Rivian CEO on CarPlay, Lidar, and affordable EVs

Hello, and welcome to Decoder! My guest today is Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe, and I’m very excited to be talking to him on my show today.

And when I say my show… I mean Nilay Patel’s show. This is my final episode filling in for Nilay while he’s out on parental leave. I’m Joanna Stern, the senior personal tech columnist at The Wall Street Journal, author of the upcoming book I AM NOT A ROBOT (out in 2026), and — fun fact — a cofounder of The Verge.

Decoder is off next Monday, but when the show returns, Nilay will be back in the host seat. But until then, I get to drive the Decoder car one last time with Rivian’s CEO riding shotgun. This is RJ’s third time on the show, and it felt like the perfect follow-up to my conversation last week with Ford CEO Jim Farley.

I loved the idea of going straight from Ford — a legacy automaker deep in the EV transition — to Rivian, arguably the most competitive EV-only car company in the U.S. behind Tesla. If you listened to the Farley episode, this one flows nicely. RJ and I cover a lot of the same challenges: tariffs, China, EV pricing.

But Rivian doesn’t have the legacy tech and other baggage of a traditional automaker. That clean slate makes things like software easier, but it just means the road ahead has another set of bumps.

And yes, we talked about how my Ford Mustang Mach-E’s lease is up next year — perfect timing, since Rivian’s new R2, expected in early 2026, starts at $45,000.

Of course, I also asked about CarPlay.

Okay: Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

All right, RJ Scaringe, you are the CEO and founder of Rivian. Welcome back to Decoder.

Well, it’s great to be on. Thank you for having me.

I’ve taken over for Nilay. I’m also changing the name of this show to “What Car Should Joanna Lease Next?” Actually, let me change the name of the show. Do you have a better name for the show?

“What Car Should Joanna Buy Next?” really rolls off your tongue, so it’s pretty good.

Yeah, it’s going to fit right nicely there. So, I wanted to take you through this because you are my second car CEO on the show, and that’s how I decided to do my takeover. One of the reasons I did that… well, there are two reasons.

One, I always listen to Nilay’s car CEO interviews and love them, but I am also always driving in the car listening to them and screaming that he should be asking different questions. The questions I want answered are usually: Which car should I lease next? So, that is number one.

The number two reason is that three years ago, I leased my first EV. It was a Mustang Mach-E. I’ve been quite happy with it, but next year that lease goes up, and I have a number of things I think I want. So I thought we could talk through some of that, and I thought that would inform a lot of our conversation today about the future of EVs and the future of Rivian.

Great. So I get to sell you a car maybe by the end of the show?

I want you to not be the sleaziest car salesman, but the coolest car salesman. And if you’re lucky, I will drive it off the lot.

Okay, all right. Going for a cool car salesman vibe. Got it.

So let’s start there, on what Rivian has in the market and what’s coming. When you came out with the R1, I believe almost five years ago now, you were very much billed as this electric truck company.

Now, you’ve got the R1S, you are expanding to the R2 and the R3 after that. It seems like your goal is to be more than just an expensive truck company. How do you think about Rivian today? How should I think about Rivian today?

The goal is definitely to be much broader than an expensive electric vehicle company. So when you launch a new company, it’s always an important question: what do you launch first? We made that decision really even before we made the decision on products. We realized we wanted to build a brand around enabling active lifestyles. The following we earned became really clear, we wanted to launch with a flagship set of products.

So we launched the R1 product with a brother-sister, sibling set of products. It was the R1T, which is a truck, and there’s the R1S, which is an SUV. Those two vehicles were intended to launch the brand and really be our handshake with the world. It enabled us to tell a story about what we stand for, the types of experiences, and the trade-offs we make in terms of attributes. Let’s say, like on-road and off-road performance, performance, and efficiency.

R2 is really just the continuation of that. So whereas R1 has an average transaction price of around $90,000, the R2 starts at $45,000. It captures a lot of those same brand elements, so the vehicles can fit your gear, your pets, your kids, your stuff, and they can go off-road, but it’s much smaller. Then, of course, as I said, it’s also much more affordable. For us, it’s the first product that’ll take us from this flagship, which is what we started with, to something that is broadly accessible in terms of pricing.

