want to do something like that or would you rather have you know a removable flashlight in the door these are those are the decisions and so for the the r2 product lineup we have less dollars to

spend and so they're those like things that we didn't have to debate as much on a flagship product like this, we really are debating heavily. That's really interesting, yeah. And so what's core to the brand is a flashlight in the door, really critical, versus being able to manage certain off-road conditions, which drive costs, the body structure, and it's a chassis.

So these are the really fun, crunchy debates that we have internally. So R2 is lower plat lower cost overall platform for a vehicle that's why that's why the decisions are more frequent between potentially things instead of just why not both because it's a ninety thousand dollar truck yeah so we have um we talked about a lot there's only so many really cool features we can add in the vehicle yeah Yeah. And each one has a price tag, and we're constantly adding all those up and saying, is the sum of the parts where we want it to be? It's a balancing act.

Yeah. Yeah. And this evolves over time, too, because I'm sure, you know, whether the target for R2 is low or you get, like, 10, 12 years down the road, and then there's a $25,000 vehicle, like, eventually accessibility is the goal.

Is there a future... Do you share the vision of like, eventually every car's electric? Is that like an inevitable future? So it's like, it needs to be the outcome. Yeah. Yeah. I guess that, that just means yes, eventually we will have to get to incredibly affordable EVs everywhere that do satisfy various people's needs. Yeah. I mean, when you think about, um um it's pretty wild we're we we lived through this period of time in human history where for like this brief moment the whole world ran on fossil fuels and you can imagine history books 500 years from now a thousand years now looking back and there was like this blip of time where like our generation and our parents and our parents parents yeah lived on like hundreds of millions of years of accumulated carbon

in the form of fossil fuels. And that just won't be the way the planet runs. And it shouldn't be. And the sooner we can get off of it, the less risk we put on our planet's ecological systems and, of course, on climate. So our view is we need to make the switch as fast as we possibly can. But it's unquestionable that the switch will certainly happen in the very near term, in the next 15 years, I would say.

Yeah. What would you say to other more traditional car companies who are lagging on their switch to making good EVs? Because there's a lot of them out there, and I talk to them, and I talk to, obviously, the ones that do make EVs. I review the products. And then there are some that just seem to not be super interested in making a good quality EV or maybe there's legislation that's like we got to get our emissions average down but like you know we're not really focused on that yet is there are there messages that regular people can send voting with their wallets like what would you say to them I think people are starting to vote with their wallets. You're seeing... I mean, you own EVs, you own a

Rivian, you own a Tesla. I mean, once you move into an EV, it's really hard to go the opposite direction. And I think that is going to become even more true as we solve charging. So as we build more charging structures. The reason, as I said, Rivian's investing so heavily in our charging network. But I'd say that the other reality is we shouldn't make the choice to have an electric vehicle just about electrification. It should just be the best thing you can buy. So if you're buying a seven-passenger through a SUV and you want something that's a premium-capable vehicle,

this should be the best thing you can buy. And the fact that it's electric is a great thing from from an environmental point of view from a dynamics point of view but but ultimately the product in totality needs to just be the one you want yeah yeah i think that's kind of what makes uh the cheaper evs a tougher sell right now is because they're not necessarily the best thing at that price where you see like the 30 to 45 000 evs where they they had to make a lot of the choices which were we're going to cut a lot of personality here or we're going to cut a lot of the the things that people typically expect in a car of this price to offer an ev where i guess strategically speaking the best way to start is at the top yeah where you make that

convincing value proposition this is the best version yeah and it is electric so now we've set the tone for electric and then we can work our way down in price yeah that's what uh for us with r2 is so exciting is the ability to have you talked about like cut the persani the vehicle all the same like rich persani that we find in the r1 platform okay but like curated so thoughtfully that the fact that there's less content, and we spend less money, so instead of a quad motor, there's less motors, but the dynamics, the capabilities,

all of that still really feels special. Yeah. Okay. Well, I'm looking forward to R2. It sounds like that's going to be exciting. When should we expect to see the first R2 stuff? It's not too far out. We're not going to show it for a little while, but sometime in the next roughly year okay nice yeah well uh i think we should do a walk around in the vehicle

and we'll do that on the autofocus channel so if you're watching the podcast thanks for watching thanks for spending the time for the waveform audience i'm sure they'll enjoy it and uh watch the autofocus video when we walk around the r1s thanks for watching see you guys later peace you