Latest / Cheeky Pint / How to build a $16B car company with RJ Scaringe, founder of Rivian

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How to build a $16B car company with RJ Scaringe, founder of Rivian · Cheeky Pint

• John (00:00:00): Cars used to have cool names. You have Mustang, Thunderbird. Now we have R1, R2. RJ (00:00:06): So the code name for Gen 2 is Peregrine, which is— John (00:00:09): Beautiful! Would anyone here buy Rivian Peregrine? Yeah, I’m seeing a lot of takers. RJ (00:00:13): With the exception of two companies, Rivian and Tesla, every car on the road has anywhere from 50 to maybe 150 little computers that run the car. John (00:00:21): This is why you—in a normal car—could not adjust, say the side mirrors from the center consoles. RJ (00:00:27): It's like three different companies. In 2013, 2014, I would go meet with suppliers and CEOs of very large suppliers and say, “We're working on an electric SUV and electric truck as a flagship product.” To say laughed out of the room is probably accurate. So you know how to pour these things and everything. John (00:00:46): These are actually really easy. This is good. This is a new, now you've got to go all the way. It's perfectly sized to fit. RJ (00:00:51): That is impressively sized. John (00:00:53): RJ Scaringe is the founder and CEO of Rivian, makers of electric trucks and SUVs. You've probably started to see Rivians out and about on the road. It's a delightful product and how they built an independent new car company is a really interesting story. Welcome. Cheers. RJ Cheers. John The Rivian story makes no sense to me. It shouldn't have worked because you grew up passionate about cars, nature enthusiast, you did a mechanical engineering PhD, and Rivian was not only the first company you started, it was your first job. I mean, your first career. Hardware companies are startups on hard mode. Auto companies are hardware companies on hard mode. So everything about this just seems like it shouldn't have worked out. RJ (00:01:41): Yeah. It's really hard. John (00:01:41): Explain yourself. RJ (00:01:43): Yeah, I mean one of the things that makes starting a car company so difficult is you need a lot of hard to obtain things all at the same time. So you need billions of dollars of capital. You need a team of thousands of engineers. You need hundreds of suppliers that would want to work with you and provide components and parts, and a manufacturing facility that's enormous and takes years to build. And if you had all those ingredients at the start, it would take maybe four or five years to launch the first product. But in the beginning, you have of none of those ingredients. And so it really is a challenging exercise. And for me, I think the part that was probably harder than I expected was just the path to go from… We started with no capital, so to go from no capital to raising a very small amount of capital, enough to prove out some semblance of an idea, but then to start to raise more and more capital to scale it. But it was a low probability of success. John (00:02:34): So what were the moments where, if you're following the prediction market, if you're looking on Polymarket, “Will Rivian succeed?” What are the moments where the probability would've spiked upwards at some point? RJ (00:02:44): Probably 2019. In 2019 Amazon invested in the company, so that would be a big spike in the probability. John (00:02:49): How much did they invest? RJ (00:02:50): Well, in total they invested several billion dollars before we went public. Today they're our largest shareholder, but in addition to them… So they invested around 2 billion prior to our IPO, roughly because it invested in a few rounds. But the round they invested in was a 700 million dollar round. It was a big first round of like, a number of strategic and really well-known investors came in at that point. And that was after we'd shown the product at the LA Auto Show. And prior to that we'd raised a few hundred million dollars, but we still needed quite a bit more money to launch the company. But importantly, beyond just them investing, we also put a commercial deal together where we build commercial vans for them. And so, you now see them all over the place. These are the big electric fans that we build with Amazon as a lead customer. But there's other non-Amazon customers. John (00:03:34): Why did they care about electric fans? Was it their climate commitment? Was it something to do with operationally it works better? What do they want? RJ (00:03:39): Well, there's a true cost advantage to running electric vans for delivery. So when you think about a delivery van, it spends a lot of its time sitting still. And so not having an engine idle, not having the same service frequency and all the engine maintenance and repairs, oil changes, brake replacements, everything just goes away. So there's a real cost advantage to running EVs, but there weren't any great electric van products on the market and certainly nothing that was designed with robustness or with their use case in mind. John (00:04:08): So they thought for their logistics operation, having a proprietary source of electric vehicles would lead to a long-term operating cost event. RJ (00:04:15): Yeah, I mean it was wild. From the early meetings with Amazon, we sketched an idea on the whiteboard, and that was in 2019.Early part of 2019, we were sketching the ideas for the vehicle and by end of 2019 we'd signed a deal to supply commercial vans. And then exactly two years later, we launched the product. So it was an extremely fast program to go from whiteboard to vans delivering packages within about two years. John (00:04:46): And where are those? Where is production of those vans now, in terms of volumes or how you work with Amazon on it? RJ (00:04:52): It's about 10,000 or so a year. It's going to be growing. So we're bullish on the van market in the long term. I think in the short term there's been a lot of things we didn't plan for. We had COVID supply chain interruption. We've seen a number of companies just be much more capital constrained in how they’ve deployed assets to invest in, let's say, electrification or electrification infrastructure. And so the whole commercial van space has moved slower than we thought, but the economics are so advantaged that we're really clear in it long-term being a big space. John (00:05:20): Do you already sell those vans to others? Will you sell those vans to others? RJ (00:05:23): Yeah, we just started about a year ago selling to others, but the ramp up has been slow. When you think of large operators of vans, very often these are not the companies that are going to take the biggest risks on technology or be on the front edge of early adoption. So we think of it as they take smaller steps with pilots, prove the model, prove that they can support the charging infrastructure, and then once they see the economic advantage, then I think many will make the switch. John (00:05:51): Going back to the Rivian story being a bit unlikely, the other thing that seems to me is getting reliable production going is really hard. And again, it feels like the first cars that roll off the line should be super janky and unreliable and everything like that. In preparation for this episode, I've been stealing my wife's Rivian. I've been really enjoying it. And it is—you were making fun of me because it's a used version that we bought, not a new version. So it's the ‘23 model, which is one of the earliest ones. And it's awesome and it works great and the build quality is incredible and things like that. And so again, that's the other part to me that feels unreliable in the story, just it feels like that's not where a hardware company usually goes. So how did you guys get the quality and reliability good out of the gate? RJ (00:06:36): Yeah, I mean one of the things that's so different about building a car company versus most software, most technology companies, and for that matter even how venture capital has been, how it's evolved and how it takes place is the first product of most startups, like usually a tech or software centric startup is pretty loose. It's there to demonstrate that the idea holds promise and it may not have scalability built into it, but it shows there's a product market fit. And then following that there could be more capital invested to grow it, to add robustness to the product. In the case of— John (00:07:10): Minimum bet size for you is really big. RJ (00:07:11): So in a vehicle, your first dollar of revenue takes many billions of dollars of development and the thing you launch needs to be incredibly robust. And so that means multiple winters of testing, multiple hot summers where you're testing vehicles in the desert, and a very large durability and reliability team set up to run this. And there's cultural challenges when you think about building a new company. One of the strengths of a new company very often, and I think what allows startups and entrepreneurs to excel is they're willing to try new things as businesses, that gets embedded into the culture. There's a certain move fast and break things mindset, and that's great for technology, it's great for pushing boundaries, but it's very different than the skills and the cultural mindset you need to run stable operations, where let's say if you're running a manufacturing plant, you need repeatability, you need a lot of process orientation. And so just for us, this step of going from a product development company, developing new technology, making prototypes, which are wonderful, and demonstrating that those prototypes are capable and then transitioning