So, we’re super excited about it. But I mean, the thing about R2 that I think is so amazing is that a lot of the trade-offs we’ve had to make to get the cost down are a lot. We’ve taken around half the cost out of the vehicle — a little bit more — and it doesn’t manifest in a loss of perceived, let’s say, features or quality. It’s the execution: the interior is just beautiful, and the way the car rides and drives is amazing. It’s obviously smaller, but it really feels like a Rivian, and it’s really enjoyable to drive.

I think package-wise, for many users, if you don’t need a seven-row, it’s just the right size. It’s a little bit shorter than a Model Y, but it feels a lot bigger. And I love all the little details. The front trunk works great. The rear liftgate is beautiful. It’s got a drop glass in the rear so you can put things in the back without opening the back up. So it’s got all the little intricate details we’ve thought through to make it feel like a magical product experience.

And when does it come out?

We start deliveries in the first half of next year, which means we have to start building what we call saleable units in the early part of next year. We’re right now in what we call a validation phase. So we’re building vehicles, we’re camouflaging them, driving them on public roads. We begin running all of our manufacturing validation builds, so running vehicles through our plant on production equipment and production process later this year. In the early part of next year, we’ll transition from non-saleable units. We built a few hundred of those, which we consume internally, to then units that are saleable to consumers. So yeah, the early part of next year.

When my lease is up, will the R2 be on shelves? That’s not what you say in the car business.

We could have an R2 in your driveway when your lease is up, yes.

Okay, okay. Well, you’re already off to a good start, and we’re going to talk about my experience test-driving R1S this summer. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show. But I want to quickly talk about how you’re expanding here and some of the backdrop of Rivian.

I think, actually, it’s kind of perfect because I live in a town in New Jersey that should pretty much just be called Rivianfield, or Rivianland. Everyone has the R1 or the R1S. When you were designing them, were you like, “Let’s make a truck that suburban moms love, and dads?” Were the pictures of suburban moms and dads on your mood board?

Well, actually, it’s funny you say that. So when we were developing the vehicle, even way before we’d shown it to the world — we did the same on R2, and we’re doing the same on R3 and R4 — we always create this idea of “what is the vehicle?” What’s the feel of the vehicle want to be, or what’s the essence of it? But then we interpret it through the lens of lots of different target customers.

So, in the case of R1, it’s a really broad set of buyers. We wanted a really diverse demographic this would appeal to. One of them, which of course is a big demographic, is people who are using it to support their family with kids or with pets or with gear. Not surprisingly, it fits all those things really well. It really resonated beautifully with customers who have kids or have families.

Interestingly, and this is a fun little fact, we’re the best-selling premium electric SUV in the country. So the way you draw the boundary diagrams on these is always confusing, but the way we draw it around premium SUVs, we have about 35 percent market share for premium electric SUVs. But in California and the state of Washington, we’re the best-selling premium SUV, electric or non-electric.

So if you’re buying an SUV in the state of California and it’s premium, meaning over $70,000, you’re statistically most likely to be buying a Rivian, and the same is true in Washington. So as dense as it seems in New Jersey, places like Seattle or Mill Valley are areas where it’s the same. It’s very, very popular in these markets.

But in that price range in EVs, you really only have one competitor, right? Is that the [Ford F-150] Lightning?

No, there’s [Tesla] Model X.

Okay, Model X is actually classified as an SUV there, too. Okay.

Yeah. So we outsell Model X by quite a bit. We outsell, well, everything. There are Cadillacs in that price range. There are also GMCs and the Cybertruck. So there are a lot of things up in that price category.

Going back to thinking about this town I live in and some of the towns you were talking about there, I mean, it’s mostly coastal, I would assume. That’s where you’ve got an audience and a demographic of people who can afford a $90,000 car that needs a bigger body. I’m assuming that part of the strategy that you’re really going for now with R2 is to expand that, to go beyond that niche. Are you confident in that, given what the backdrop of the ecosystem and competition looks like right now?

Yeah, we had a board discussion the other day, and I said it, and I’ll say it here: I’ve never been more confident in the business than where we are today. I think one of the big risks in launching a new company is that there are lots of things you could control that are fairly deterministic. Does the vehicle accelerate like this? What’s the range of the vehicle? Does it fit this kind of stuff? And then there are a number of things that are far less deterministic, and in some ways, I think of those as almost like magic. And the biggest one of those is the brand and how well the brand resonates.

