Pod Insights THIS CAR POD! with Doug DeMuro & Friends! Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe on the Future of Rivian, EV Sports Cars, and Depreciation! THIS CAR POD! EP73 About this episode Have a question you want answered on the podcast next week? Ask HERE
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Welcome to THIS CAR POD! Doug DeMuro & Friends offers weekly expert insight and opinion, on the breaking automotive stories, the car market, and audience Q&A.
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CHAPTERS:
00:00:00 THIS CAR POD!
00:00:20 The Quail
00:04:32 RJ Responds to Q2 Rivian Losses
00:09:49 Rivian Under Tariffs
00:12:00 Ford's New EV
00:16:25 Chrysler Goes Gas
00:24:01 Talk Cars
00:24:15 RJ's Volkswagen Corrado
00:27:03 The Rivian Sportscar
00:35:31 What About The Electric Sportscar?
00:46:38 How Fast Is RJ's Rivian?
00:49:23 Why Isn't RJ In The News Like Elon?
00:52:51 What Other Automotive CEOs Do You Admire?
00:53:59 RJ On The E39 M5
00:54:51 Market Report
00:58:25 EV Depreciation
01:00:26 Community Questions
01:00:46 What About A Rivian Wrangler?
01:02:31 What About A Gas Range Extender?
01:03:48 What New Quirks and Features Will Rivian's Have?
01:06:41 What Would You Rivian Restomod?
01:08:55 What Would Be The Rivian Halo Car?
01:10:53 Where Are The Original Rivians?
01:12:37 Final Thoughts
#dougdemuro #thiscarpod #carsandbids #rivian
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Transcript 16,378 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:04 Doug DeMuro? Hello and welcome to This Car Pod.
1:07 Speaker 03 I'm Ken.
1:08 Speaker 04 I'm Filippo.
1:08 Doug DeMuro? And today we have a special guest, Rivian CEO and founder, RJ Scaringe.
1:14 Speaker 03 Thanks for having me.
1:14 Speaker 04 Welcome, RJ.
1:15 Doug DeMuro? Thank you for joining. This is a big deal for us. Huge.
1:18 Speaker 03 Same.
1:20 Doug DeMuro? We're sitting here at the Quail Motorsports Gathering or something, and we're at the Rivian booth where we have all sorts of Rivians around us, and we're gonna talk cars and we're gonna talk Rivian. So, thank you for coming.
1:32 Speaker 03 Not just Rivian.
1:33 Doug DeMuro? Not just Rivian.
1:34 Speaker 03 We'll have other topics.
1:34 Doug DeMuro? We got a whole big show.
1:35 Speaker 03 Probably.
1:36 Doug DeMuro? And we're gonna start, as we always do, with the news. You wanna start?
1:40 Speaker 03 Yeah. First, we're gonna talk about the Quail in general. We've been walking around all morning. Are there any good reveals so far that you've seen?
1:46 Speaker 04 Well, first thing, point I wanna make is this has kinda become like the new Geneva Motor Show. There's so many reveals that are just happening. This was just kind of an enthusiast show for a long time, and now it's like the place. There's so many different manufacturer releases.
1:56 Doug DeMuro? There's Bugattis, there's an Acura.
1:58 Speaker 04 Bugatti, yeah.
1:59 Speaker 03 Chevrolet revealed the CX concept, which is the future of the Corvette.
2:03 Doug DeMuro? Future of the Corvette. It's got a cockpit that comes off.
2:04 Speaker 03 Apparently.
2:05 Doug DeMuro? RJ, have you seen anything that you like here so far? Aside from the Rivians, which we'll get to?
2:10 Speaker 03 Of course. Yeah, the Rivians look nice. It's funny, I was walking with my three sons, 976 age, and they're looking around, they're saying, "Hey Dad, is that cool? Is this cool?" And I'm like, "That's not cool. This is super cool."
2:23 Doug DeMuro? Okay, now, so what do we tell them now? Now we gotta get into it. What do we tell them is not cool?
2:30 Doug DeMuro? Other electric cars.
2:31 Speaker 04 There's some beautifully, you know, there's like wonderful historic vehicles that are here and they're just, you know, the kids just walk by it and I'm like, hey, that's, that's,
2:39 Doug DeMuro? Right, yeah.
2:40 Speaker 04 275 GTB, like, guys, take a second, look at it.
2:43 Doug DeMuro? Right.
2:44 Speaker 04 And then they'll see some highly modified thing and ask me about that and I'm like, no, that's,
2:49 Speaker 04 Man, man after my own car, that's great.