that into a production system that can scale and has high quality and robustness built into it. It took a lot of work. It was hard. John (00:08:31): But the first version of many hardware products have a lot of teething pains. Did the R1 have a lot of teething pains? Did you guys do something different to avoid that? RJ (00:08:40): Well, for us, we launched, we made a few. If I could go back in time, I probably would change one thing. We launched a truck and SUV, so the R1eT and the R1S—a sibling set of products. At the same time we launched a commercial van. We launched three different products at the same time and we were building out our plants starting in the beginning of 2020 and then launched in 2021. And so, trying to build out an industrial ecosystem, turn on a supply chain and then ramp a product is hard. Doing that in the middle of COVID is really hard. And doing that across three different product lines was extremely hard. And so I probably would've inserted more sequencing between all those different products. But nonetheless, when the R1 launched, we won vehicle of the year, which was awesome. And so MotorTrend does this, a few different organizations. We had multiple truck or SUV of the year awards. And then Consumer Reports does this annual brand survey and they look at customer satisfaction, customer appeal, and they look at likelihood of repurchase. And so in our first year of production with our first product we've ever produced, we came out by far number one on that, which was amazing. And in our second year we came out by far number one. So the closest we were beat the next closest by 15 points. So that was amazing. It was really just a reflection of how much work the teams have put in to make all these product level decisions, trade-offs around… You think of a vehicle, it's like many tens of millions of trade-offs you're making around cost versus performance versus a feature. And so we'd really done a nice job of getting the product market fit right, so really connected with consumers. But saying all that, the ramp was hard. So launching late ‘21, it was difficult. We were coming off the back of COVID and then we had this awful supply chain crisis that hit, you may remember like 2022 where getting anything from drywall to semiconductors was hard, but in our case we were last in line with many of the suppliers because we were new. And so you can imagine we went from having a bill of materials that was already inflated, relative to existing large incumbents, to something where if we just wanted supply, they said, “Look, you're going to have to pay us an extra 20%.” And so it was like this across thousands of parts in a car, all these discrete decisions of, “Do we stop production for this part that should cost $2, but we're being asked to pay $4.” And you do that several thousand times and it adds up. So we had a cost structure that was really challenging. We chose to actually ramp— John (00:11:14): And I presume you mostly just ate those cost increases because it doesn't make sense to spike the cost of the vehicle. Did you debate whether you should pass along the cost increases or eat them? RJ (00:11:24): Well, in parallel to this, of course inflation went really wild in 2022 into 2023. So the price of vehicles grew quite a bit in that same timeframe. And so we did add in reaction to that. We did have adjustments to our pricing, but we've tried to be really stable in pricing because it's always hard if your pricing's moving around a lot, it wreaks havoc on the residual market. It's not great. John (00:11:50): You can’t plan for car purchase. RJ (00:11:51): It's just really hard for consumers. We've tried to be really methodical with that. But saying all that, we had to sort of grow through ‘23, we resourced a lot of our bill of materials. We launched what we call Gen 2 of the vehicle—which you don't have—but is a meaningful step forward in terms of technology, but also a considerable reduction in the overall cost of the vehicle. And so finally, end of ‘24/beginning of ‘25, we started to hit a positive gross margin. So Q4 of ‘24, Q1 of ‘25, positive gross margin. We're extremely bullish on long-term profitability, but this business is really tough if you have disruptions to supply, just the fixed costs are really tough. John (00:12:33): What's the Gen 2 pitch? What's most exciting from a tech point of view? Is it autonomy? Is it something else? RJ (00:12:38): Boy, yeah, there's a lot there. We didn't change the exterior of the car much. So really we redid a lot of the interior, like the guts of the car. And the biggest change was on Gen 1, we designed and built all the electronics in the car, but we allowed for a number of the compute platforms to be specific to an area, like specific to a domain. John (00:13:02): The zonal architecture where you move to— RJ (00:13:04): Yeah, so the reason we did that at the start is we needed to move fast. So let's say you're on the body controls team, your timeline isn't necessarily the same as, let's say, the powertrain controls team or the vehicle dynamics team. And so we allowed the proliferation of a few different domains that we knew long-term would consolidate. But we made the decision because we said we own the whole software stack, we own the electronics, the consolidation will come in step two. And then with Gen 2 we went from 17 down to three. So now we have what we call an East zone controller, a West zone controller and a South zone controller. John (00:13:34): When you say controller, these are the computers and the integrated kind of systems management? RJ (00:13:39): Yes. There's three real-time computers in the vehicle that run the whole platform. So they run everything from propulsion to body control to your lighting, all the real-time systems. And that was a big lift to move all the software into this new architecture. But we also used that as a chance to completely change out the way we approached autonomy. And so, that effort started in about late 2021, where we recognized we needed to move entirely to a platform where we owned the entirety of the perception stack. So all the cameras in our case, also the radars, a much more powerful compute platform for autonomy. And launch that in a way such that we can build this large data flywheel where we can train the system. And what we often call end-to-end training where we have cameras, radars that feed in, that's building a large parameter, multi-billion parameter foundation model that governs how the vehicle drives. Then deploy that in a distilled state back into the vehicle. So that's now in the car and the slope of the curve in terms of progress and additional features is going to be really steep. Your Gen 1 won't have that, but Gen 2 as well. But that was a huge part of the lift and all that laid the network architecture, the consolidation of ECUs, this refactored software stack—it laid the foundation for us to do a lot of other things. So we're about to launch our lower price vehicle, which we call R2. It's the coolest thing we've ever done. It is awesome. It's a smaller SUV, five passenger. As I was telling you before, you will love it if you like the R1, you'll really like the R2, but it's a starting price of $45,000 and it has all the essence of a Rivian that you see in R1, but squeezed into a slightly smaller— John (00:15:21): And higher volumes, I presume. RJ (00:15:22): Much higher volumes. John (00:15:23): Can you give us the comparison between R1 volumes and R2 volumes? RJ (00:15:26): So R1, the average selling price is just over $90,000. And so in terms of these things are always subject to boundary diagrams, but if you draw the boundary diagram around electric premium vehicles, like premium SUVs that are over $70,000, we're by far the bestselling vehicle in that class of vehicles. So we have about 35% market share as we draw that boundary diagram. So differently, we have the bestselling electric SUV over $70,000 in the United States. Interesting in California and the state of Washington, we have the bestselling SUV—electric or non-electric—in California and the state of Washington. John (00:16:06): That fits with what I see out on the roads. RJ (00:16:07): So if you're here in the Bay Area everywhere, it is the bestselling premium SUV. But the size of the market for someone who's buying a $90,000 vehicle is just naturally more collapsed. John (00:16:17): So how many R1 do you ship a year? RJ (00:16:19): This year we'll do… call it 40-ish. John (00:16:21): 40,000, okay. And so what are you tooling up for in terms of R2 production? RJ (00:16:25): So R2, we're going to build first in our plant in Illinois, just south of Chicago, a town called Normal. And there we'll be building up to 175,000 R2, in addition to R1, in addition to our commercial vans. But we're also building a plant in Georgia, which will be the further expansion. And the size of the market for R2 and then R2 variants— there's an R3, there's other things we haven't yet announced—but there's a whole host of products that sit on that platform. It's many millions of units. It just, it's the whole, if you think of it like the whole automotive demand space, the average price of a new car in the United States is $49,000. The most popular configuration is a five-seat SUV or crossover. And so it's just a huge space. John (00:17:07): So you're on the cusp of a very significant ramp up. RJ (00:17:09): Yeah, so sort of the first step is going from, in total, call it sub 50,000 units a year. The plant will be capable of 215,000 units with just our Normal facility—Normal, Illinois facility. And then we add in Georgia across two