As we just described, you can do all these mood boards and studies to say this is what we hope the brand becomes. But if I were to wind the clock back to 2020, before we launched, I wouldn’t have imagined the brand would even have resonated as well as it has. Since we launched, every year since we’ve launched, Consumer Reports does this annual brand appeal study, and it’s based upon what we say, but they survey lots of different customers independently. And since we launched in 2021, we’ve been at the number one spot on that chart. So, we’re number one level for brand appeal, and then by far the highest rate of repurchase.

The brand is just really connected with consumers — the authenticity of it, the way that we’ve approached making all of these trade-offs and decisions at the product level, how that ultimately shows up and manifests as a business, as a company. My hope is that if we can take even a fraction of the market share success that we’ve had at this premium price point with our flagship product and translate that to the mass market product, the R2, we’d be really happy.

So, of course, we’d be happier if we could take a bigger fraction of that market share of success. But to get 35 percent market share in the segments we’re operating, outselling all the other EV alternatives, this segment we’re now going into with R2 is very big. This is crushed up with lots of internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles and lots of hybrids. Of course, you see Model Y in this price category.

The Chevy Equinox, which I’m seeing all over the place.

Chevy Equinox, yes. There’s a whole host of products we get to compete against.

My previous Decoder guest was Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford. I know you guys know each other.

We spent a lot of time talking about the threat of a company that doesn’t even sell cars in America, which is BYD. The mindset is that it is the competitor in the lower-cost, high-tech EV space. Even though they don’t sell in the US, what they’re doing is the competition. He said the Chinese are the 700-pound gorilla in our industry for EVs. There’s no real competition from Tesla, GM, or Ford with what we’ve seen come from China. That’s clearly what he’s thinking about. What about you?

Yeah, I think there are two things to call out about China that are important. The first is obviously their cost structure, and I think that draws a lot of attention. Their cost structure is not… I’m sure Ford has, and we have, but everyone buys everyone’s products and looks at how they’re made. There are certainly lots of innovations that are being made, but there’s nothing that everyone’s not aware of or that they themselves aren’t doing in terms of manufacturing process, vehicle design, or vehicle architecture.

I think what’s happened on cost is BYD has the compounding benefits of very low cost to capital, both at the OEM level and at their suppliers. In many cases, the plants are free or close to free. It has very low labor cost, very high labor availability, and that just compounds as you go from raw materials all the way up the supply chain to these dramatically lower-cost structures than what we have in the Western world.

So, I think what will happen there is either you’ll see tariffs go in place or requirements that those vehicles be produced locally, where a lot of those cost advantages go away. And so, as much as I think cost is something we should all be aware of, and to say look at how low the cost is to build vehicles in China, which we can see, Western companies can also benefit from as well. You look at the cost structure of Tesla’s vehicles built in Shanghai versus Tesla’s vehicles built in the United States, and it’s much, much lower in Shanghai. So I think there’s the cost element.

But the bigger element is actually how advanced the technology is. Here, what’s happened is, much like Tesla, I’d say much like Rivian, if you start with a clean sheet, you end up in a very different place than the legacy car manufacturers. In our case, we developed our whole software platform in-house. We built all of our electronics in-house. That platform’s very robust, and in fact, it’s what’s underpinned us. We did a $5.8 billion software licensing deal and an associate joint venture with Volkswagen Group, the second-largest car company in the world, to take that technology and deploy it across their vehicles globally, with the exception of the Chinese market. But for Europe, the United States, and the rest of the world.

I think this is the challenge. Now it’s not just Tesla and Rivian that have this very unique approach to software and electronics. It’s a number of, not all, but a number of Chinese companies that also have a much more advanced approach to software and electronics. The legacy OEMs have to very rapidly shift how they approach this technical domain, which has historically not been a core competency of OEMs. Historically, they’re very mechanical companies, and they’ve relied on Tier 1 suppliers to do a lot of that work. Those Tier 1 suppliers often rely on Tier 2, so the software and electronics space in automotive tends to be quite a bit behind consumer electronics as a result of this outsourced third-party approach that the auto industry has evolved to use over the last few decades.

Well, you walked right into some of my questions about tariffs. And also, you really touched on a large part of what my conversation with Ford’s Jim Farley was about, which was about how he pivots the company to do some of the stuff that you’re doing.

But let’s go back to tariffs because it’s clear that they are affecting your business. It is affecting this entire automotive industry. If you look at what you’re trying to do with R2, which is to bring down the cost and make this an affordable vehicle, or at least your efforts to make it an affordable vehicle, and you’re up against tariffs. Can you do this? Is this just like the worst-case-scenario timing for you?

