The last quarter was a turning point for
production. It seems.
What did you fix? Well, you know, we started production
now about 18 months ago, and in the first 12 months we launched three
different products the truck, the SUV, and then a commercial van.
And the complexity of launching any product is incredibly high.
But to launch three products in parallel with a complex supply chain, we really
felt that last year we saw it with shortages of parts, which then led to,
you know, shortages in terms of what we were planning to produce.
But what we saw in Q2 is really the beginnings of the supply chain now
really running in a healthy way. I joke we had a board meeting a few
weeks ago and it's the first time in a board meeting where our supply chain
slide had no read on it. So supply chain is is is healthy.
It's keeping up with production. And importantly, it's not just what we
saw in this quarter, but what's to come. So the continued growth in production
output, which is one of the most important levers for us in terms of
driving overall, your point is that you have visibility on the supply chain.
You see that you have enough parts coming in to to get the ramp.
You're expecting more visibility, the supply chain.
And then really for us running and operating the plant
as intended. So there's there's certainly tons of
efficiency improvements that we know that we can make throughout the plant.
But we're now at a point where we can be much more predictable to say we believe
we're going to produce X number of vehicles this week, this day, this
month. And given that the supply chain
confidence is there, and given that our operational sort of experiences is so
much stronger, we're able to have a level of predictability for the business
that in the first 12 months we really, really didn't have.
Some are asking, why didn't you raise guidance then?
Because that plant on paper is capable of building many more than 50,000 units.
Yeah. You know, one of the other things we've
gone through is just being, you know, very much thoughtful and in not wanting
to over promise, we want to we want to make sure that we overdeliver on on on
our numbers or we deliver on our targets.
And you're knowing all the unknowns that
still exist in system. The supply chain is much healthier, but
wanting to protect for just some of the unknowns that could happen.
How much did the introduction of the Enduro motor have to do with with the
ramp in the second quarter? Yes.
So we have just as a point of context, we have a quad motor set up in our one
vehicles. It's two motors per axle so far, motors
per vehicle. And we've just launched a dual motor
setup which leverages a new motor family, which we call the Enduro Motor
Family. And that enduro is completely built
in-house. The rotor and the are, of course, just
like on the launch configuration, we build the inverter in-house.
The gearbox in-house only sourced the power semis for the inverter and enduro.
We sourced in a really thoughtful way that gave us enough capacity and much
more confidence around that supply chain than some of the challenges that we've
had on the launch configuration. And so that not only provides a high
confidence production capacity on the enduro, but it also provides risk
mitigation on any shortcomings in terms of supply on the quad motor.
The other big news of the last five days is that you have a you're out of the
United States. Yeah, a small number of Amazon EDV
electric delivery vans are being shipped to Europe.
Germany in the first instance. Yeah.
Why was that significant milestone? Well, you know, it's it's important to
get those vehicles there. Amazon has a lot of a lot of business in
Europe, but it also represents not just turning on production of vehicles that
get shipped overseas, but all the supporting infrastructure.
So we have parts distribution capabilities, we have service
capabilities. And the EDV program is really a
wonderful way for us to open those markets with highly predictable and
planned service intervals and delivery intervals.
So it's the beginnings of us opening up the European market for our products.
As you know, I always ask Twitter, What would you ask in this case?
RJ Scaringe. Lots of people want to know about the
Amazon relationship. You don't break down production by
product type, I'll want to own or EDV, but a lot of people want a sense of how
many vans you're building proportionately to your consumer
products. What is the main part of the business
overall? If you think about over there, over the
full year, we've guided to roughly 20% of our production.
Is is the commercial vans. You know, as we think about the business
going forward, the consumer side of the business will grow disproportionately
relative to the commercial side, especially as we bring in our next
generation products with the R2 and the R2 platform representing a significant
step up in volume and a much lower price point, much larger addressable market
without without product. What is the status of the relationship
with Amazon? They have exclusivity.
Yeah, but you would like to sell vans others in the future.
I mean, the relationship with Amazon is outstanding.
The van is loved by the drivers.
There's lots of content all over the web and just the creature comforts.
We've built in the ease of use. The operators of the vehicles are
feeling it. With with the increased efficiency.
So we've we've we've done, I think, a really nice job of capturing that
feedback as we went through the development process to make sure that
hand delivered. We're now in the final stages of
negotiating, allowing us to sell the vehicle outside of the Amazon
relationship to others so that the exclusivity provisions that were
originally built into the contract accelerating.
When we open that up to be able to sell to turn on Amazon.
