Rivian CEO, RJ Scaringe, talks R1S and the Future of Rivian

foreign [Music] like a podcast Studio this is super fun yeah first time podcasting in a review this is my first time podcast senior review yeah amazing RJ thanks for doing this yeah thanks for spending the time uh welcome to the waveform podcast yeah oh we have so much to talk about so you're the CEO of rivian nope and I've owned and used a rivian that I've talked about in the past 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 SUV um with the ocean Coast interior with the light interior which is pretty sweet and the this is limestone is what it's called on the outside yeah on the paint talk to me about how you got started with getting into cars and how rivian started what's the like origin story that you give people yeah well I um it's funny we're just talking about origin stories yeah started the company about 13 years ago okay and uh initially um 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 um 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 yeah it took us a lot of time to really think through the position the company the brand how we can create something that um 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 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 so 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 um I did see that the original name for rivian okay was something else yeah and that it was mainstream Motors is that true and if so what all the names well I'm glad you didn't and go with mainstream Motors that just feels like a very Bland like generic Mega Corp name how did that choice happen um yeah so uh I I started the company and when you start a company you have to have a name to start with yeah I didn't have the final name in mind so I I use that as a placeholder yeah 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 Avera so we're Avera motors for about a year and a half and it was a sort of a plan words it was playing on the word verde in Terra so Green Earth nice but the name actually sounded phonetically similar to Hyundai had a product the Azera and so this is back in like 2010 2011 Hyundai's basically said you need to stop using the name or we're going to sue we had no money of course I'm not gonna fight with Honda over a name that nobody knows about got it Hyundai so yeah you keep it um so we then went through this long exercise to figure out what the name should be and um arrived at rivien which I'm so glad that all happened yeah because I'd like that name a lot more than evera same but it was something we wanted to find something that phonetically was sounded like flowing and moving but um that of course didn't have a meaning in any language and yeah we could get the rights too so it was a hard process to come up with a name um I can sympathize we're working on a name for a product that we're making and it's been like weeks oh yeah dating different words and different made up words and just think of what will work and looking at what's out there so peace words together yeah yep same thing yeah and when we were doing it we we like went out and talk to some third parties to do like naming and branding and I thought how hard could this be and we got a quote back for what they charge us I'm like whoa okay so it looks like uh it's a it's a real myself in the five or six other engineers at the company had to figure that out now without the support of any uh branding experts that's funny but so you you got the logo out of rivian you got the the sort of font and yeah The Branding is all set yeah and Adventure vehicle is the theme and it sort of piece together in that puzzle piece yeah I mean the the logo we call it the compass is it's basic it's a graphic representation of a 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 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 out the canyon red the red is just like 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 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 yes and so that's when I place my order is 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 thank you 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 is 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 yeah and how does the rest of the plan look yeah 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 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 The Sibling product the r1t really intended to be the truly the flagship following those 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 can fit your gear your your kids your pets do it in a really you know sort of refined and fun way but in different packages and in smaller form factors um 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 this in the case of these vehicles Electro hydraulic suspension in terms of damping air suspension quad motor so really sort of full content instead of everything you can put into the vehicle the future products will have a little less stuff but still deliver on the the essence of the brand yeah that's really interesting because I I talk about industry is 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 yeah the flashlight and 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 we when we were sort of at the drawing board stage um there's all kinds of things we said well if you Electrify the vehicle what can you differently of course the obvious ones like the front trunk uh less obvious uh like the gear toll and the r1t which goes to the side of the vehicle yeah um 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 yeah just because it's it's it has a place it's always there it's always charged um it's a thin 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 yes on the truck the like in the SUV as well there's 7776 cells okay and so the cool thing about flashlights also gives you that last sell ticket to four sevens 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 seven seven seven I'm glad you're admitting it was a coincidence we really enjoyed yeah but yeah all those types of little features the the 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're you have to make lots of trade-offs so the size of the size of the vehicle the seating configuration and 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 an 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 years yeah um and the the result is is of course what we're sitting today 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 you you like the teams and a lot of the Technologies either siled or very often outsourced so Electronics software infotainment these are not typically things that the car manufacturers do themselves so for us vertically integrating our electronic 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 loose city 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 just yeah it's a huge Focus for us and when we talk about software there's the things we see 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 is more range than last year's product but it's right through software software updates yeah which