With R2, we’ve actually had the benefit of making a lot of sourcing decisions, recognizing some of what I’d characterize as global geopolitical shifts. One of the biggest global changes in mindset that’s not just unique to the United States, but we’re seeing across the Western world, is an increasingly domestic-centric approach to manufacturing. Meaning, in the case of the United States and I’d say broadly in the case of Europe, there’s a desire to retain more manufacturing content local to the markets in which the vehicles are sold.

In our case, because we’re producing all of our products in the United States, we knew that going into the sourcing of R2, so we had built a US-centric supply chain around that. Of course, there are some things that we don’t make in the United States, like certain metals and especially heavy rare earth metals. Certain materials just globally really aren’t born out of the United States. Things like nickel are a very good example — 92 percent of the world’s nickel supply comes from Indonesia.

So, in certain aspects of the vehicle, we’ve had to build cross-border trade relationships. Some of the changes we’re seeing in trade policy do add cost, but we’ve had the benefit of being able to be quite plan-full around that. Whereas on R1, which was already in production with a fully sourced and fully operating supply chain, the changes to trade policy being so abrupt, we didn’t have the time to respond to those as thoughtfully as we’ve been able to with R2.

You mentioned — I mean, I think it’s well-known — that Rivian is manufacturing in the US, and it feels like you’re making these cars here. You’re adding jobs here, but you’re still facing, from this administration, the tariffs and the upcoming cuts to EV tax credits. Do you feel like this administration’s just working against you? Are you just pushing against the tide all the time?

An important part of my job, and I’d say increasingly so, is looking at all the unknowns in the system. We think of this just not for me but for the whole leadership team, looking at all the changes in the system and trying to understand what things are going to be persistent? What are the changes that are going to exist two years from now, a few years from now, five years from now? What are the things that are somewhat in the noise? And when we look at it through that lens, there are a number of really clear things.

So one thing that’s very clear, regardless of whether you’re looking at it from a Republican point of view or a Democratic point of view, is that building independence from China is going to be a theme that’s important in the United States. That was really important for us as we sourced R2. We built very little dependency, or as little dependency as possible, on the Chinese supply chain. That carries with it assumptions around costs and different cost structures, but that was one key takeaway. In that way, we’ve aligned the business to the intent of both political parties in the United States.

The other is that there’s a big push for US capability in both technology and US capability in manufacturing. So, putting aside some of the, I’d say, noise and short-term changes that have impacts, real impacts, on us around electric vehicles and some of the policy for electric vehicles, we find ourselves very aligned in terms of building deep technology expertise in the United States. Technology expertise that is so strong that, in fact, we’re selling that to other companies outside the United States. So this deal with Volkswagen is one of the largest software licensing deals in the history of the auto industry, between a US company and a European company.

I think there’s alignment there, but a big part of what we try to find is a way to depoliticize electric vehicles, which have become political. They shouldn’t be. We’re investing in building technology and jobs in the United States. We employ close to 16,000 people here in the US, so we’re a large company. We have one of the strongest technology teams, I think, in the auto industry. And so we spend a lot of time with the administration on that, and there’s a lot of support and enthusiasm for what we’re creating and building in that regard.

You should just bring an R2 to the White House. You should get President Trump in an R2, and he can say everything’s computer.

[Laughs] We’ll have to ask him, we’ll see.

Yeah. Do you go to Mar-a-Lago in your R2?

It would work beautifully there. The rear window drops down, and you can put a surfboard in the back. It’s a good idea. It’s the ultimate vehicle for being down there.

Well, see, you’re not only going to sell me an R2, you’re going to sell an R2 to the President of the United States. What a great show for you.

Well, I say this all the time, Michael Jordan has a quote I just love, which is that both Republicans and Democrats buy Nikes, and the same is true for Rivian. I think it’s a great result that we try very hard not to make what we’re doing political. We have a lot of Republicans who buy our vehicles and love them. We have a lot of Democrats who buy our vehicles and love them. We have people who are in the middle, and we have Independents.

So we try to be as broad as possible, in terms of creating a welcome mat for us as a company, and really appeal to the core values of enabling active lifestyles. That’s not a political orientation; it spans across all political points of view.