You are running a business and you're only delivering around 90% of your
production at the moment, 90% of your output.
How sustainable is that for Rivian? Well, that's just an artifact of I mean,
long term, of course, production and deliveries are going to be equal because
we're in a ramp curve and because our plant is in the middle of the US and a
lot of our demand is on the coast, we build a product, It then has to get
loaded into a train or loaded onto a truck and shipped out.
So there's a bit of a delay between the produce numbers and the delivered
numbers, but over time that becomes de minimis.
That becomes a very small difference between production deliveries, which you
consider a franchised dealer network or something outside of the current rivian
business plan. Or it's just not needed.
No, it's not needed. It's we really just are, you know, our
plants in normal Illinois, and there's just not a lot of demand immediately
adjacent to normal Illinois. I said the the activity of moving
vehicles to the demand centers is is always going to be present and doesn't
that doesn't relate to direct or indirect in terms of the sales process.
We talk about enduro in this sort of read through Benefits of Power Semi's.
What else are you seeing in supply chain?
There's a lot of talk at the moment about metals and what China might do
that will impact the metals market. Are you seeing any of that in your
discussions with suppliers right now? Well, I mean, the probably the most
significant that everyone's watching is lithium hydroxide.
And, you know, when we launched front, we
were planning the vehicle launches. You know, lithium hydroxide was well
under $20 a kg and then spiked up to close to $80 and kg.
It's come back down a lot, which is great news for us.
I think it's great news for electrification.
So that's probably, I think not just for us, but probably for most manufacturers,
been a core focus point just in terms of cost of an EV.
But that's not to say we're not paying attention to nickel and some of the
other core materials that they're going to
battery. And especially in the context of our RJ,
I want to take a pause in the sort of minutiae of running a car company and
ask about you. You turned 40.
He founded this company in 2009. You're a founder CEO.
Yeah. You having fun?
I'm having a lot of fun, yeah. Are you really, though?
I mean, yes, it's. It's tough, but it's expectedly tough.
I think in starting a business and starting a car company, you don't do
that expecting it to be easy. And in some ways,
the challenges today are so different than what they were ten years ago, ten
years ago. If you have a very small team without
enough capital, without a brand that people are excited about.
We're sitting here today. Customers are really loving the product.
You know, multiple, multiple accolades just around how well-received the
product has been. The brand's really resonating with
customers. We have demand is, you know, beyond what
we're able to produce today, which while frustrating for customers is a is a
good, you know, good situation to be in. And then what's coming next in terms of
future technology, both in our one but with our two, is extraordinarily
exciting. You know, I'm a product person, so, you
know, for someone that's really focused on products, it's it's always the next
thing we're developing that that really gets us excited.
Well, one example of that was the decision to to join the North American
charging standard NHS. How big a decision was that for you
personally? Well, it's interesting.
When we made the decision to use six one now for the road network.
Well, when we when we were developing our one and planning its launch, that
was at the time really the leading solution.
Every OEM and the charging networks were sort of consolidating around that.
But the next charger is of course smaller and takes up less footprint in a
vehicle. It's an elegant solution, but we didn't
really look at that as as an option because it wasn't an open standard.
So in test, I made the decision to open that up.
It obviously created some unique opportunities and we, along with others,
were able to not only adopt that as the charging port, but but importantly gain
access to test the supercharger network, which in parallel to the build out of
our Rivian adventure network, provides customers and immediate access starting
in 2024 to a very large and very well-built network.
Now, that doesn't take away from the importance of building really an
adventure network as is. You see new sites are coming online
every week, but in the ramp up of that of that network, it's going to start to
really feel that in 2024. Wall Street does have some questions.
One is about profitability and the path to get there, and the other is about the
need to raise more capital. How are you thinking about both of those
issues? So on profitability, this is like the
number one focus of the business and you can think of it across a couple of key
levers, the most significant of which is production ramp.
So you've been to our plants. It's a very large facility.
It's designed for a lot of output. When you run a plant like that at low
outputs, as we've done really up until fairly recently, just the fixed cost
absorption of a facility like that, it it's very challenging.
So number one priority across the whole business is production ramp.
But closely related to that is also working across every aspect of our cost
of goods sold. So building materials, you know,
logistics, inbound logistics, driving quality and then efficiency of line
operations within the plan to drive cost out to get to a point where the business
is not only gross margin positive, but but supports and carries the CapEx load
of the rest of the business. It supports overall profitability.
With that in mind, why did you walk away from the JV with Mercedes in Europe?
