Rivian’s Scaringe Says R2 Will Help Pay Huge R&D Costs

May 6, 2026

Chris Clonts

At the ACT Expo in Las Vegas, Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe said that the coming R2 pickup would help pay for the company’s massive R&D budget.

He said that budget was the result of a conscious decision to design and build the majority of items for its trucks and SUVs in-house. Scaringe joined Erik Neandross, president of TRC’s Clean Transportation Solutions Group, for a fireside chat reflecting on Rivian’s journey and its future.

“All the computers in the car we build ourselves, the entirety of the software platform we build in-house. We build our high-voltage architecture, so battery packs, motors, power electronics. So as a result, we have an enormous engineering team. We have a very high [operating expense]. We have a huge R&D budget. And that doesn’t make sense if we only plan to build, let’s say, 15,000 vehicles a year,” he said.

He said that the goal is to build millions of trucks and SUVs every year, adding that the R2 is the company’s first true mass-market vehicle with a price starting at “about $45,000.” “The average price, by the way, for new cars in the United States is about $50,000,” he said. “It really puts it in the sweet spot. The revenue from that program will start to cover this enormous R&D budget that we built.”

In addition to the coming R2, the company announced in February that the RCV (Rivian Cargo Van) previously exclusive to Amazon would be available to virtually anyone. He said some people think of the van as simply a fuel-savings or environmental play, but that it was designed to have class-leading creature comforts.

“We spent a lot of time really making sure that it was very nice to use: Everything from the shapes of the handles to get in and out, to the design of the shelving, to the contours of the seat. These are cooled seats, which in this last-mile segment is not typical but drivers love it,” he said. “We see a very clear preference with our vehicle to be in a Rivian van versus a non-Rivian van from drivers, which is like the ultimate signal.”

Asked what he’d do differently in vehicle development, when he reflects on the years since the company was founded in 2009, Scaringe cautioned the large audience about false progress.

“When you’re starting out, there’s a desire to make progress, and there’s a desire to drive action. I think in building something really complex…it’s really easy to start doing activities that make motion,” he said. “So you do things because you think you’re making progress, but actually you’re just moving things around. And sometimes it’s really actually more valuable to take a second to really plan out your course of action and be highly intentional on making progress, which sometimes means going a little slower. In the case of engineering, that’s really spending time on the architecture decisions, whether that’s a network architecture or a vehicle platform architecture, or a technology web map.

Robots for Rivian (and others)

Amid Rivian’s success and growth, about a month ago Scaringe launched another company: Mind Robotics. He wants to have AI-trained robots ready for factory work shipping by the end of 2026.

“This was born out of a few years of work and research we’ve been doing within Rivian and looking at another inflection point where we’ve seen mechatronics that can perform highly dexterous tasks, advancing to a point…where you can actually have robotics do human-like skills or human-like tasks,” he said. “It’s so compelling and such an amazing shift that we decided to build a business around it.”

He cited the big shortage of industrial labor. “So being able to supplement our human workforce with a robotic workforce is going to fundamentally change not only how we look at our cost structure, but importantly, it will allow us to bring certain types of manufacturing back to the United States,” Scaringe said. “Things that today we can’t be cost-competitive with, we see as certainly coming back over the coming decade.”

In the past, Scaringe has expressed dismay at robot makers that concentrate on non-productive skills like cartwheels or other physical tricks.

Become autonomous or lose market share

Neandross asked him what the commercial market might look like in a decade, and Scaringe had a warning for manufacturers.

“By 2035, if you’re a large-scale vehicle manufacturer, whether it’s on the consumer side or the commercial side, and you don’t have a connected, highly intelligent platform that’s running the software and the electronics in the vehicle, and the vehicle doesn’t have self-driving capabilities, it’s hard to imagine maintaining market share,” he said.

“So, I think every company is going to be faced with a decision of you need to have those two technical areas really developed,” he said. “And either you develop it yourself, you partner with someone to develop, or you just accept that you’re very likely going to lose market share.”

Earlier in the week, Scaringe told Reuters that new variants of the R2 would likely be coming to market, including a performance model.