Although I’ll ask you, did it help you that there was the Elon Musk-Donald Trump alliance and that I now see many people with bumper stickers on Tesla saying, “I bought this before Elon went crazy.” I’m assuming that maybe that helped you.

It’s been interesting to watch. There’s a long list of things that I could say a year ago I would’ve never expected to see happen. So this time last year, I wouldn’t have predicted some of what happened there to have occurred. But I think at the end of the day, look, I think the important thing is that in Tesla’s case, they do have a great set of products. The Model Y and Model 3 are great products. I’ve owned them, so I’ve been a customer a few times, and I think it’s good that customers have that as a choice.

I want to get to some more product questions and things about my R1S driving, but I want to stick just for another second on the state of the economy and the state of your business and the fact that you have the uphill battle now of making cars that are profitable for you. You are still, as far as I can tell from earnings and reports, losing money on each of the vehicles you sell. Is that going to improve in the coming months, and with the R2?

It better improve, and I say that with a smile. So if we look at our trajectory, when we launched, we had a whole host of challenges that really were not predicted. We didn’t predict, when we launched, that it’d be right into the pandemic. It’s probably hard to imagine a more challenging environment to launch an industrial business into. It’s hard to build a plant and launch a plant with remote work and work from home.

We then had a huge supply chain crisis, and given we’re a new manufacturer, we had a real challenge that persisted well into 2023, around just our ability to get enough parts. So we were starved for parts, which manufacturing really benefits from predictability and being steady, and our on-off nature just created a huge amount of unexpected fixed cost overhead.

Then, as we came into 2024, things started to really come together. We launched some updates to the vehicle we call our Gen 2 version of R1, and so in the fourth quarter of 2024, we were positive gross margin. In the first quarter of 2025, we had over $200 million of positive gross margin, which was awesome.

This past quarter was a tough quarter for us, Q2 of 2025. We had a big drop off in volume, largely driven by some of the challenges around getting enough heavy rare earth metals to make our motor. So in our case, because all of our vehicles are, of course, electric, we produce all of our vehicles in the United States. China, as part of the trade negotiations that have been happening, put in place an export control that didn’t allow the export of magnets into the United States. So we just couldn’t make motors because these motors needed the magnets.

We went from 14,000 units produced in Q1 to around 6,000 in Q2. That was a singular sort of phase shift, if you will, that we felt we saw in the numbers. But we built solutions around that. That export control has been lifted. So we’re quite bullish on how the rest of this year is going to go. We’ll produce and sell more vehicles in the second half of the year than we did in the first half.

As you said, the launch of R2 really ignites the business. It allows us to get to a level of volume that helps cover our operating fixed costs. It’s like our plant fixed costs, and then the overall OpEx of the business. So all the R&D and SG&A, the sales administrative functions of the business, support selling and delivering, and servicing all these vehicles. Scale is a really important part of the automotive business and automotive production. It becomes even more important if you’re extremely vertically integrated, which we are. So, once you get to that scale, that vertical integration creates a structural advantage in cost structure. But you need a certain level of scale, which R2 brings for us.

Okay, and maybe it won’t be in this quarter, but maybe you’ll have my R2 lease.

That’ll help, but you’re going to have to convince someone of this decision that isn’t me. So I’m going to play a message from him soon. But I test drove the R1S this summer. I drove it many miles. It was almost 500 miles in your car. So, thank you for that.

But I had a pretty tough reviewer in the car for this whole time. And we have a quick question from him. I’m going to play it.

Joanna’s Son: Why did we get a flat tire, Rivian Man?

And what else do you like about the car?

Joanna’s Son: That we have the card for it, and it opened. That’s cool.

So did you hear the beginning of the question?

I couldn’t quite hear the beginning.

It’s, “Why did we get a flat tire, Rivian Man?

I heard the Rivian Man, which I really liked. That’s adorable.

Yeah, that’s your name. I told him I was going to talk to “Rivian Man.” And so that’s what he said. He wanted to know, “Why did we get a flat tire, Rivian Man?”

I actually don’t know. Did you run over a nail or something?

I don’t know either. I don’t know. Anytime he sees a Rivian now, he’s like, “That’s a Rivian, it has a flat tire.” And I had to explain to him that actually all cars can-

Can get flat tires, yeah.

And then the second part of his question was, it wasn’t really a question. He just wanted you to know that he loves the key card. He says that’s really cool. But I wanted to actually tell you, I don’t like the key card.