Ultimately, for us, and we've seen this I've talked about this quite a bit since
since start of production, we've been really methodically looking at what
we're doing and where do we drive priority and focus.
And there are so many cool, interesting, exciting things to do.
You'll be have the deepest respect for for the team at Mercedes,
but it's so important for us to be hyper focused on what are the key biggest
levers within the business. And for us it's, it's ramping production
of the R1 platform and the EDV platform. And then of course, what goes into the
R2 vehicle and platform, which really introduced a step change in volume for
us as a business. And that was the decision.
We said R2 has got to be the core focus for us.
We've got to make sure it's it's it's executed beautifully and ultimately that
will give us a big step in overall output for the company.
You are thinking about all aspects of the company and what's to come in the
future while handling what's happening now.
How is that process for you day to day? You know, you are engineer by trading, I
suppose, or origin, you are founder, CEO.
Which one is winning at the moment? Which one is winning?
You know, I think, you know, being an engineer,
I've often said as a discipline, engineering is is is
learning how to thoughtfully and intentionally solve problems.
So solving and, you know, complex problems, multivariable problems and and
actually translates really well to running a business because effectively,
you know, my role is to is to look across the business whether it's the,
you know, the commercial side to go to market side of the business or the.
Engineering side of the production supply chain.
All different aspects, all have different puzzles that need to be
figured out, and the nature of the puzzles change with time.
They certainly change with scaling. But what it ultimately comes down to is
getting the right team of people together that can at scale solve lots
and lots of different challenges in parallel around scaling or around
growing the business. And
what we've experienced really over the last 18 months is some pretty
significant organisational developments and changes where they brought in
additional leaders or brought on new leaders.
And a big part of what I need to make sure in my capacity that I'm driving is
that those teams are working effectively together and of course working towards
one goal. But, but the how in terms of how we
deliver on working terms up towards that one goal needs to be synchronized so
that all the leaders across the business from my direct reports down are acting
as much as possible and in a sort of aligned or unified fashion.
And that's that sounds like obvious, but it's actually, you know, it takes a lot
of effort to drive that. How hard is it to delegate to you?
I mean, there are undoubtedly some minutiae of product design or execution
that you have an opinion on. Yeah, I have opinions on a lot of
things. So, I mean, in the beginning I was in
the very, very beginning I had a computer and I was designing parts and
CAD. I don't get to do that anymore, but I'm
still way into the details around thinking about improvements to
the are one program or platform, but also what's coming in our to but then
making sure that the organization is filled with people that are driving
innovation across each layer of of of what we build as a company.
And so some that innovation may exist in the sourcing realm, it may exist in the
manufacturing or manufacturing realm or it may exist in the product from.
But those all those innovations need to be tightly coordinated.
And that's the the exercise we've gone through as an organization, growing and
learning, looking at our to relative to our one, there's an extreme emphasis on
manufacturing innovation. So the way the body structure is put
together, in a way the vehicle comes together thinking about the number of
seconds or minutes it takes to put a, you know, a certain part of the vehicle
together and how the the parts naturally want to come together, easily
eliminating parts, eliminating joints. These are really key sort of big
considerations and drivers we're pushing across the business.
What can you tell me about oh two? Here's what I know now.
Smaller form factor than all one sort, more mass market focus, different price
point. Therefore, it's pretty much the extent
of what we know. That's pretty accurate.
I mean, if you think of r one as the sort of the handshake with the world in
terms of what we're doing and how the vehicles positioned the essence of it,
the feel of it, and we often talk about it both hopefully enabling but also
inspiring people to go do the kinds of things we want to take photographs of
that essence. We want to translate into a lower price
point and into a smaller form factor. But the orientation towards active
lifestyle, orientation towards living your adventure, whatever that adventure
may be, a trip trip into the city or a trip to the beach or a trip mountain
biking that percolates across the thousands, I should say, millions of
decisions we make in developing. And so how you put bikes on the vehicle
to how you store things in the back of the vehicle.
So what it's like to put a pad into the vehicle to what it's like to drive on or
off road. So I'm immensely excited about what's
coming because it I think it takes a lot of what we did in our one, sweetens it,
but then puts it into a package that is really accessible for for folks across
much lower price point. Is this exciting for the United States
or are you thinking about other markets globally?
No, it's a global platform, it's size to fit us, Europe, China really nicely.
And I, I think it takes what we see that's connected.