phases, another 400,000 units of capacity. We've taken the approach of very heavily vertically integrating technology. And so everything from the low voltage systems we just talked about, so the computers in the car, the software that runs in them: the perception stack, our self-driving platform, our whole infotainment platform. And then into the high voltage side: batteries, gearboxes motors, inverters, DC/DC converters, DC/AC converters, all of that power electronics, all is done in house. And so when you're producing less than 50,000 units a year, the engineering fixed cost and the operational fixed cost to run that is very high. So it's a structural cost challenge, but you reach your— John (00:18:01): For the fixed cost to run, which? RJ (00:18:03): Well just to run an engineering team to engineer all that content, but it's only finding its way into a small number of vehicles. John (00:18:10): You're saying the systems are very complex, and so you want to amortize that complex. RJ (00:18:14): So once we add volume, then it becomes this enormous structural cost advantage because we don't have, typically you have a lot of tier one suppliers that provide all these systems and they add a lot of cost, and for that matter, a lot of complexity. So because we do it all ourselves, all that complexity and cost is wiped away. But you need the volume to really have it make sense. John (00:18:38): It seems interesting to me that there was a gap in the market for an electric SUV, because when you think about it, you guys were thinking about starting originally with a sports car. That's what you founded the company to start with. And my sense is that you said, “Huh, the electric car company starting with a sports car idea has kind of been taken.” RJ (00:18:59): Exactly. Yeah. John (00:19:00): “So maybe we'll pivot…” But I've driven the Tesla Roadster. It's not a good idea to put a ton of batteries in a sports car. It doesn't handle well, whereas an SUV is heavy anyway. It's perfectly suited to being an electric vehicle. And so why were you guys able to arrive into the market and take what feels like the most obvious form factor for an electric vehicle? RJ (00:19:20): Boy, is that a good question. It's funny how things change over time. So today it seems obvious, but in 2013, 2014, I would go meet with suppliers and CEOs of very large suppliers, and say, “We're working on an electric SUV and electric truck as a flagship product. Following that, we want to launch more affordable electric SUVs.” And the lack of understanding of what an electric vehicle can do in those conditions was so extreme that it's hard to even appreciate this. I mean, I would get—to say laughed out of the room is probably accurate. I mean, it would be like, “Why would you make an electric SUV?” And the questions would be, “Well, what if it has to go over a bumpy road” or, “What if it needs to go through water?” And so there's this perception that you couldn't drive an electric vehicle off road, you couldn't go through deep puddles. And so born out of that, we realized it was actually this amazing opportunity to not only say, “Yes, you can make an electric SUV” or “Yes, you can make an electric lifestyle pickup,” but “You can make it so much better than anything in the combustion world.” And so we really had fun with that. I mean the R1, our new quad motor R1 does zero to 60 on the R1T, the truck, we'll do zero to 60, just under two and a half seconds. It can manage the most complex off-road trails, like Hell's Revenge or any the really hard stuff where you're going up almost 45 degree angles, steep rock faces, it can do that no problem. And you can use it every day. And so the comical thing is you pull up to a stoplight, you look to your left and you see a brand new— John (00:20:58): Ferrari. RJ (00:20:58): Ferrari, and you're actually quicker than that car. And you've got groceries in the front trunk, your kid's in a car seat, and silently it just out-accelerates any of those things. And then it can veer off the road and drive over a mountain. So we wanted to make this product that just completely challenged those incorrect assumptions around technology. John (00:21:20): So if you rewind those suppliers in 2013, 2014, is what they missed one, they were maybe thinking about the Ford F-150 market, which will be slower as adopters? But there's a very large, just general everyday SUV market and kind of outdoor enthusiast market. Is thing one they kind of misunderstood some of the truck markets? And then secondly, you can actually make a better vehicle when you have all this abundant ships power available to you, especially as you get into the outdoorsy stuff, having just an abundant source of power is actually pretty nice for a lot of the other functionality. RJ (00:21:53): Yeah, I think with electrification, we have found that particularly early on, this has shifted, but there was this perception of what an electric vehicle buyer was. And if the description of a Rivian was, it's electric, and then you describe all these compromises, that sort of fits the historical, call it 2014 description of electric vehicle buyer. You're buying a vehicle accepting a bunch of compromises. But we have customers today that are not buying it because it's luxury, they're buying it because it's great to drive, it's fun, it's capable, it fits their lifestyle. John (00:22:26): Noone ever got super excited about a Chevy Volt. They're like, “This is the car I want.” RJ (00:22:29): We wanted a vehicle that was like, if you're cross shopping this with a Porsche Cayenne Turbo, or let's say a Wrangler Rubicon or you'd be like, “Wow, this is a better vehicle.” And it actually does the things that the Rubicon can do and it does the things that the Cayenne Turbo can do in one car. John (00:22:47): Where did the culture of surprise and delight features come from? Because that's one thing I associate with Rivian. We have here your Gear Guardian, is that what you said his name is? The kind of animated fellow who makes clear to any ne'er-do-wells that they are being monitored if they're trying to break into the car. You also have things like the flashlight is a very cute feature. And then I also notice, it's not quite a surprise and delight, but they're often features that other cars will have that I find they're just executed really well in the Rivian. And so the functionality of where you pair it with your phone and then it kind of locks and unlocks based on your coming and going. Lots of cars claim to have that, but unless it works super reliably, it's actually more annoying than not having it right? Because you walk away from the car and you're like, “Huh, did it lock or whatever?” And again, the execution of that feature on the Rivian is really, really good. RJ And it's better in Gen 2. John I will! I promise that someday I'll upgrade. Where did this come from? Why have a flashlight in the car? RJ (00:23:42): I'm a huge car enthusiast, and I think that's really helpful in that I love cars. I've grown up loving them. And so as a kid, when you're growing up reading about cars, it connects with this emotional, almost dreamlike part of you where you're imagining and you're dreaming of things. I have three kids now and I ask them to sketch, “Hey, sketch me what an R12 looks like” or an R9 or an R23. The ideas they come up with are so wonderfully removed from the practicalities of what's possible, and they have all these surprising features. Sometimes they're like wildly not possible. But we wanted to have some of that kid-like joy built into the product, and even the aesthetics of how the vehicle looks. It's one of the fastest cars you could buy today, but it doesn't look mean. It looks friendly. And so we wanted the vehicle to be lovable. We wanted a lot of, when you fall in love with something, it makes the little things nice. So my kids and I were at a farm the other night and it got dark and we're walking around in the cornfields and we needed a flashlight, so it was perfect. We walked back to the car, pulled a flashlight out of the car, and everybody was with us was like, “How'd you get a flashlight?” I'm like, “Oh, I have one in the car. It's built in.” (00:25:00): And so it's like those little features that they just unlock, that made the whole night different for myself, my kids, and a bunch of other people. And so we thought about those kinds of features really carefully. John (00:25:11): What are fun features that you left in the cutting room floor, that you would love to have put in or maybe you'll do in a future car, but— RJ (00:25:17): On R1? John Yeah. RJ I shouldn't say this here because everybody's going to say, “Bring it back.” Up until very, very late in R1 we had two roof options. One's the glass roof, which is what you guys have in your car. And the other was this beautiful carbon fiber roof that you could take it off the top and it fit perfectly puzzled into the front trunk. And so you get this now when you look up with the glass, imagine there's no glass there and it's open. So you get this really nice open air experience. John (00:25:45): Like Jeep Wrangler kind of. RJ (00:25:45): Yeah, that was really nice, especially in a car like this, to have that capability. Future R1 someday we'll bring that back. That was really cool. We all lamented losing that, but it was just a lot. Again, back to complexity and launching, we decided just to manage our own complexity in that, but that was one. Now R1 has just about everything. We wanted the new quad, we brought back this, we call kick steer feature, where we can use the fact that there's four motors in the quad and the four motor