The key card, actually, is not supposed to be used other than for sort of an emergency. You put it in your wallet, or you put it somewhere and hold onto it. But the idea is that your phone is really the key. So, I don’t know if the team, when you loaned it, set you up with your phone as a key, but that’s the idea.

It’s true. I did have it set up on my phone for a little bit after we had the key card.

Any other things you have to say to my four-year-old son in terms of why he should tell me to get this car?

Ah, so I have a six, a seven, and a nine-year-old. So I have a perspective on what the kids really enjoy with it. I’d say in the case of R2s, my boys have spent a lot of time now in the R2. A lot of the fun little features we have on the R1, like the flashlight in the door, are still there. There’s tons of storage. The front trunk is great in the R2, but we put in a few more features. So the rear glass drops completely. It makes for a really nice open-air experience where you can drive with the back open.

It’s not too noisy. You can fit stuff into it. If you have pets, they really like it. But the car has all the same performance trade-offs; it’s still very capable on-road and off-road. It’s a great adventure mobile; it fits all your gear. So, I think he’d really enjoy the R2, but it’s also easier to get into for kids because it’s a little lower than the R1. My kids prefer the R2 over the R1.

Okay, all right. I’ve got a lot to tell my four-year-old; he’s going to be making this decision. He makes all the important buying decisions in the house.

Also, I text Nilay a lot about cars, often after I’ve listened to Decoder or just when I’m test-driving cars or thinking about it. So, I want to read you the text I sent him earlier this summer. I said, “Drove Rivian loaner upstate. No problem charging, but maps are fucking terrible.” The good news is you fixed one of these problems, the maps, right?

Yep. We have a great partnership with Google, so the maps are now in partnership with Google, and it was an area where there were a lot of requests for different solutions to our mapping. So the beauty of our architecture is that we can update all sorts of things, including map applications. We have a whole new mapping environment, which is beautiful. It’s really nice, I mean, it’s just great working with the Google team to develop this. It’s really special, it’s a wonderful application.

Did you work with the Google team on the underlying infotainment system? That’s based on Android, right?

It’s a good question. We didn’t work with Google on the platform. We built it to really work seamlessly with the Android ecosystem so that some of the apps that we integrate can be pulled in more seamlessly. But we did that entirely without Google. And then in the case of the maps, we did work very closely with Google.

That makes sense. Well, I did get the R1S back to test post the maps update, and it is significantly improved. So that’s good timing for you to be on the show.

I love that. So we checked one box there.

Okay, one of the main reasons I got a Mach-E actually had to do with CarPlay. Do you still hate CarPlay?

[Laughs] I love it, that’s a funny way to ask it. No, we definitely don’t hate CarPlay. We’ve made the decision, which I’m very confident about, that in the fullness of time, customers will appreciate, which is that we wanted to have a seamless digital experience. To not have the need to jump between CarPlay, which feels obviously like CarPlay, and so it feels the same in every car, and then what we create as a Rivian environment. And rather, think of it more à la carte, create all the same applications.

So you have YouTube, you can go to Spotify, you can go to Google Maps, you can go to Apple Music, you can go to everything. You can have all those integrations. But for us to hold the glue for putting that all together, this becomes even more important as we start to integrate AI into the vehicle.

Over the next 18 months, we’re going to see a lot of new features that, by necessity, are performing tasks or making decisions to connect different applications. And so, knowledge of “what’s the vehicle state?” Knowledge of “is it in drive, or is it parked? What are the conditions outside the vehicle? What’s your driving history? What are your preferences?” Knowledge of all of that at an ecosystem level allows us to present a richer, better experience for you as a driver or occupant of the vehicle.

I think it’d be really hard to do that if we had to put all that through an application that expands to take over the screen and provides you essentially with a set of bubbles that feel very much like a CarPlay experience. So piece by piece, everything that someone may have missed from their CarPlay experience, whether it was a mapping, or soon we’re going to have a voice-to-text, is going to be there, and it’ll be beautiful.

We’re really convinced of this. For some folks, that means they’re not going to buy a Rivian. We accept that. It’s a decision. I say this all the time: part of building a product as complex as this is recognizing and being okay with the fact that we have to make a ton of decisions, like the products, like a vehicle has many millions of decisions together. Some of those decisions, not everyone’s going to agree with, and that’s okay.

