How Rivian Is Pulling Off Its $45,000 R2 Electric SUV
How Rivian Is Pulling Off Its $45,000 R2 Electric SUV
WIRED talks to CEO RJ Scaringe about how the automaker’s engineering team learned to say no—or make some compromises to create a smaller, more affordable electric car.
Last week, the electric automaker Rivian unveiled the R2, its latest electric SUV. When the vehicle starts rolling off production lines—in the first half of 2026, Rivian says—the R2 will join the R1S SUV and the R1T pickup truck in the automaker’s lineup.
Critically, Rivian pledges its newest entry will be cheaper: At “around” $45,000, according Rivian’s press materials, the SUV will cost some $30,000 less than its bigger SUV cousin, and will still come with about 300 miles of range.
Pulling off the feat of making its new SUV more affordable without sacrificing range or style should not only prove critical in making Rivian’s latest ride stand out in an increasingly crowded field of electric vehicles—it also might save the company. How did Rivian make it work? “R1 was designed through addition. It’s our premium flagship. We got to say yes to a lot of things,” Jeff Hammoud, the automaker’s chief design officer, said at an R2 unveiling event in Laguna Beach, California, last week. “With R2, we’re really thinking about, to get the price point down, what do we need to say no to?”
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A story about the pricing of a car that won't deliver for another 2 years?!
When you are 23, two years is forever. When you are 53, two years is like next week.
Yeah, but thats not the issue here, though.
Its like the cybertruck or the F150 Lightning, where they were making all these promises of their affordable pricing, and then by the time the car released, the price had ballooned. So the question here is, once the R2 is out, will it still really be around $45K?
Good point. How did this go with R1? Did they make any pricing "promises" years before launch? Did they hold up?
Gotta build hype and preorders! I'm hoping Rivian sticks around long enough and scales up enough that I can get an R3 in 5 years.