version to introduce torque vectoring to an extreme degree where you can pivot— John (00:26:16): Like an F 22 Raptor. You’re cross vectoring. RJ (00:26:18): Yeah, you can pivot it on its access. So it's really fun off-road. It's not an on-road feature. You're not going to use it on the highway and it's quite useful. John (00:26:26): Not with that attitude! RJ (00:26:27): Not with that attitude. But we brought that back. I think as I look at R2, there's some features on it that we didn't put in R1, but that really make R2 special. So R2 still has a flashlight, but the rear glass on the lift gate now drops. And I've been using an R2 with the kids to do school dropoffs, and it is so cool to come up with the back glass open and the kids just throw their backpacks in through the back of the car. So I love that. And then we've added a few other really thoughtful features around… All the storage compartments are thought about from the perspective of, do you have kids? Do you have pets? Do you have a backpack, do you have a handbag? Do you have something that you need to put somewhere and where does it go? And increasingly, I’ve found in a lot of modern cars, you just don't have places for all this gear. And so we like, do personas. So imagine you're a backpacker, where does all your gear go? Imagine you're commuting to the office. Where does your gear go? Imagine you've got two kids and a diaper bag, where does that go? And so we really have thought about it from the perspective of users and that user-centric design just manifests into all these things being thought about. John (00:27:38): The last time I saw you, I was asking you about CarPlay and I was saying how you guys needed that. But then I realized afterwards that I think when people say they want CarPlay or when I said I want CarPlay, what I actually want is navigational and traffic data from a source that I trust.And the inbuilt navigation system in a car from a Mercedes or BMW, or something like that, no one thinks that they have the best traffic data and then you guys launch Google Maps and it's awesome. RJ (00:28:07): It's great. John (00:28:07): How did that come about? RJ (00:28:09): Well, you just nailed it. This is a decision. It's generated, I said there's many millions of decisions, many of them will never get noticed and they're just under the surface. One of those decisions that's been noticed quite a bit is the fact that we've intentionally not included CarPlay in the vehicle. And that's not to say we don't think a close partnership with Apple is important. So we have Apple Music integration, we have a bunch of Apple integrations that are yet to come, we have a great relationship with the team at Apple. But it was more to say, we just felt and continue to feel very strongly about creating a consistent, fully integrated digital experience where you're not jumping between apps, let's say from a CarPlay app back to the vehicle app. And it's quite jarring when you don't have, let's say vehicle level controls when you're in the CarPlay environment. That view we've had since the early, early days. I think that's going to become even more important and more true in a world of integrated AI. So suddenly when you can talk to your vehicle and say, “Please open the front trunk, please unlock the doors, lower the windows, set the temperature, take me to this place. I'm hungry,I feel like tacos… find something along the way to the charger.” All those immersive experiences really need the full breadth of context from your mobile device, from your vehicle, from the vehicle back to you. Like, what's the state of the charge? And trying to do that through a homogenized single layer app that works across many, many brands, and by definition in some ways has to play to a lowest common denominator is really challenging. And so there's a few areas that by not having CarPlay, it generates friction. The first is maps. And so until we launched this partnership with Google, we had built our own mapping platform, where we took OpenStreetMaps and we layered in a routing platform on top of that. And we had information that we would buy around traffic, but it was not going to be as good as Google. John (00:30:03): I don't even know if it's irrational for me to not trust it, but I just noticed that I don't. RJ (00:30:08): Yeah, it's better. It's a big step forward with Google, how we've done it. So that I'd say fully eliminated the concern on mapping. And then the next is text, and voice to text, and being able to interact with your device, that's equally important for Android and for Apple customers. And so that's coming very soon. John (00:30:25): Oh, that's cool. RJ (00:30:26): And then there's really no gap. And what we found is working directly with Apple on the applications that folks care about, like Apple Music, these are the kinds of things we'd rather do and give customers this more highly curated choice of different platforms, but within the Rivian ecosystem. John (00:30:43): Again, I was struck by, after we discussed it, that again, I don't actually want CarPlay. It's kind of funny when you think about it. There's the screen with all the icons and the Audible app, and no one wants to go browse through their audiobook library on the car screen. What they want is navigation data from a source they trust and to play audio from their phone—those things they actually want. Can I give you my pitches for my suggested Rivian features? RJ (00:31:07): Bring it on. John (00:31:08): Have you seen that episode of The Simpsons, where Homer gets to design his own car? RJ (00:31:11): Somebody gave me a picture of that car. John (00:31:13): Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, the Homer car. But I feel like it's a classic bikeshed issue where, I dunno, no one's that familiar with what Stripe does at the innards level, and so they just assume that Stripe is doing all the sensible things. Whereas everyone drives a car, and so everyone could be like, “Here's what you guys should do.” RJ (00:31:30): Family members, friends. Totally. John (00:31:32): Exactly. Why do all cars offer memory of the driver, either the old fashioned way that other cars do it—where you press the position one or two for the seat—you guys do, it connects to the phone. It's really nice. That moves the seat that moves the side mirrors. No car moves the rear view mirror. Why is that the final frontier of adjustability? RJ (00:31:58): Well, there's no actuator on the mirror. John (00:32:00): Sure, but that's your choice. RJ (00:32:03): It's definitely our choice. We could, it's a cost trade off. John (00:32:06): Yeah, you’ve got actuators on the side mirrors. RJ (00:32:10): Yeah, they're harder to reach though. John (00:32:12): The rear view mirror is harder to reach? RJ (00:32:14): The side mirrors, if you go back in time, if you go back 25 years— John (00:32:17): Oh, they're harder for the driver to reach. Yeah, yeah, yeah. RJ (00:32:19): They used to be manually adjusted John (00:32:20): And then— RJ (00:32:21): The little knobs. And then way, way back you'd have to push on the glass to move it around. And then we had little knobs. John (00:32:29): The advanced knob technology— RJ (00:32:31): And then we moved to electric-controlled. And in those cases we moved to electric-controlled because it's hard to reach out the window or reach across the car. In this case it's just there. John (00:32:40): But you guys are the surprise and delight company. RJ (00:32:41): So here's the question. We always have to ask ourselves, if we have a certain pool of dollars we can spend on the car. Essentially we're the arbiters of how those dollars get spent and we can't make everyone happy. Somebody maybe wants that, but to do that,something else either has to fall out or the price has to go up. John (00:33:00): Okay. If you're worried about the bond— RJ (00:33:01): So we end up taking, those are the kinds of things— John (00:33:05): You could also do it like when you see the really big SUVs, they actually just have a video feed projected up there. You could also do the video feed, which then would not require any adjustment RJ (00:33:13): Completely. Yes. So we’ve actually had a lot of debate around this. This is very actively debated. Where you see the mirror, it's not actually a mirror, it's just a screen. And we've not done that yet. If I'm honest it’s partially because of me. I've not loved— John (00:33:30): Oh, the team's coming and pitching you on the video. RJ (00:33:33): There's a team that would like to do it with the mirror as a screen. And I've been against it. In part, because if you have good visibility— so if you can see out the back—it's a little disorienting. And so my concern is, you make 50% of people happier with it, but a lot of people would say, “Just give me a mirror.” And so we've just made the trade to say we're going to take those dollars and spend them elsewhere. There's not anything wrong with those as products. It's just a decision. John (00:33:59): Okay. Next question. California mandates booster seats up to the age of eight. And I've always found it funny that we are boosting the child as opposed to moving the third point up and down on the seatbelt, where you could just have an adjustable seatbelt and then ensure that the child is correctly configured where you move the third point down and now the seatbelt is appropriately across their lap. And it would just be much less stuff to be carved around. You're not requiring boosters, you just adjust the seat to be correctly configured to the child size. And Volvo kind of does this with the XC90 where they have an integrated booster seat in the