Our job is to have convictions around the decisions we’re making and have intention and thoughtfulness in why we made those decisions. But knowing that our goal is to make as many people as happy as possible, but also knowing that you can’t make everyone happy because not everyone’s going to want exactly the same thing.

So what I’m hearing is you’re definitely doing CarPlay Ultra.

[Laughs] Yeah, that’s what the takeaway is, definitely doing it.

That is what you just said.

No, look, we have a great-

I mean, to be clear, we have a great relationship with Apple. They’re a close partner. We have a bunch of integrations that are coming soon. Apple Music was the first demonstration of that, but there’s a lot more coming.

Yeah, so I think messaging, think vehicle access. So I think getting into the vehicle with an Apple Watch and Ultra Wideband, and there’s a whole host of things coming. But you don’t need to use CarPlay to do that. You can do it in other ways.

I agree. I will say three to four years ago, CarPlay was number one on the list of things I wanted in a new car. That has quickly fallen down the list. But I will tell you what’s going to be near the top of the list for this next decision, which is AI, autonomy, and self-driving. Group that all together, which is all very different, obviously, and your teams that listen to this will cringe.

And we’ve talked about this before, but give me a sense of how you’re thinking about full self-driving or some version of autonomy that goes beyond what you currently have in the car, which I’ve tested, which is a glorified cruise control. I do really appreciate it.

But how do you get to the point where I am actually just sitting in my R2, if I get one, and I’m able to go from my house in New Jersey to the studio in New York without maybe touching the wheel a couple of times? Maybe I touch it two times. How do you get there?

Yeah. Boy, we could spend the rest of the time on this. This is a big topic.

Well, it’s good because we have another hour.

All right. First, it’s important to recognize there’s been a big shift. So the way autonomous systems were developed up until around 2021, or even 2022, is that you had a perception platform or stack of perception, which may be cameras and radars — maybe in some cases, cameras, radars, and lidars that would see the world or perceive the world.

It would identify all the objects, it would classify those objects, and it would assign vectors to those objects, like how they’re moving in the world. Then all of those objects would be handed to a planner, and the planner would be a rules-based environment that’s essentially a programmed version of interpreting how the world works and then making a whole series of decisions based upon this defined set of rules. That environment has its obvious limitations; it’s very sensitive to changes in the sensor set, and it’s very sensitive to the location or the application. So, it sort of reached an asymptote of capability.

While that was being developed, a whole new approach to thinking about how to develop self-driving systems emerged, which was really to use AI, which, interestingly, AI as we know it today was not really part of the first gen of self-driving systems. It was a very rules-based environment. So, what’s now happening and what’s happening in our Gen 2 vehicles, which is why there’s a significant difference between our Gen 1 and our Gen 2 vehicles… Our Gen 2 vehicles, which we launched in the middle of 2024, brought all of our perception stack in-house. All the sensors we designed ourselves; there are no third-party sensors there. We then built a much more powerful compute platform, so an inference platform in the vehicle.

We’re taking all this data and we trigger it based upon a whole variety of things, which we can talk about in a moment, but, like interesting events. We use that to feed the training of a large parameter model. Think of it like a foundation model for driving. So, a large, what’s ultimately a multi-billion parameter model, and that model is a neural net of how to drive a vehicle. And the beauty of this is, as you improve sensors, change sensors, or change vehicle applications, this neural net of understanding of how to drive a vehicle doesn’t go away.

So, a simple analogy is if I wear glasses, if I learned to drive without glasses, and you suddenly handed me my glasses, I would not forget everything I learned. I would just drive better, with more accuracy, because I have better precision or better perception. The same is true in this approach now, which is building a large model. You’ve maybe heard or people have heard it called an end-to-end approach, where you take this approach of having data come in, you use that to train the model, and then that model determines how the vehicle’s operating. Why this is so exciting is that the rate of improvement of these systems is going to be much higher. That’s the platform we now have in our vehicles.

We’re going to begin to see the feature set expand. So today, as you said, we call it a highway assist. It’s a highway feature where you can be on the highway, you can take your hands off the wheel, your eyes stay mostly on the road, but otherwise, the vehicle drives itself. The next extension of that is hands off the wheel, eyes on the road everywhere, so on any type of road. The next extension of that is hands off the wheel, eyes on the road, with turn-by-turn so the vehicle can navigate from one address to another, and that’s coming next year as well.