So all with the Rivian brand already, which is this idea of enabling and
inspiring adventure, as I said. And it just takes it into a price point
in the form factor that's it's so accessible relative to where we are
today. The reason I ask is is actually largely
about the I.R.A. You think about the price point of all
ones, you know, and s also the component base, the supply chain.
It partially qualifies and it's excluded from some of the benefits of the I.R.A..
Yeah, but do you see momentum from that legislation when you look at your order
book for our one note, our ones largely priced above the price bands and IRA and
the requirements for for content, particularly round battery, make it more
challenging for you. Don't make your own battery cells for
example yet Yes we buy cylindrical 2170 cells in the case of our one, you know,
from from a battery cell supplier and then integrate them into a module, into
the module, into a pack on our to the entirety.
The program's been set up to make sure that it's IRA compliant.
So the sourcing of battery cells where they're produced there, of course, being
in United States have. The packs come together, of course, in
the States, and then the rest of the vehicle needs to hit the you know, needs
to be IHRA compliant because that 7500 our customer facing credit is really
important in a vehicle at this price point.
You know, the price range in order to will range from roughly 40 to 60 in 20
$23. So and it evolves.
But but in today's dollars it's a it's really important that that 7005 all our
credit is built into the price. So it's about one of the important
decisions being supply chain innovation. Does that include de-risking from China
in the supply chain? How exposed to you that?
Well, you know, and it's a great question.
When I think about how our one was sourced, we were sourcing most of the
components. So things like brakes or seats or
steering wheel or windshield, we were sourcing those and like 2018, 2019.
So well before we launched the product and the level of leverage that we had in
negotiating pricing, negotiating supply was was really limited.
And I mean, that manifests in so many ways.
But I mean, I really feel it now as we're sourcing our to the difference in
how the suppliers are showing up. You know, in 2018, 2019, we'd be
fighting to get a meeting with, you know, a head of sales from a major
supplier was today I'm I'm meeting 1 to 1 with the CEOs of these same companies
and we're talking big picture strategy around how we scale together.
So just the whole sourcing backdrop that we're developing, the two supply chain
around is starting with so much more strength and really we think a much
better derisked volume ramp and a much better pricing starting point in terms
of the cost of those components. Clare McDonough and Frank Kline, how do
you rank them joining the company in this sort of list of important moves
over the last couple of years? So Claire joined
See fit more than a year right around, I guess a year before we went public?
Yes. Which was great because she was she was
just phenomenal at helping us to put together everything that it takes to to
go public as a company, both in terms of the things that are external facing, but
also like from an accounting process point of view and an internal process
point of view. And then Frank joined a little more than
a year ago and he's been really great in helping us ramp up and scale up our
production organization and our manufacturing operations organization,
which we've been able to do it without them.
I guess my my question is, since joining, you know, has it been a
contributing factor to the kind of change in Rivian fortune, especially in
the last month or so? Oh, I mean, Claire Frank and many, many
others, you know, Rivian can only be as is, I would say, like this Rivian's
success is the result of of lots and lots of people working very hard and
working, as I said before, and highly coordinated ways.
And that's what makes, I think, the automotive
business so unique and so challenging. If you think about a vehicle, it's not
it's not even possible for a single person to design an entire vehicle
themselves. There's maybe on the order of 10 million
decisions that need to be taken in developing something like a car.
So, you know, if you can make $50 a day, it would take a very, very long time if
one person were to do it. So you need a team of people that can
make many decisions in parallel per day to drive the product to come together.
And that's at the development level. You have a supply chain layer on top of
any factory layer and those have to all be integrated.
So this is this isn't like we're designing a coffee
cup. It's a really, really complex product
with a complex supply chain. And all those pieces have to, you know,
interconnect really, really thoughtful classes.
And the interesting last month that in the quarter currently we'll see all one
ask the SUV output overtake that of all one T and also the pre order book is
predominantly all one s at this stage. What is what do those two pieces of data
tell you about demand? Well, we start with the first vehicle.
When we started, production was 20 and up through the end of Q1.
Q1 of this year, roughly 75% of our production was for R, one was r1t, and
the demand mix for R1 s relative to R1 TS, roughly 75% R1 s relative formality.
So we were you could think of it as producing
a disproportionately large number of R1 TS relative to the demand ratios between
us. We're now getting that to a point where
the production matches demand. So production of R1 us relative to 20
should roughly match. You know what, what of course demand is.
And for the next few quarters we're going to try to catch up a little bit.
R1 as we know for any R1 reservation holders out there, we know
we know you're waiting for your vehicles and this is a lot of froth.
