Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe on Q1 results, R2 production timeline and state of EV market

Let’s bring in RJ Scringe, CEO of Rivian, the company reporting their Q1 results after the bell last night, wider than expected loss. RJ, your stock is under pressure today and I think a lot of people are looking at your guidance for the rest of this year. And on one hand there’s there’s relief that you affirmed your guidance in terms of production and your targets that are out there. On the other hand, I think people are looking at the EV market and they’re not sure what to expect. What’s your take? Yeah, I mean there there’s an ongoing discussion just around how rapidly the the entirety of the automotive industry is going to electrify. And you know our view and our conviction is still very much that over time we’ll see the entirety of of of you know, of our vehicle population move to electric, you know electric propulsion. But this is going to take time and and key for that is giving customers lots of choices. And Speaking of choices, you’ve got the R2, which is your next model, which is a a crossover utility vehicle or small SUV. However you want to phrase that, you’re going to build that in Illinois. You’re going to have lower Cap X this year in part because you’re not building in Georgia. Are you confident that you can begin production by the end of next year and start deliveries perhaps in the first quarter of 26. You know you know you and I talked at the launch event for R2 and R3 products, you know we couldn’t be more excited about it. This is exactly what we’re talking about in terms of creating customer choice. And our decision to to launch the R2 out of out of our normal IL facility as you said was not only to drive capital efficiency but importantly to remove risk from the launch and also to allow us to start deliveries in the first half of 2026. And we’re we’re incredibly confident in the product and and confident in the execution of of that launch RJA lot of people say we’re entering an EV winter if you will and that it’s going to be tougher to sell E VS to people especially here in the United States. What do you hear from most of your customers, are they coming out of internal combustion engine vehicles primarily or are they coming from other E VS Yeah, the, the significant majority of our customers have never owned an EV before. So their their first EV experience is through the lens of Rivian and that’s really our goal. Our goal is to take the, you know more than 90% of customers who aren’t buying electric vehicles today and give them an awesome choice, something that’s really exciting and and desirable and great, great value for the money and pull them out of their internal combustion vehicle into an electric vehicle. And we’ve done that with the R1. So our R1 S is not only the best selling EV over $70,000 in the United States, but in California it’s the best selling vehicle, over $70,000. You have agreed to make Rivian’s compatible with Tesla’s charging network and that you’ll be able to use the Supercharger network at some point. Are you worried about Elon Musk basically gutting the Supercharger division at Tesla? Yeah, we’re we’re really excited about the way we’ve approached charging with our our partnership with Tesla. We have a we have a great technical relationship with the teams within Tesla and and for those who have used our vehicles on the net on the Tesla network it’s it’s very easy drive right up, you plug in the charge it every all the payments all the back end work is you know our team, our software team worked on with Tesla software team and that’s and that’s still very robust. But in addition to that we’re also building out our own charging network what we call the Rivian Adventure Network. This summer we’ll be opening that up to to non Rivian customers as well and you know in key for charging network is uptime and there’s very few networks that have very high uptime. Of course Tesla’s network 99 ish percent uptime, our network also about the same 98, 1/2% uptime. So these are incredibly high performance networks both of them. And as we continue to build out our network you know in in addition to to what you see with Tesla, we we really think this is an important part of of pulling more and more customers into electric vehicles. Hey RJ, there’s been some speculation, you’ve seen the reports about a potential partnership between Rivian and Apple which of course killed its its own car ambitions but may still have other ambitions and people speculating that maybe a partnership with you could lead to something. Can you speak to what’s going on? You know we, we don’t comment on on speculation or or rumors on the on these types of things. I would say that you know as a company we’ve got a A history of of great partnerships, our largest shareholders Amazon in that partnership we’re starting to see manifest on on the roads every day with our delivery vehicles that we built for them. Let me ask you one slightly different way then you have been very outspoken about having your own operating system for the Rivian. I think that’s that’s clear. You spent a lot of money and time building that. Would you ever share any of that space with a potential partner or not? Yeah it’s it’s a, it is a great question. We’ve we’ve approached the the entirety of the electrical architecture or the network architecture. So it’s all the the ECU or the computers across the vehicle and then the software that sits on top of them from the view of building that ourselves. So it’s all it’s all vertically integrated core technology. It’s been the foundation of a lot of what we built as a company. And so this certainly has value outside of you know beyond just our own products and there are, there are lots of different ways we could look to leverage that, but we don’t have anything to comment on today, but it’s certainly something we recognize of significant value.