is really fun um but you but you have to control the entirety of the software stock to really fully leverage right all the capabilities so no Android auto no car play correct which is what a lot of people it's kind of surprising have you seen a stat Apple posted about like 75 percent 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 is I'm assuming that's no plans to add those things but it's sort of a bouncing I have to make this as good as yeah I mean a lot of the things we do like whether it's music or not being 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 uh 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 then 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're 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 uh the software stack is we get to continually make it better so you've had your RIT 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 um our head of software developments on Reddit all the time uh 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 software roadmap and make sure we're delivering what customers want do you guys feel like you're like lean enough to respond to like you see 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 this is a good idea we haven't thought of it let's let's add this oh yeah all the time I mean whether it's Reddit um videos um my dad's sending me a texture they had and I had some feedback and we integrated in so yeah that feature yeah so I mean there's um there's all that kind of content that comes in and we have um you know we have a roadmap that every roughly every three weeks Revenue software release and so we'll review what the plans are for that release and I'll spend time with with our head of software and the team and we often bring things in and say hey look this is something there's a great idea let's get an insurance possible so it might be a matter of weeks before it gets into the vehicle nice I mean I talk about this on the autofocus Channel where like I get 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 fix this make sure you're in the releases 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 know a lot about like the typical r1t buyer yeah um so most of the customers at R1 T haven't owned the truck before and one of the things that we're seeing is um often there's the desire for the function that a pickup would have provided in terms of like an open bed storage they build they 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 SUV maybe they had a hatchback so it's it's just it's a very large percentage of customers um that just haven't done to pick up before so it's not only in many cases it the first DV but it's the first DV and it's their first pickup yeah and so we've had uh folks that you 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 DV is also interesting because then it 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 ev4 like a lot of them will have those features by default in 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 you you referenced regen that's that's a big one we um they 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 okay the ability to do one pedal driving is 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 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 I it's hard to say we I I think what we found is um a lot of more of our customers you know it's like three quarters our customers have never owned an EV before since I think it's like 80 percent yeah um so they come into an EV for the first time and very quickly reorient around regen re rewinds around sort of when you actually need to use the brake pedal which is not that often and um and it's like you learn in a few days yeah 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 yeah yeah which is interesting yeah it's funny that's uh that's weird well something else I think a lot of EV first time EV buyers have to contend with is charging and 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 it's a challenge in the United States there's um there's been a massive under investment in charging infrastructure um and realizing that we decided to build out our own infrastructure so it's in its early stages but yeah we call Caribbean Adventure network uh it's a DC fast charge Network we have about uh we were early today we have about 30 sites that are up each one has six DC fast chargers they 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 um you know as we have new products come out that that'll continue to grow to fully utilize the charging capability of the Chargers um but in terms of independent networks there's only a couple that are out there outside of Tesla and um and they're not very good A lot of them have real reliability problems or uptime problems are not very predictable so this is one of the reasons we're investing you know 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 uh within about two years so it's quite a lot uh in the well first yeah and really opening up you know as you'd imagine the kid the key corridors up and down the West Coast the east coast and then connecting you know the west coast to the east coast so that's the prioritization I think you know Tesla's that works a very strong Network um clearly the best network that's out there today um in what we're building we hope to create a network that is equal level of density in terms of chargers but also in terms of uptime yeah do you think of it as like 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 reviewing customers and the better the public charging experience gets the better it is for going on road trips if you get a home charger the whole thing starts looking really good um but there's just like a couple of Tesla Chargers that have added this adapter that can work and I'll show up in the map which is great do you wish there were more open on Tesla's Network yeah I I think that I think more will open on Tesla's Network we've The Ravines can charge on that on Tesla's Network where they're open the 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 sure it's a you know it's many hundreds of millions of dollars to go do that but it um but it creates a much better customer experience so you know a year from now the density of rivian chargers will really help solve a lot of these core issues and and we'll see third-party networks start to build up as well but because our chargers are that we designed them we build them we build them actually in the same plant we build the vehicles the the really high quality so the uptime is high we monitor them it's a heat 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 you buy 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 yeah that's a really frustrating experience and agreed is that something rivian can control right uh it's 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 like an infrastructure in place to keep the uptime high there's people monitoring them essentially yeah for sure because that seems like the biggest difference between a well-maintained and a not well maintained charging