Pickup Shocker!

With the R1T, Rivian emerges as the startup most likely to build the electric vehicle all of America will want to own.

January 1, 2019

Bill Visnic

Rivian’s R1T is sized between Detroit’s midsize and fullsize pickups and promises credible towing, hauling and off-road capabilities. (Image: RIVIAN)

Rivian founder and CEO R.J. Scaringe isn’t claiming he’s developed the formula for cold fusion, but it’s possible he’s cracked a code of similar import to the automotive world: the formula to make electric vehicles truly resonate with mainstream America.

It seems simple, really. Develop a fresh-looking and cleverly designed pickup truck —and make it electric.

If it’s so obvious, why hasn’t anybody done it yet? And can this company that’s made nothing pull it off, expecting the world’s pickup-truck experts in Detroit to remain indefinitely focused on their profit-pumping, combustion-driven dinosaurs?

Not your garden-variety startup

As with many contemporary electric vehicles, Rivian’s basic battery/chassis structure is a “skateboard” layout that enables multiple body styles to use the same modular platform. (Image: RIVIAN)

The answers come from multiple angles: the confluence of technologies suddenly available and ever less costly, for one. The hysteresis of the “traditional” auto industry, certainly. But also because Scaringe, with an almost spookily infectious optimism and calm, leads a startup company unlike just about any borne from Silicon Valley.

Rivian, started in Scaringe’s home state of Florida, has existed for almost a decade under a couple other prior names and has headquartered in suburban Detroit since 2015.

Rivian is comfortably—if not lavishly, avers the CEO—funded by patient investors led by Saudi Arabian automotive distributor Abdul Latif Jameel (ALJ), which has close ties to MIT, where Scaringe earned a Master’s and Ph.D in mechanical engineering. The company currently has a reasonably modest 560-odd employees spread between three U.S. facilities and an office in the United Kingdom.

Rivian promises a degree of premium look and feel for the R1T cabin, but also durable and easily-cleaned surfaces owners won’t have to be afraid to get dirty. (Image: RIVIAN)

“We’re very well capitalized,” Scaringe told a small group of journalists visiting the company’s Plymouth, Michigan, headquarters last November for a look at the R1T pickup prior to its world debut at the 2018 Los Angeles auto show.

Unlike virtually all its contemporaries, Rivian already owns a viable manufacturing facility, having bought the former Mitsubishi-owned 2.6-million sq-ft assembly plant in Normal, Illinois, for the reported price of just $16 million. The company has a workforce of about 65 revitalizing the plant, last used in 2015, for the start of R1T sales that Scaringe said are about two years away.

“For these first two vehicles (the R1T pickup and the R1S SUV), we’re talking about tens of thousands of units (annually),” Scaringe said, with an annual global-sales target of approximately 45,000 after the first five years.

“Rivian’s challenge, like Tesla, Karma and Lucid, won’t be attractive product,” asserted Eric Noble, president of the CARLAB automotive consultancy, after seeing the confidently hip R1T at its unveiling in L.A. “It’ll be every other aspect of the world’s most difficult business. Being a profitable carmaker is not a trivial task, even if your models are cool.”

Zig while the incumbents zag

Scaringe took early notice of the U.S. market’s swing towards pickups and crossovers, calling it a “market space that’s massively underserved,” by alternatives to the current combustion-engine configurations.

Because of the well-known profitability of conventional body-on-frame pickup trucks, “The formula hasn’t changed much,” said Scaringe. He added that today’s pickups are inefficient, ride terribly and just “aren’t very good at what they do. But in large part, (it’s because) they’re being used like cars.”

Noting all this, Rivian did a wholesale shift and began to develop its modular platform for the R1T pickup and the R1S SUV. It is not overstatement to say Rivian’s redirection to the truck market was prescient — and little short of enlightened.

“I’m thumbs-up on the direction Rivian has taken,” said Tony Posawatz, P.E., a 30-year-plus industry veteran with General Motors who oversaw some of the company’s most significant electrification programs as Vehicle Line Director. He’s now CEO of Invictus iCAR, as well as serving as a Board Director and advisor for many auto-tech firms.

“And it’s not just about North America,” Posawatz added, saying China and even Europe are displaying a consumer-preference shift towards trucks and SUVs.

Land Rover used to be here

The unitized drive for the R1T’s front axle integrates two propulsion motors and their respective transmissions into a single case. The same arrangement is used at the rear. (Image: LINDSAY BROOKE)

The more one looks at the R1T, it’s easier to understand Scaringe’s plan for Rivian: to create a pickup for the upscale adventure market, to “focus in this Patagonia-like space” that he described on a clothing-brand spectrum of tough and utilitarian yet still being premium and aspirational.

“Land Rover, as a brand, used to be here,” Scaringe said. Now, however, Land Rovers are “not products you really feel comfortable getting dirty.”

The R1T will start at $69,000 before the existing federal tax credit of $7,500, the company said, with the top model starting somewhere around $90,000. Heavy money, to be sure, but these are not prices that will shock anyone shopping today’s high-end fullsize pickup, Invictus iCar’s Posawatz asserted to Automotive Engineering.

Fullsize truck devotees may scoff at the Rivian R1T’s 55-in (1397-mm) bed length, for example—although it’s a longstanding industry axiom that few who own pickups put much of anything in the bed.

Posawatz was a leader in GM’s fullsize-truck product development when the company designed the first Avalanche. He said the Avalanche was one of the first models to acknowledge the changing use case of the pickup, saying the Avalanche was a response to the growing understanding that pickup buyers “didn’t really need or use the bed that often.”