The next step is for hands off the wheel, eyes off the road, in certain circumstances. The highway is a really good example where you’re on the highway, your hands are off the road or off the wheel, you want your eyes off the road, and you can be on your phone reading a book. And that set of features for us is going to be coming in 2027. And that I think is a really big unlock because you start to get your time back. So it’s not just reducing the cognitive load on you to have to operate the vehicle and be fully aware, but it also gives you the ability to do other things.

What I just described is all happening over the next 18 to 24 months. I think the rate of progress here is going to be so high that if we look at the last 10 years for autonomy and compare it to the next 10 years, it’s going to be on a completely different trajectory, such that by early 2030s it’s going to be inconceivable to buy a new car and not have it perform at a very high level from a self-driving point of view.

Tell me real quick, though, what are the sensors? I mean, there’s this big debate I feel happening right now, or maybe it’s not really a debate. There’s maybe one side of the debate, and no one’s really debating it, that there is the lidar versus cameras. And Tesla’s going all in on cameras, saying we don’t need lidar. What about Rivian? Does Rivian add lidar?

Yeah, so our view is that there is a real benefit [to lidar]. Actually, I should start over. The view of the entirety of the science community is that having multiple sensors is helpful because you build a more accurate view of the world. The way that we build these neural nets is that you want a broad understanding of the world, and you want the highest accuracy. And if you have more than one camera, you’re going to have multiple cameras that have different signals, which have different signal-to-noise ratios that need to be managed. But ultimately, the way that that information is fused very early, if you have multiple cameras coupled with radar, coupled with potentially lidar, as you said, it gives you a more fulsome and accurate picture. It also allows you to train your model better.

So, it’s analogous to if I had to learn the world with one eye, I would learn a less accurate version of the world than if I had learned the world with two eyes. And if you look at the evolutionary tracks of many species of animals, most animals have multiple modalities of sensing. And the ones that have to operate in maybe the most extreme environments, let’s say extreme darkness, generally combine some optical perception with some wavelength-based perception. Often, like sound waves or sonar, bats are an example of this.

Our view is that it’s definitely beneficial, and our approach to sensors has been that we need to rapidly build our foundation model as fast as possible. Tesla has a lot of vehicles and has made great progress. We have an amazing product. So we have more megapixels in cameras. We have 55 megapixels in cameras in R1, which’ll jump to 65 megapixels in R2. We have a really robust set of corner radars and a really beautiful 3D imaging radar in the front. And that’s rapidly building a robust foundation model, one that we’re going to start to see these features I just described play with.

So not ruling out lidar, is what I’m hearing?

No, I wouldn’t rule out lidar. And there’s another thing I’d just say, which is important to note. I think a lot of the debate around lidar was born out of [autonomous vehicles] 1.0, where you actually had a rules-based environment, where this idea of an early fusion or building of a neural net that wasn’t there. In a rules-based environment, it was more complex to do some of these fusion activities because the fusion typically happened a little later.

Now, what’s happened is that we no longer run the models like that. So the models benefit from the maximum amount of information on the front of the model. The cost of lidar used to be tens of thousands of dollars. It’s now low, a couple of hundred bucks. So it’s a really great sensor that can do things that cameras can’t.

So my last question comes back to buying or leasing one of your cars next year, which is that, and this is the worry I have, that Rivian was recently ranked last by Consumer Reports in a survey on vehicle reliability. What are you planning to do about that?

That’s something we’re absolutely focused on. The way, of course, this looks at some of our early builds, our vehicle liability is now getting much, much better. But even with that, even with the fact that there were more service requests on our early builds than, let’s say, other vehicles, we had the number one level of customer satisfaction. I always say to our team, when we look at that data, imagine if our reliability gets to be best in class, coupled with all the product attributes. So, that’s our goal.

R1 has continually improved since we launched, and then R2 is a further step change from that with all the learnings that we’ve made around our production process, production quality, and reliability. It was tough for us when we first launched because, in our first year, we came out number one on customer satisfaction, but it was our first time building vehicles at scale. So not surprisingly, we had more challenges with just ramping up quality systems to begin with.

Well, the good news for you is that I experienced that customer service when I had that flat tire.

So, I know about that, and so does my four-year-old. So, it’s looking good.

RJ, thank you so much. I mean, I have a lot of other questions, but I’m being told I need to wrap up. They’re giving me the circle.

You’re getting the hook?

Well, thank you for your time.

Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it.

All right, wonderful. Thanks.

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