middle seat, but it's only one seat, and it's actually still a booster and everything. Why not do adjustable seatbelt points as a child restraining device? RJ (00:34:39): So we do have the adjustability of the third point. We can adjust it. It just only goes down to 5th percentile female. So it doesn't cover the kid range. And the reason for that is, it's classic unintended consequences. So when we have to test at different settings, and so we test across from 5th percentile female to 95th percentile male. And that's what that range is set up for. We also uniquely, in the United States, there's no other developed country that has unbelted tests. So we run a lot of our crash tests with no belts on. And so the kinematics of a body moving in the event of a harsh collision are very different if you have your seatbelt on or your seatbelt off. And so it's a very interesting question. There is no clear answer, but if you were to say we're going to test around all occupants being belted, you would end up with different solutions and different control algorithms for the airbags. John (00:35:34): That's so interesting. RJ (00:35:35): And so we also plan for unbelted in a way that, I think, other countries don't contemplate that. John (00:35:41): Sorry. And that is when you say “we” you mean the United States as a certification. RJ (00:35:45): Yeah, United States, yeah. John (00:35:47): I didn't know the United States was an outlier there. Are there places where if you could change the certification and safety rules around cars, you would make changes? RJ (00:35:57): It'd be really nice if the United States and Europe had one set of standards. The biggest difference, in terms of safety, between the US and Europe is in pedestrian protection. So when you think about, if you hit somebody on the road, what you want is you want to have them go up over the car, but they're likely going to have a hard impact with the hood. And so in Europe, there's very tight pedestrian protection standards. And so, the shape of the bumpers have been designed to make sure they get brought over the top of the car and then the hood needs to have some give to it. And so we've designed our hoods… a big part of the hood design is to contemplate a human head hitting the hood. There's certain cars that you see here in the United States that could never pass a pedestrian protection. In Europe, for example, a Cybertruck could not work in Europe. John (00:36:51): Interesting. You wouldn't expect a car maker like Rivian to use Stripe. But one reason they do is they need to accept a huge range of payment values. So when you're putting down a thousand dollars deposit on the car, you probably want to use your credit card. But when you're actually ready to buy and you're spending $90,000, you might run into a few issues with that. So Rivian uses Stripe to securely accept bank payments using ACH. The right payment method for the situation, it just depends. For Rivian, they want bank payments and many businesses on Stripe, they want to accept the blossoming variety of international payment methods. If you're expanding to Brazil for example, you need Pix, which is now how most people pay online there, In Poland, offering the local option, Blik, can lift conversion by over 40%. And globally, customers increasingly expect point of sale credit using services like Klarna. Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite handles all these payment methods and their differences for you. We use AI to analyze the customer and the context they're in, and then we dynamically surface the payment methods—over 75 different options—most likely to convert for that specific customer. Learn more at stripe.com/payments. Are accident trades going up because of texting and driving? RJ (00:38:00): Yeah, for sure. But countering that is, as the vehicle increasingly drives itself— John (00:38:05): That's where I was going to go. There's a battle between, people are becoming worse drivers, which is kind of bad and scary but true because they're just increasingly on their phone. And we were walking through the city at one point recently, and a car kind of blew past the pedestrian crossing right as people were kind of in the process of crossing. And just like this old guy next to us said, “You have to be on your phone to be driving like that.” I thought that was an apt description of much driving these days. But how much are the improvements in semi-autonomy, like the fender bender detection and stuff like this helping? RJ (00:38:42): I have a 9-year-old, a 7-year-old, and 6-year-old, and I truly think that by the time my oldest is able to drive, the environment's going to be so different than what we see today. The next five years, we're going to see autonomy features where the idea of hands-free or hands-free, eyes off go from being something that a very small percentage of customers are looking for or using to something that's essentially expected. So for that reason, it's by far the biggest investment area for us in our business. It's the most critical area of technology development. But what's changed so much that has me believing deeply that the next five years will look very different than the last five years is just the way that AI is now part of this system. So historically, the way self-driving systems were created was you'd have a perception stack. It would see the world, it would identify all the objects, it would classify the objects like person, car, tree, assign vectors to those objects, so acceleration velocity for each of those X, Y, and Z. And then it would handle those objects and their classifications to a planner that would be rules-based. So a planner written by humans that would describe the rules of the road and for which would make a whole host of decisions around what the trajectory should be for the vehicle. That whole approach has been completely replaced with what I would call Gen 2 of autonomous vehicles, which is you still perceive the whole world, but you've used a transformer and encode all of those images. You then feed it into a very large model and you train it in the way that you train at LLMs. You're building this very humanistic understanding of the world. And if you have a car park that's large enough, like what we do, you can create this amazing training flywheel and the rate of progress is so much faster than trying to program how the world works. John (00:40:30): Could you just have cars going around in the parking lot? RJ (00:40:33): Well, not your Gen 1, but all the Gen 2 vehicles. John (00:40:36): They're gathering training data for this. RJ (00:40:37): So the obvious ones are if you're in self-driving mode, if you're on the highway, for example, in our vehicle, and it disengages, that's a piece of information, we train off that. More interesting is when you're driving, you as the human, the model's running in parallel and when you do something different than the model predicts, that's interesting. It's like if you change lanes and the model predicted you would not change lanes. Or vice versa, if the model predicts we should change lanes now and you don't change lanes. On a singular basis it’s sort of interesting, but you multiply that across thousands and thousands of vehicles, it becomes a really powerful method for teaching a digital driver how to drive. John (00:41:15): Yes. I feel like the big debate that plays out in the public realm on this stuff is basically the Waymo versus Tesla approaches of more sensors on Waymo's versus fewer sensors on Tesla. And Elon's being quite dismissive of LiDAR. Where do you stand on this sensor debate? RJ (00:41:32): I think first is I'd say there's alignment amongst Rivian, Tesla, Waymo around the use of AI to train. And so, the view that you're building a large scale foundation model, multi-billion parameter model, you're building that with the data flywheel of the vehicles that are deployed. There's consistency there. I think, for some reason this has been a lightning rod issue in ways that I wouldn't have expected. If you look at sensor theory, and even if you have noisy sensors, it just mathematically proves that having more sensors is a better approach. John (00:42:07): It’s always seemed nonsensical to me. Yeah, more sensors obviously better and we know how to— RJ (00:42:11): So that's the reason you have more than one camera. So even moving beyond more than one camera, we have many cameras around the vehicle, but then saying we want additional modalities that have a non-overlapping set of strengths and weaknesses with a camera. And it's, there's no arbitration of the camera versus a radar or camera versus a LiDAR, because it's just not how the models are built anymore. They have a worldview and then the addition of different modalities. It actually helps balance out some of the noise and the signals. Because every signal's going to have noise, every camera has noise, every LiDAR has noise, every radar. John (00:42:44): So you just want as many sensors as you can afford in the car, then combined— RJ (00:42:49): And then it becomes as many as you can afford and as many as you can process, which ties to how much you can afford. And so, a few things have happened in the last five years that have changed things. One, as we move to a neural net based approach, that's what we talked about already. The second is that the cost of sensors is six, seven years ago a LiDAR was $20,000. 