Thus Rivian’s rationale for its 55-in bed. Enough-but-not-too-much also could be the analysis for the truck’s hardly-skimpy 11,023-lb (5000-kg) tow rating and 1764- lb (800-kg) payload capacity. These are figures that place the R1T ahead of conventional midsize pickups that mostly have all the utility casual buyers need.

The hard parts

Rivian’s R1T and R1S share a modular “skateboard” platform that sees the battery pack placed between the high-strength-steel (HSS) frame rails; some parts of the chassis are aluminum. The R1T has a 135.8-in (3450-mm) wheelbase and overall length of about 216 in (5475 mm). Overall width is 79.3 in (2015 mm). Maximum ground clearance: 14.2 in (360 mm) when jacked to the utmost of the standard air suspension. The front suspension is a double-wishbone layout, the independent rear suspension is a 5-link design.

The pickup’s body is mostly aluminum, with HSS and composites in key areas, said Mark Vinnels, Rivian’s executive director of engineering & programs. Vinnels spent more than a dozen years at McLaren, leading the engineering programs for the company’s highly-regarded line of supercars. Many other engineers and Rivian employees also worked at Mclaren prior to joining Rivian.

The R1T is all about “utilizing the elegance of electric drive,” Vinnels said, although he won’t say much about the batteries that provide the power. Exact battery chemistries and suppliers are the ongoing secret-du-jour for most vehicle startups and Rivian is no different. Vinnels would confirm Rivian’s lithium-ion battery form factor is the well-known 2170 cylindrical configuration, and indicated they will come from a proven manufacturer. Vinnels said Rivian’s battery pack is 30% more energy-dense compared with “the current best in the market.”

For the largest battery pack, there are 800 cells grouped into nine modules. The battery modules stack two cells atop one another, making for a thick battery pack. As with most EVs that remains an advantage because their placement imparts a deliciously low center of gravity.

Vinnels said great care has been taken to optimize thermal management of the pack—coolant passages run between the two-high cell stacks, for example — crucial to maximizing efficiency and driving range. There are three coolant circuits for the vehicle and engineers say the R1T has successfully completed towing runs on the gruelling Davis Dam climb in Arizona.

The battery-size “walk” is where it gets intriguing. Most of the initial hype focused on the R1T’s largest battery-pack capacity, 180 kW·h, which the company said should be good for a plump maximum driving range of 400 mi (644 km) “eliminating any chance of range anxiety,” said Vinnels. But Invictus iCar’s Posawatz said the volume sellers could be the pickups with the 135-kW·h pack delivering 300 mi (483 km) of range or the 105- kW·h entry-level pack good for 230 mi (370 km), as many buyers may choose to optimize the balance of price and driving range.

As charging infrastructure expands, he said, buyers will begin to gravitate toward buying only as much battery capacity as they anticipate requiring. Assuming there’s a 400-amp DC fast charger around, the 180- kW·h pack can be charged to 80% capacity in 50 minutes.

4wd and clever touches

The R1T’s propulsion system is appears exquisitely simple and promises immense capability. There is a electric propulsion motor for each wheel; Rivian has varied slightly in its specifications for the motors’ output, but Vinnels said at the truck’s media preview each motor develops 137 kW (186 hp) for a total of 743 hp and total torque of 811 lb·ft (1100 N·m). All this purportedly is good for a 0-60 mph dash of 3 seconds and highly precise and controllable torque vectoring at any speed.

The individual motors, each with a single-speed transmission, are combined into an integral sealed casing for each axle.

The R1T’s electrified platform allows a variety of useful features not necessarily available to conventional-pickup developers, although nobody should be surprised if some of Rivian’s innovations show up elsewhere.

One feature that won’t: the R1T’s front trunk, located where the engine resides in a conventional pickup; it holds up to 330 liters and is deep enough to hold many kinds of items. There’s a wonderful built-in rigid tonneau cover for the cargo bed that retracts, accordion style, at the push of a button, to disappear into a holding area at the forward edge of the bed.

The feature with the most “wow factor,” though, must be the “gear tunnel” that runs transversely across the vehicle just under and behind the rear seats. The gear tunnel is envisioned for long or unwieldy items such as baby strollers, snowboards and the like. A small door on either side of the truck that accesses the gear tunnel opens downward to double as a handy bed-access step or seat.

The vaporware factor

All these promises are made for vehicles that are nearly two years from showrooms and from a company that’s never made a vehicle. It’s impossible not to lump in Rivian with the troubled startups that have dotted the landscape in the past few years. But Scaringe said the Rivian story is as much about addressing the aberrations in today’s vehicle market as it is about introducing “radical” new technology.

The OEMs “have a lot of incredibly smart people,” he said, but “they have structural disadvantages” such as embedded scale and processes and legacy costs that make it difficult for them to be agile.

Product-development expert Posawatz, who after GM served as CEO for Fisker Automotive and has consulted to numerous start-ups and technology companies, likes Rivian’s modular-platform approach, which he believes is an immense asset.

He calls Rivian “in the top couple (of vehicle-manufacturer startups) that have a chance,” adding that one significant advantage has been Rivian’s “long time in incubation” that enabled the company’s principals to assess the moves and mistakes of others.

Nor does he think there’s much good in comparing Rivian to Tesla, as has been done exhaustively since Rivian broke cover. “They’ve carved out something unique — and done something very different from what Tesla has done,” Posawatz asserts.

The CARLAB’s Eric Noble agrees that Rivian’s trump card is having the right product at the right time. And a bit of emotion, too.

“First, they’re an acknowledgement that fullsize trucks and SUVs are never going away — and that if we want to ‘green’ the [U.S. vehicle] fleet, we’ve gotta green these behemoths. Second, Rivian borrowed a page from FCA, with unapologetically masculine styling. Like the Wrangler, they’ll be either loved or hated. As long as there are enough lovers, who cares?”