Situation with how long the backlog is. So we're that's something we talk about
literally every day is how do we how do we catch up on the backlog, which is a
great from a business point of view, it's a great thing to have such a large
backlog. But from a customer point of view,
you know, it's challenging to know you have to wait so long, particularly for
an R.A. How does RJ Scaringe think about
marketing? You know, I think about the pre-order
book and lots of people say, well, you know, rivian's for the early adopters,
but how do you I know it's coming, but in the next immediate turn of a couple
of years, we're going to see Super Bowl ads from Rivian, too.
You know, this is now one of the most powerful
voices in building brand awareness. And building awareness for the company
is actually our customers. So the level of customer satisfaction
that we're delivering is extraordinarily high.
J.D. Power does a they do an annual survey of
brand satisfaction, and it's independent.
So it's not what we said. It's what our customers are saying to
J.D. Power as they run this survey.
And in our first year with our first product, we came out number one.
So ahead of all of the brands that have the highest level of customer
engagement, customer satisfaction and with, you know, of course, the key
question, would you buy Rivian again being the highest?
This is really important for us. So we know that the customers that are
experiencing I mean, absolutely love it. They love to talk about it.
They get asked questions about it. And we find that that flywheel of more
evidence being on the road and more customers talking about their experience
with the company, with the products, that really helps seed more and more
customers. And we're seeing it especially as we
open up new markets. You know, the R one.
S is starting to appear a lot more in New York.
A lot of eyeballs on those vehicles in New York drives this flywheel of demand.
We're seeing It's pull up, you know, in the tri state area.
As a result of that, we write a lot that Rivian's November 2021, IPO was the
sixth biggest in US history. Or another way of looking at it, the
biggest since Facebook now known as matter and then 2022 was really hard
from a stock market perspective. So you worry about that.
How much time do you spend thinking about it or your stock's up for a sixth
straight day at the time that we're talking trading at its highest level
since February? Yeah.
I mean, do you care? I mean,
the the thing about we went public at a great time.
The market was very is a very bullish market and a lot of it raised a lot of
capital. 2022 we know you know, 2020 is a hard
year from a market point of view. It's a hard year for us from a ramp and
supply chain point of view. But ultimately our success in the long
term is really going to be determined by how effective we are, building great
products that customers love, and of course, doing that properly and we do
those things well. Sure, price takes care of itself.
So organizationally, internally, we, of course, you know, are cognizant, aware
of what's happening from a you know, from a share price point of view.
But our daily activities, our weekly activities are focused purely on how do
we create value for the business, how do we make sure we're delivering amazing
customer experiences and and how do we of course, as I said before, drive
towards profitability? What do you still want to fix Arabia?
What do you think still needs to be fixed in the organization or on the
product side? I think I'd probably look at it slightly
different. I'd say there's at the product level,
there's all kinds. There's daily changes happening on the
vehicle. So every day we have a few updates that
go into the vehicle from a hardware point of view.
Every few weeks we have a new software release that comes out, so we see the
software continue to get better and that's sort of incrementally day by day
or week by week, improving what the products that we have on the road today.
The big next step is is delivering on air to program and that that's the
consolidated aggregated set of learnings that have been sort of accumulated
through the launch and ramp of our one that'll be baked into our two.
When you and I spoke in April last year, you would make this point that, you
know, I get the CEOs and the suppliers in to the factory and I say, Look,
here's the factory, what we're capable of doing.
How have you taken that experience? As frustrating as it was it all one to
change how you go about sourcing components for our team?
Well, this is it's a really good point. So when we saw each other, it was
it was relatively early in the ramp. And what we did later in that year, so
late 2022, is we brought all of our suppliers to the plant.
We had a supplier day and the purpose of that was to say, okay, 2023, we can't
have a situation where a line down on a daily basis because of shortage of
supply. In layman's terms, you mean the line
being paused because you had production lines stopping because we ran out of a
single part and you know, we had this hundreds of
hundreds of our suppliers there, senior leaders, CEOs, senior executives from
the suppliers. And I said, I want every one of you to
look to your left and look to your right and recognize that the volume that
you're going to get from us in terms of demand is based upon how effective all
of you collectively are delivering on our on our asks.
And that proved to be a galvanizing moment where.
Getting all of our suppliers together in the room together room at the same time
helped ensure that this year we've really removed those supplier
constraints we felt in 2020, 2022. Now, of course, that translates into
what we do in order to and as I said, the whole negotiating backdrop and the
level of leverage that we have is so different than what we had in our one,
that the the health and robustness of supply chain of the supply chain when we
launch our two will be materially different than what we launched with
with our one. What do you want Rivian to be?