15 years ago LiDAR was $75,000. Today a LiDAR is like 200 bucks. So it's a very low cost sensor and it solves certain things like very bright light, very low light, extremely well. And similarly, a radar is a hundred bucks, depending on which one, you can buy the crappy radar for 25 bucks. You can buy a great imaging radar for a hundred bucks, 125 bucks, and it gives you rain, snow, fog in ways that cameras obviously don't perform very well. And if you've ever driven in really thick fog, you've probably thought to yourself, boy, wouldn't it be great if I had a radar in my forehead? That's what planes have. John (00:43:43): Which I think all the time. RJ (00:43:44): But you would navigate those situations with a much higher degree of safety. But then the last piece I'd call out is when you have multiple modalities, it allows you to train your perception stack better. For example, if you're driving in the fog, there are subtle little things your eyes will spot and you're hunting for, like you're looking for the little red dots of the car in front of you from their taillights, but you have to hunt for them. Imagine your brain had the assistance in training its neural net to immediately know where those objects are, vis-a-vis radar. So your brain can more quickly identify the visual characteristics and you build this much more robust neural net to be able to see in hard situations, bright lights. And you're like, let's say coming down the 101, you've got that sun right in your eyes. It's really helpful to have something that doesn't affect. So I think it's strangely become a debate topic. I think it's not really— John (00:44:42): Everyone's actually in agreement on the high level points. RJ (00:44:43): I think everybody's actually in a more aligned— John (00:44:45): Everyone agrees on the overall AI approach and then… Yeah, actually there isn't that much disagreement on the sensor stuff or maybe less than it would appear. You're describing some of the progressing components. So you're describing how LiDAR and radar have really changed in becoming a lot cheaper. What else is happening in the land of components that you work with? Are tires getting better, batteries, tires, windshields, anything like that? RJ (00:45:08): I think on the electric side, we're seeing the motors become lower cost. So I'll illustrate the point on what's going into R2. It's our fourth generation motor that we've designed. And so, previous generations used what's called a hairpin winding in the stator. So you take copper wire, you bend it into a unique shape, and you've seen these before, I'm sure. There's a whole ring of wires and then you bring them together, depending on how you designed the electric mechanics on it, you're welding all these little tips together. That was state-of-the-art. And that's what essentially 99% of the cars, electric vehicles on the road are now doing. On R2, on the drive unit that we called Maximus, which is my middle son's name, which is a great name for a motor. We have a continuous winding, so it's one long wire that we wind. It's sort of woven into a mat, and then we fold it on each other. And what it does, it takes the number of welds in the motor down by something like 95%. And so it's slightly more efficient, but importantly it's a lot less costly. Does it materially drive different? No, but does it allow us to continually drive the price of electric vehicles down? Yes. John (00:46:17): Okay. So a lot of components that are pretty important for electric vehicles, is there like a meaningful cost curve of improvement happening on them? RJ (00:46:24): Yeah. And then I think if you take the complexities of designing real-time operating systems and a compute platform across the vehicle, these are things that car companies don't historically do very well. We've got, as an industry, there's this massive supplier base of tier ones that provide functions and computers alongside of them. So you buy a seat that historically has come with a little computer, you buy a car with power windows, it has a power window computer. And so with the exception of two companies, Rivian and Tesla, every car on the road has, depending on the amount of content, anywhere from 50 to maybe 150 little computers that run the car. John (00:47:05): This is why you, in a normal car, could not adjust the side mirrors from the center console, regardless of whether— RJ (00:47:13): It's two or three different companies. John (00:47:14): It's different systems— RJ (00:47:15): Companies and different software. It's islands of software written by little suppliers, on little ECUs that go back to suppliers. And so that actually underpins, we did a 5.8 billion deal with Volkswagen where we're providing them this—the second largest car company in the world— we're providing them a zonal architecture. So a platform that allows us to run the whole car with a very small number of computers. Depends on the size of the vehicle. And then a software platform. I think it's inconceivable that by, call it early 2030s, that a car company can exist at scale and maintain their market share and not have a software defined architecture. And be on an architecture for which they have… I think of the software architectures that are in cars today, it's like a field of weeds. It's like you just have all these little ECUs all over the place. They're all little islands of software. You can't make updates to them. None of them are written by yourself. There's so many abstraction layers between the actual code and the manufacturer. I think that must go away for you to be competitive in a world of AI, where you want deep contextual understanding of what's happening across the vehicle and being able to create these highly immersive, highly evolving experiences that get better and better over time. And so I think every car company is either going to try to develop it themselves, which is hard because they don't typically have those skill sets. Try to source it from suppliers. That's very hard because those companies are precisely the ones that don't want to see all their little computers go away. Or, work with us. Obviously, I have a biased point of view, but we think of the Volkswagen partnership as this, the ultimate billboard for the idea. To be able to deploy this platform in such a wide range of vehicles from flagship Porsches down to a $22,000 European Volkswagen demonstrates the scalability of this architecture. And so I think that's going to be a huge change that must come. And if doesn't, if manufacturers don't make that change, they're just going to lose market share. And the ones that do have that technology are going to gain a lot of market share in the next 10 years. John (00:49:16): I think people don't realize how much with traditional car manufacturing, the brands are in the car assembly business. And you're going to “car Costco” and you're filling your cart with, “We need a backup proximity sensor and we need a rear view mirror adjuster. We're spending a lot of time on our side mirror adjustment system and things like that,” but they're assembling all these components from sub-manufacturers that are not integrated. I think your point is, in a traditional car, the backup beeping sensor, oh, it can only beep. That's the only thing it does. And so you can't integrate it with the rest of the car and the systems because of that approach. Whereas, you think the integrated approach is just definitely going to win. RJ (00:49:55): What's also, it's an interesting moment in time, because if you were to build a spreadsheet that looked at all the features of a classic network architecture versus us, you'd say there's actually looks like you have all the same features. But then you look at how they're created. And in our case, we have on a relative scale, a small team of software developers that control everything and we can make changes very quickly. If you have an idea, I can put it into the next release and it'll be the car in two weeks. And you compare that with something that's very, very requirements driven. So the manufacturer's requirements are sometimes years out, and it may be things like the seat will have six presets, and that gets hardwired in and it's very hard to change things or evolve things. And so I think that again, it's a moment in time where there's a huge amount of effort to try to have a similar set of features to what we do, but then they can't do cool things like we do. So we have a couple of things we do every year that try to flex this into a very easy to understand consumer— John (00:50:54): And the simplest version of it, sorry, you're probably going to say something like this. But the simplest version I see is, I'll walk out to the car and it unlocks based on phone proximity and adjust the seats to be, again, based on knowing that it's me. It's minor but it's really nice. RJ (00:51:08): But that's like 15 different companies. So you have to do HVAC adjustments, seat adjustment, lighting adjustment, exterior sound, interior sound vehicle state, battery state. But here's where it's exciting, is we can do something like a Halloween mode. So we do one every year and the cars get dressed up. So last year we had a Knight Rider version, we had a Back to the Future version. And when you walk up to your car and it's in that mode, it does a totally different sequence. It plays, in the case of Knight Rider, like the light on the front go, you get in the inside of the car is different lighting sequences, different sounds, and it's just for Halloween. But that's only possible if you control all those systems. And so we're at the tip of the iceberg of being able to do these very immersive, very hard to recreate modes that are just, you can't do with a traditional architecture. John (00:51:57): Knight Rider was early to having a lot of on-device compute the value of a zonal architecture and