network is it's just like for sure there is there has to be some level of effort to maintain quality yes I mean I I review every week I get the uptime report for every one of our chargers and that's one of the things is we we deployed our these first initial sites with mostly concentrate on the west coast um we want to make sure the systems are 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 you know five something like that it needs to be because if it doesn't work if it doesn't work 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 they 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 and yeah John rivian's Network right and we're going to open it up right now it's it's Ravens only but it's six nine twelve it's sort of groups of three yeah cool I like that I think we have we have a 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 yeah thank you has it surprised you at all how much investment is required to also build out the charger Network aside from the vehicles no we we we sort of went into it knowing it's getting expensive I think what's more surprising is sometimes just how hard the um the process to get everything approved is is so building a site sometimes the everything from a zoning and and permitting point of view takes more time than the site itself right interesting so the pipeline there's we have several hundred sites in the pipeline that are like in various stages charge a big built and then the charger gets set up really quickly got it okay that's cool so 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 it's 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 passes 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 because we launched the truck the rnt 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 yeah and she has hundreds of suppliers with thousands of Parts all of them have been synchronizing coming together to do that on any vehicle is hard to do that in a vehicle when you've got this supply chain prices happening in the backdrop it's really hard to do that when you've got the challenges of operating with code but it was it was incredibly hard and to sort of Stack those four different Vehicles over the course of the last year was was yeah yeah was uh tested our operational capabilities and it showed all the gaps we had and we learned so much the last year but as of since today the the T in the ask the R1 platform is ramping the van program uh while it's a completely different vehicle Top Hat we do share some of the electronics okay uh share some of the propulsion element developments of the propulsion platform but um but it's a much easier vehicle to build it's it's like one seat and a jump seat yeah it's like a big box with shelves in the back so yeah it's yeah it's a it's a different kind of vehicle than this when you look at this there's a lot of content there's a complex vehicle to build definitely so the Amazon bands and the commercial bands were ramping those as you say you're gonna start seeing a lot of them on the roads yeah it's it's kind of 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 um there are a lot around here the the key is we deploy those in in clusters I see so there's probably a big cluster here and then they also have to have their own like charging setup and they get do they get like walked through the advantages of the vehicle and like what to do not to do for a driver I mean imagine um you're in a van all day long 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 so you have to get in and out of the vehicle a lot about 300 times a day geez okay 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 yeah and on what we would call the passenger side there's a pocket door it's a 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 package 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 nice um and when I say cool not just vented but actually uh you know cooled refrigerated air blowing up through the sea which on a hot day feels really nice hot sit down and it's almost like when you when you're going to the kitchen you open the refrigerator to cool off and it was a personal cool air it's like your seat does that to you so it's really something that the drivers have responded to possibly and it's the sought after vehicle right within the you know within the distribution centers that's really interesting yeah yeah it seem 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 all right we're gonna put the little logos here on the wireless charger and I didn't mention some of the autofocus videos like 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 a little rage are you this is this was there's a lot of things that aren't right about the charging pad but it's um phone slides aren't too easy the way the induction coils are set up and I spaced well enough to allow for such a wide variance in phone sizes so this is uh this is going to be updated pretty soon we're already here first and so it's being updated absolutely it is super frustrating right now against 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 we 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 like am I going to use this speaker yeah where is this skirting a line for you too just like a funny thing let's just add a speaker just we got the space the speaker's fun um we have a option that's coming going to come out soon which is another first uh that speaker when it goes in there's a if you 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 I want that's for is if the vehicles when the vehicle's in drive that latch closes yeah so that if you were to brake hard or get into an accident the speaker doesn't become a projectile yep but that that latch and the whole electronic mechanism around that creates an opportunity for this to be a modular space so we actually instead of a speaker we have a drawer module that's going to go in so imagine like a little that could be a box that carries stuff yeah that's going to be an optional bit so you could choose the speaker or this drawer 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 yeah 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 yeah 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 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 design 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 flashlight flashlight we find gets used a lot it is I use all the time yeah the theme is the speaker's probably bigger than it needed to be you probably we probably could have gone with 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 so grab the speaker I'm like carrying the speaker on with me a wire attached to it okay I'm like boy I wish we made this a little smaller that's funny um yeah so what is another thing that you find is something you don't use a lot um okay the one small detail small detail yeah with the gear tunnel on the R1 t Okay is if I have something that's not big enough and I'm driving and it slides around and I put it in 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 top it's fun um so there's a whole series there's