And I'm thinking about the Amazon ban. EDV You know,
a lot of focus on the consumer car in this conversation, but Amazon is also
taking delivery of more and more EVs nationwide.
Internationally, it's a core part of your business,
but you're running three product lines at once and then you want to bring our
two on in next years time. I mean, well, the way we when we think
about what we focus on as a business and what we do at everything funnels through
sort of one core decision criteria, which is how do we maximize impact, how
do we as a business have the most impact on driving what is, you know, you could
argue a once in a many generation shift in transportation from a fossil fuel
based transportation energy system to a renewable based energy and
transportation system. And somehow miraculously, like we as a
generation happen to be alive right at that inflection point, right at this
point of change, when 100 years from 150 years from now, we're going to look back
and say, you know, thankfully in the 2020s and 2030s, society rapidly moved
off of fossil fuels towards towards like electrified vehicles, renewable energy.
And so when we think about what we do, we think about how can we drive the most
impact within that context. And of course, the EDV program
represents represented for us an opportunity for for us to add a
stabilizing element to our business, but to also open the world's eyes to the
need to electrify logistics. And we knew that when Amazon made that
commitment to us and we made the comment to Amazon that we would be raising the
bar for all other last mile logistics providers to say we better electrify as
well. So we see impact not just through our
own actions but through the the echo of competition.
So we greatly value competition. We think it's actually one of the most
important things for this transition, and the same is true on consumer.
So we when we I remember when I would meet with suppliers to talk about the
20, they'd say to me, who would ever buy an electric pickup?
And I'd, of course, make the pitch to say why we think, you know, electrifying
the pickup space is important. And that vehicle helped galvanize and
shift mindset around the necessity of electrifying pickups.
And we now see multiple offerings, each serving customers in a different and
unique way. And that's outstanding.
That's exactly what we wanted. And then we look at the the the Artemis
program and what that represents. We see an opportunity to create truly a
beautifully executed product with a vertically integrated electronics and
software stack that that delivers a customer experience that really we
haven't seen in this type of a vehicle, certainly this type of form factor and
at that price. So again, we hope to raise the bar with
what our two does and of course will inspire competition.
But that's that is the point. But continuing to lead through the
product innovations and those product innovations link to, of course, how we
drive cost and manufacture innovation. But that needs to continue to lead the
way. Finished on the word lead.
So and there you're on Twitter and on Instagram, but not as some other
electric vehicle companies CEOs are. What is your plan for yourself in terms
of how you communicate, how long you stick around as CEO?
It's a it's a well-trodden Silicon Valley story.
Founder, CEO, Sam, go to become an executive chairman.
So I'm going to do something completely different.
Start a new company. I don't know if anyone's ever asked you
that before. I don't know either.
Well, since I was probably about this tall, I, I wanted to start this company
and it was born out of this sort of deep
love of automobiles, which then sort of over time, I realized that those things
that I loved were causing so many of our world's challenges from, you know, all
of our major cities around the planet having air quality issues to, of course,
the biggest one being that climate change and the effects of climate change
were experiencing already. So some of the geopolitical challenges
we have and so sort of as I got older, I was inspired to say, Let me go work on
that big set of challenges. And
it's what I sort of think about when I wake up.
It's what I think about when I go to sleep.
It's what I'm deeply passionate about. So I'm excited to continue driving and
growing the business as we continue to work to to push the solutions to solve
this this major shift forward. RJ Scaringe Rivian CEO.
Thank you.
This was a pretty good interview and had good insights. RJ interviews well and is well spoken.
What I am not looking forward to are the 40 crappy articles that get written by thought regurgitators for the next week or more. I have already seen some headlines and don't even bother clicking.
Watched the whole thing earlier today and it’s pretty good, but I absolutely HATE when interviewers ask questions like “did the hiring of X employee have a positive impact on the company’s success?” Like what do you expect him to say? No? It’s just a waste of a question with no real content.
Unable to watch the video at work. Anything interesting mentioned about R2?
Great interview. Thoughtful questions and answers.
I thin R2 will do to Rivian what M3 did to Tesla wrt stock price overall growth and exposure.
Also, Scaringe seems to be a more responsible and accountable individual than Musk. Tesla's build quality was cheap at best but Rivian's QC is far better than Tesla's. Hopefully this serves as the edge and if they can get supply chain and production challenges fixed - Rivian will emerge as a winner in the next 3 years.
Full interview :RJ on Bloomberg