systems integration. Speaking of Knight Rider, that was a Pontiac Trans Am, if I recall. Cars used to have cool names. You have Mustang Thunderbird, all these really nice names. El Dorado, very evocative. Now we have R1, R2 model 3 X5. Have we lost a bit of the sense of adventure? Could we have some? RJ (00:52:26): Yeah, could we? It's a good question. John (00:52:28): Evocative names? RJ (00:52:29): Names alpha numeric versus name. We decided to just keep things simple and we had, it's a structured name design. John (00:52:34): Again, but you're surprised and delight company. You have a Knight Rider mode. RJ (00:52:38): Yeah, I don’t know, maybe we should— John (00:52:39): Is something that's befitting of an R1 or— RJ (00:52:41): Yeah, we had those debates. John (00:52:42): You guys are super outdoorsy. Like Apple’s taken the Yosemite El Capitan naming scheme. But again, I feel like there's a lot of— RJ (00:52:50): So all of our cars end up having code names. John (00:52:51): Could we just use the code names as the public names? RJ (00:52:53): The code name for Gen 2 is Peregrine, which is— John (00:52:57): Beautiful! RJ (00:52:59): It’s a super fast Falcon. John (00:52:59): Would anyone here buy a Rivian Peregrine? Yeah, I’m seeing a lot of takers. RJ (00:53:00): But you'll laugh. So the first batch of prototypes we built, then the first one of those vehicles of R1, like production representative, the code name for that vehicle was Avocado. So that may be less of a saleable name. John (00:53:13): Okay, I can help you with the names again—back to the bikeshed point—I'm happy to advise on that. As we talk about the Rivian business. Think about a car business 20 years ago, say a US manufacturer. I think we regard it as a hard business, capital intensive. It's about getting to a significant number of units and market share. Being disciplined on price, generally trying to move people up from sedans to higher value vehicles, is at least for the American car makers, how they try to improve the business. How should investors think about what the Rivian business is today where there's again, the classic car business where you're trying to sell a lot of units, trying to get volumes up and you do other stuff like you do insurance and lending and things like that. But car makers have always done that to drive more volumes, or is the business actually very meaningfully different from a classic automaker where you have this big Volkswagen deal that sounds like a capital-light, more kind of B2B side of the business. Obviously, people talk about how ride sharing is going to change things. So I'm curious how much Rivian is a classic car business done well, where it's a P times Q, we're going to sell a lot of cars and make a margin on them and you have the volume ramp. Versus, how much is it, “Oh, this is actually a totally different kind of business and we are going to rent cars to people in the ride sharing world or we're going to sell software to other car manufacturers”? RJ (00:54:31): I would characterize—there's three parts of the business. The volume of selling vehicles and the revenue associated that is quite large. And so even with each, today it's $90,000 for every sale, but let's say it's half that. It still just creates a tremendous amount of revenue and helps cover a lot of the fixed costs and allows you to develop technology that even if a small percentage of that is being put back into technology, allows you to develop a lot of technology. And so that's core to what we believe and we built a brand that people really love. So we just need to get to higher volume products to pull that together. John (00:55:09): Like 200,000 R2s times 50K per is 10 of revenue? You can really start to move up the revenue— RJ (00:55:18): So this year… last year I think we were just around $5 billion. So we'll see our revenue really start to climb. So that is absolutely a part of the business. Then there is technology sales and there's a lot of different ways to accomplish that, but Volkswagen is an example of that. But we look at what we're doing across our technology stack. There's a bunch of areas that we believe are things that can be monetized to generate incremental revenue and often revenue that has a higher-margin profile than, let's say, the vehicle sales. Vehicle sales, that comfortably sitting at when we get to the right steady state, 20 to 25% gross margin. And then there's a third piece, which is different business models. And a big unlock here is actually just being D2C, being direct to consumer. With the exception of us and Tesla, every manufacturer today sells through distributors and distributors then onto dealers, or in a few cases direct to dealers. But nonetheless, there's a middle layer. John (00:56:16): I didn’t realize there's two middle layers. You have to sell to distributors who sell to dealers. RJ (00:56:19): Yeah. Often it's a distributor then to a dealer. That often draws the attention to the sale saying, “Oh, you're paying a third party, 10 to 15% to sell your car”. That's true. That's a far less efficient way to sell the vehicle than having a direct relationship. But I think that the unappreciated part of it is you lose out on all the business that happens post-sale. And so the service business actually becomes a very large part of our revenue generation. And if you look at car dealers and if you know any friends that own large car dealer groups, they're very profitable. And where they make the vast majority of their money is on service. The thing you have to wrap your head around though is in the beginning, service is not a profitable business because you have to build. So you're investing a very large amount in building capacity. So service infrastructure, so a ton of CapEx. You have to build up a large team of service technicians. This is a huge spend category for us. And in the beginning we're just performing warranty work. We don't really have paying service yet. But it suddenly goes from this thing that's a cost center, and either feeding in as part of a warranty expense, or feeding in as OpEx, and suddenly it becomes COGS and profitable COGS and it's like an afterburner to the business. The car park’s then at a big enough size where it just is throwing off billions of dollars a year in profit. That's the goal. The services side of the business we think of as quite interesting in the long term and something we protect. And it becomes even more valuable if you have a software defined vehicle because there's an opportunity. Thinking about used cars. Used cars are another huge profit center for the auto industry. And today when you buy a used car, if you're a business that's buying a used car to then sell to someone else, you buy it, you maybe do a 25-point check, maybe you do a 50-point check. You maybe put some sort of a stamp on it to say this has got an additional warranty, but you actually have very little understanding of what the health of the asset is and you have no ability to incrementally improve the asset with software improvements, with a software update. We control that so we can decide, “Hey, we want to invest in making software improvements that will raise the value of these vehicles.” And so it allows us to play very differently in the residual space and uniquely control and have profit built into the used car business. And so that's another arm that today, it represents a very small percentage of our revenue. There's not a lot of used Rivian transactions. We participate in a lot of them. We buy Rivians and sell them, but in the long term it becomes very big business. John (00:58:49): Okay. This is very interesting. So a traditional car maker, part of why the business is hard is because you sell units and the business is the least recurring revenue you can imagine where you're— RJ (00:58:58): All the recurring revenue somebody else gets. John (00:58:59): Exactly. And so you're always in this dog fight for next year’s sales and the following year’s sales. Whereas you're saying you guys are selling cars and then you have monthly active users of Rivian out there and you have a direct service business, because you have direct relationships with those customers. And that really changes the direct business. Nevermind the B2B stuff. RJ (00:59:18): It depends on the brand, but if you look at it like this: for every car that's sold, whatever its sale price is, the revenue over the life of the vehicle is generally around two to two-and-a-half X the initial sale price. But that's over a 15-year time horizon. John (00:59:32): Sure, sure. RJ (00:59:33): But there's a lot of revenue that happens associated with the vehicle. And of course we know that. Think of all the businesses that exist that are not car companies that exist because of those cars. And so some of those businesses have less relevance in an EV world. So do I need to go to a Jiffy Lube to change the oil? No, but would I like to have a software update? Definitely. And so you see this— John (00:59:58): That's still a complex thing. There's still components that wear out.. My car is telling me to rotate my tires. Why do I need to rotate my tires? RJ (01:00:04): In your car? Because we are biasing the front tires when you're in efficiency mode. So it's wearing the front tires a little bit faster than the rear tires. John (01:00:11): And then Gen 2, it does this dynamically? RJ (01:00:13): Gen 2 on the… Yeah, it can, if you put it in what we call the all-purpose mode. And then R2 is even better because the way we do it dynamically is we—I'll go deep here for just one second. So it's a permanent magnet motor, and a permanent magnet motor generates