a whole group of people that thought about what like do we put retainers or different sort of Cubbies if you will within the gear tunnel there's a floor mat that will work on that has a ridge um what we're finding most people use it for duffel bags yeah which is very common yeah um not basketballs or things that roll easy for exactly that point yeah uh but but things that sort of you put there stay in place obviously golf clubs uh snowboards is a really common one uh that we see all the time snow boots is a really common one the camp kitchen's gone the camp kitchen's it's gone gone it is yeah enough people um it's a good question no it's a really popular feature it was more there's more people that wanted it than more the take rate was higher than we expected we went we're going through a redesign process to redesign it to something that uh 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 is we originally designed it is people had this painful uh decision between do I want to use my gear tunnel erdogan the entire thing the entire thing used up with the kitchen yeah so we have a cheaper lower cost update design that is much less yeah the whole thing that's cool yeah yeah I feel like that so we pulled it off the 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 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 that was something we spent time on the interest 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 and something as complex as a vehicle um you know if our products were making I don't know insulated cups or something much simpler conceivably like you could be I could be involved in every decision what's the radius of the edge of the cup yeah how does the top score on on something like a vehicle there's some you know so many millions of decisions that need to be taken that by by very definition I should be involved in a small fraction and as you said it's it's the really key foundational decisions with a really hard subjective decisions um so on these products on on R1 the team was a lot smaller and a lot of the Court decisions are 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 the key technical decision so the decisions are on compute platforms uh battery cell architecture uh Network architecture so it'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 um but of course whenever anything escalates around like a design trade-off That's a classic one like if 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 um but it'll cost less and way less those types of trade-offs sometimes it's hard to have them made automatically to require some level of escalation and they kind of I guess add in the the compile so you can make one of those decisions and it might feel like just one but if you made all 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 it's on a vehicle with a costs Target if they decide where you're gonna spread investment right like so 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 that trade-off web gets super complex when you aim for like a 35 000 car like this is the this is the ultimate question I always get which is man I want an Eevee but they're also expensive when are they gonna 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 it's really important and what we don't want to happen as 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 um 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 chorus and so what is what is the product in the brand stand for so you know we're deep into our 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 the 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 it's really interesting and so what's core of the brand is a flashlight and the door really critical right versus um you know being able to manage certain off-road conditions which which Drive costs as the body structure and it's a chassis so these are these are the really fun country debates that we have internally so R2 is a lower plat lower cost overall platform for a vehicle that's why the decisions are more frequent between potentially things instead of just why not both because it's a 90 000 traffic yeah and so we have um we talk about a lot there's only so many really cool features we can add in the vehicle yeah and and each one has a price tag and we you know we're constantly adding all those up and saying we is the some 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 an incredibly affordable EVS everywhere that do satisfy various people's needs yeah I mean when you think about 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 five years from now a thousand years from now looking back and there was like this blip of time where like our generation and our parents and our parents parents 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 Lesser us we put in our on our you know planets theological systems and of course on climate so like our viewers we need to make this switch as fast as we possibly can but it's it's unquestionable that the switch will certainly happen in in you know the very near term in the next 15 years yeah what would you uh 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 talked 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 oh I gotta get our emissions average down but like yeah 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 yeah you're seeing one I mean you own TVs Shonen revenue on a Tesla I mean this is um once you move into an EV it's really hard to go the obstruction and yeah and I think that is going to become even more true as we solve charging so as we build more charging and search for the reason as I said Riggins investing is probably in our charging Network um but I'd say that the other reality is 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 true if you're buying a seven passenger through a SUV and you want something that's a premium cable vehicle this should be the best thing you could buy and that's yeah and the fact that it's electric is is a great thing from from an environmental point of view from a Dynamics point of view but but ultimately the the product and 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 cell 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 this price to offer an EV where I guess strategically speaking the best way to start is at the top yeah or you make that convincing value proposition this is the best version yeah and it is electric so now we've set the 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 people to have you talked about like cut the personality the vehicle all the same like rich person that we find in the R1 platform okay but like curated so thoughtfully that the fact that there's less content and maybe we spend less money so instead of a quad motor there's less Motors but 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 if it's not too far out uh We're not gonna show it for a little while um but sometime in the next roughly a year okay nice yeah well uh I think we should do a walk around of 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 thank you foreign [Music]