losses if it's spinning. And so what we do is when you're in conserve mode, it automatically disconnects the rear axle. And so you're using just the front. On Gen 2 with the dual motor, we dynamically disconnect the axle, even in all-purpose. And then R2, we've been able to make it so fast that it connects and disconnects so you don't even know it's happening. So you can be in—it feels really sporty because when you hit the throttle, it all very, very quickly connects everything. John (01:00:54): Oh, that's cool. RJ (01:00:54): But you have to mechanically disconnect their axle. So, you think, can you do that in 140 milliseconds? It's a lot of stuff to do in 140 milliseconds. John (01:01:04): And going to two-wheel-drive rather than four-wheel-drive. That's an efficiency thing? RJ (01:01:07): Yeah, because you turn off—you completely disconnect the motors. So there's no losses associated with spinning the permanent magnet machine. John (01:01:13): Interesting. Okay. The big EV story of the past 10 years has been the China ramp-up. Obviously, the Chinese EVs are cheap but they're also very good. How did China get so good at EVs and how does the US continue to be competitive with the global market? Obviously the US is protected as a market, but as you think about winning other countries, say Europe. RJ (01:01:37): Europe in particular, yeah. There's two pieces of the China story and I think the one that we often are drawn to is the cost story. And so, one of the things about the car industry is everybody buys everybody's products. And so you can go buy, if it's on the market, you can buy it. So everyone buys them, they take them apart. John (01:01:59): There’s Jim Farley talking about EVs. RJ (01:02:01): On the mechanical side, there's nothing that's not seen by every car company. So when we launch R2, everyone will have it. Everyone will take it apart. And so what I call out is that there's not any magic that’s happening in terms of how Chinese vehicles are manufactured—the processes, the design of the components and the systems. There's high degrees of overlap in some cases, very similar to what we have here in the US and very similar to some of the things we've done within Rivian. Or if you look at comparisons to Tesla or others, there's obviously clean designs, so they have great part consolidation, part elimination, but there's not something that you'd look at and say, “Oh aha, this is how the cost has come down.” And what's driven the cost down is that you have the compounding benefits of much lower cost of capital across not just the manufacturer, the vehicle manufacturer, but across their whole supply chain. So tier one, tier two, tier three, everyone's cost of capital is in some cases zero, or close to zero, because a lot of that capital is provided by the local government. And in some of the larger companies’ cases, the federal government, or the equivalent of the federal government. And then you have a much lower cost of labor. You put those two things together, and you multiply it across every part, all the way down to every source of raw material. It just ends up with a cost structure that's very advantaged relative to the western world. Particularly very advantaged relative to the United States. And that doesn't translate. Meaning if you took a car, the exact same design of a Chinese car and you produce that in the United States, with a US or North American-centric supply chain, in North American cost of capital, the cost would be much, much higher. And so we're seeing tariffs in the case of the United States go in place that try to take up the fact that there's difference in labor costs, difference in cost of capital. I think Europe's a big question as to what happens there. But depending on how those regulations fall, if there's zero trade friction between let's say a country in China, more production in the fullness of time will shift to China because of those advantages, the lower cost of labor, lower cost of capital. John (01:04:03): But is it not just the cost structure? Because you've seen the videos of the champagne glasses on the— RJ (01:04:09): So that's the second part. So that's the second thing. And this is the part that I think, I'm glad you touched on this. This is the part that actually everyone should be taking note of, which is the technology is very good. And this isn't true for every Chinese car, but there's a subset of the Chinese brands that have done an excellent job, in many ways for the same reasons that Tesla and Rivian have developed our technology differently than the incumbent manufacturers, that they started with a clean sheet. And so if you start with a clean sheet, you're going to naturally look at this and say, well, let's design a zonal architecture with as few computers as possible. Let's own our software stack. We're not going to have it owned by 50 different suppliers and abstracted across a hundred different islands of software. Let's vertically integrate around the high-voltage systems. To end up making a lot of these very logical, first principles decisions in ways that are not too different from a Rivian or not too different from a Tesla. And then because the cost structures such that they've been able to say yes in some cases to more features. They haven't done the powered— John (01:05:13): Even they have not done the powered rear-view mirror. RJ (01:05:14): But you could see they've said yes to more features because they have the cost structure to enable that. And so I think that if I'm a Western manufacturer, that would be my biggest concern, is that you have to very rapidly go build a software-centric architecture and a world-class electronic stack to support. That is sort of obvious, but I think that's a big part of what led to our deal with Volkswagen is we offered an ability to very quickly get to that state. I think every manufacturer should be thinking, “How do we build a software-defined architecture as quickly as possible?” Because to be competitive on a world stage, you need to have it. John (01:05:58): Yeah, I can buy that. How do you feel about the phasing out of the EV credits? RJ (01:06:02): In the short term, I think it's going to create some headwinds. And in the longer term—I say this often—I think it's hard to argue that it's going to create a less competitive environment. So you see a lot of manufacturers pulling back on their EV investment. I think that's… Myopically, I'd say it's good for Rivian, but I'd say it's bad for the world. It's bad for my kids. I think it's unfortunate that we don't have more companies leaning in. The best measure of the underinvestment in this space and the lack of highly compelling product is that there's a single company, Tesla, that still has around 50% market share in the United States. The United States is at around 8% of new vehicle sales are electric. John (01:06:43): Isn't that a surprisingly low number? 8% of new vehicle sales in the United States are electric. If you're to ask someone to guess, I feel like they guess a higher number. RJ (01:06:50): But here's why. If our products that Rivian sells today, our flagship products, I really believe that R2 will expand the 8%. But if I'm buying a vehicle and I want to spend less than $50K, there's hundreds of choices in the ICE world. I can get sedans, I can get coops, I can get convertibles, I can get minivans, I can get crossovers, SUVs, all these different choices, different brands. If I'm buying an EV, I think there's truly, I think there’s— John (01:07:19): You think it's just a choice issue. RJ (01:07:20): I think there's two choices: I think it's a Model 3 or Model Y today and everything else is—there's maybe a few that are getting close. John (01:07:26): Everyone clearly likes crossover as judging from the internal combustion world. RJ (01:07:29): I think for the first time with R2, you'll have a choice that's highly compelling that's not a Tesla, that's not to say anything negative about Tesla. John (01:07:37): Will the R2 be the first affordable crossover? RJ (01:07:40): There's others. I'd say it's going to be the first highly compelling, affordable… That's the key part, is you need it to be highly compelling. And so there's been a number of EV launches from existing manufacturers that haven't gone that well. And I think we get the causality backwards. We say, oh, it's because customers aren't ready to buy EVs. And I say, well, no, it's because the EV is not that compelling. And the existence proof that if you have a highly compelling product, there will be a lot of demand is Tesla. The Model Y is one of the best-selling cars in the world. Now we just need to have 20 other choices in order to start to really make a dent. And then if you compare this to China where there is a lot more choice—China is at a three-and-a -half, four times higher level of adoption of electrification than we are. And the slope of the curve is very steep. We have a choice issue here in the US, is our view. John (01:08:25): Last question. Where did the name Rivian come from? RJ (01:08:28): So Rivian is a play on words. I grew up on the Indian River, and so it's the first few letters of the word “river” and the last three letters of the word “Indian,” I-A-N. We came up with all these different ideas, but we wanted something that was phonetically smooth and nice, but didn't mean anything in any language. John (01:08:43): Indian River. RJ (01:08:44): Now it's so natural, but when we first started using it, it was like, “Is that right?” John (01:08:47): It's a great name. It sounds really nice. Yeah. Alright, well RJ, thank you. Super fun. RJ (01:08:50): Thanks for having me.