Channel: WVFRM Podcast

Views: 363,738

Keywords: MKBHD, Marques, Brownlee, Andrew, Manganelli, Waveform, Podcast, WVFRM

Id: RdjDDtHvUXA

Length: 43min 11sec (2591 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 07 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/wphn99]

Loved the multiple shout outs to Reddit and how rivian goes through Reddit comments and posts to improve the software of the vehicles

[u/SoCal_GlacierR1T]

Quite a few juicy tidbits in this interview. Worth a listen.

[Spoiler Alert]

• Despite great things being planned for R2 and R3, R1 will remain Rivian's flagship (and have the most features).
• R2 platform is designed to a lower budget.
• Zoning and permitting is a greater impediment to RAN rollout than the cost of construction.
• Charging Pad is getting a redesign and rolling out soon; RJ admits it's frustrating to use.
• Soon, instead of camp speaker, we will have option of choosing a storage drawer that latches just like the speaker.
• Camp Kitchen is indeed undergoing redesign. It is not gone forever (ha). It will not take up the entire Gear Tunnel and is lower cost. And it will be shown soon.
• Though said in context of R2, even though it isn't Quad, Dual is still engineered to deliver a special experience.

[u/someguy474747]

Interesting to hear RJ drop that the charging mat is being redesigned. I wonder if that will be just for new builds or if they will offer retrofits for existing owners.

[u/Southern_Smoke8967]

I think RJ also mentioned R3 platform. Not sure if that is going to be a sedan.

[u/TimmyC0617]

Weird question, but anyone know where RJs shirt is from? I like it!

[u/Chrissugar21]

And text message capability

[u/SergeantBeavis]

kinda irritated by how dismissive RJ is of CarPlay and AA. He can still control the user experience with either of those platforms. What he can’t do without them is offer superior navigation options like Waze, OnX, an Gaia. He can’t offer every music platform that many of us want. I’m good with Apple Music, I don’t really want Spotify. Maybe someone else wants Youtube music. Carplay or AA can make that happen. Then, as mentioned by others, Rivian has no capability of handling text messaging. I can’t speak to AA but Carplay handles that extremely well.

While the navigation and music options are getting better, there isn’t any way that Rivian can give use the usability of Waze for years. Right now it does a crap job of traffic reporting. It is only passible at navigation. It certainly can’t tell me there is an accident up the road or a cop hiding somewhere.

At a minimum find a way to offer Waze or other 3rd party apps natively on Rivian. My understanding is that the infotainment is an Android based VM. So that uplift shouldn’t be impossible.

[u/beachandtacos]

Spoiler alert: Apple CarPlay is a no-go even through there seems to be heavy support for it on Reddit, and even though the CEO says Rivian scours Reddit to glean feedback on areas for improvement.

CarPlay is low hanging fruit to drastically improve user experience. The hubris is insane for an auto manufacturer to think they can develop a superior user experience with a software product for less money than Apple. Especially for what is likely to be an eventual cash-strapped startup. It should at least be an option, not something that takes over the whole screen/interface (example: pop-up window).

Frankly, the lack of predictability for Alexa to actually work (e.g., play a song I request on Spotify or ‘open front trunk’ or ‘unlock my front door’, or ‘turn on the lights in the living room’, or ‘get directions’ to wherever, etc) has become so embarrassing that I no longer show anything Alexa related to curious family and friends.

We should do a Reddit poll to drive home the point to Rivian.

<knock, knock, knock>

What is wanted?

R1 owners, having been true and faithful in all things, desire a further vehicle upgrade in the form of Apple CarPlay for and in behalf of their R1 vehicles and iPhone users.

Whereupon Rivian responds and says: navigate to settings after the next update, and their request shall be granted. /s

[u/MrrQuackers]

Ok, you want Apple music, but others want Spotify, PlexAmp, Pandora, Deezer, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, the list goes on. This is the issue.