2:51 Speaker 05 Did they, were they excited about seeing 17 different Ferrari F50s? Or like after one or two, were they bored?
2:56 Speaker 04 Yeah, after one, I think they were.
2:58 Speaker 05 To be honest, I was too.
2:59 Speaker 04 The F50 thing is crazy.
3:01 Speaker 05 There are legitimately 17 on the other side of the line.
3:02 Doug DeMuro? There's also like 17 Shelby GT350s, which I know is more up your alley.
3:06 Speaker 04 Yeah.
3:07 Doug DeMuro? Okay, so, but we want to, we're talking news here and have there been any specific they've used? There was the Bugatti.
3:12 Speaker 04 Yeah, so the, the, yeah, so the Bugatti is actually more the reveal of a program. So it's called their solitary program where they're making one-off cars and they, which they've done before. But the thing that was interesting to me, this one's called the Bullard, which is, but it's based on, the engine is the W16. So the new car has the V16.
3:28 Doug DeMuro? Yeah.
3:29 Speaker 04 But they're continuing this W16.
3:30 Doug DeMuro? So that's based off the previous car?
3:32 Speaker 04 Yes, and they're, but they're going to continue to use that for this program, which I think is very interesting.
3:36 Doug DeMuro? There is a new Lamborghini.
3:37 Speaker 05 Is there? I thought it was like a special edition Wilton.
3:40 Doug DeMuro? It hasn't been revealed yet, well, yeah.
3:42 Speaker 05 I mean, it has, an hour ago.
3:43 Doug DeMuro? Oh, it was an hour ago? We bumped into the Lambo guy this morning and he said, here's what it is, here's what it's called, but don't tell anybody I told you that. For another hour.
3:50 Speaker 05 Right.
3:51 Doug DeMuro? I guess it's all.
3:52 Speaker 05 But what is it? This, by the way, doesn't come out till Sunday, so you're good.
3:55 Doug DeMuro? Oh, okay, all right.
3:55 Speaker 05 There's no embargo on this. Just, just for clarity.
3:57 Doug DeMuro? What is it called, the Phenomeno?
3:59 Speaker 04 I think so.
4:00 Doug DeMuro? Oh, wow. We haven't spent enough time.
4:01 Speaker 04 We were busy, I was distracted by F50s.
4:04 Speaker 05 The reveal that I'm most excited about, of course, is the Acura RDX. No, I'm so, I'm so sorry.
4:09 Doug DeMuro? RSX.
4:09 Speaker 05 Not the RDX, RSX, which is a small EV SUV.
4:14 Doug DeMuro? Concept.
4:14 Speaker 05 You, you must be very frightened as, as a maker of EV SUVs.
4:17 Speaker 04 I don't know, frightened, I think it's great to see, great to see things coming out, yeah.
4:22 Doug DeMuro? This is a special event where there are a lot of very cool cars being shown and those are a few of them. There are others. I haven't checked out this Corvette thing. They literally just pulled the wraps off it, so we'll have to do that later. But that is kind of our interesting vehicle news at Quail and there's still more happening.
4:37 Speaker 04 Well, it's fun to be here. It's like, again, it's kind of replaced Motor Show, so it's cool to see it up close and be around for it.
4:41 Speaker 05 This is my first time here and it's wild just to see both the cars that are here generally, your Countach included, and then what they're revealing. And it's automakers that I don't care about. I care about the Rivian stand, the Acura stand.
4:54 Doug DeMuro? Fleeb only likes the regular brands. He's not into the super.
4:57 Speaker 04 I'm into supercars. He's into regular stuff and Doug is.
4:59 Speaker 05 And therefore this is not my event, but it is wonderful nonetheless.
5:02 Speaker 04 Yeah.
5:03 Speaker 03 The parking lot here is.
5:03 Speaker 05 The parking lot.
5:04 Doug DeMuro? Very special.
5:05 Speaker 04 That's the best.
5:05 Speaker 03 It's really enjoyable.
5:07 Doug DeMuro? Yeah. In fact, there is actually a parking lot best in show award, which you can vote for. You go out in the parking lot, you take a lot of things out there and you can write in a thing and submit it somewhere.
5:15 Speaker 04 May have cast my vote for an E39 M5.
5:17 Doug DeMuro? Wow, your own.
5:21 Speaker 03 There's a white two-door Mercedes wagon with a full interior.
5:24 Doug DeMuro? We saw that yesterday. It's like a wagon, but it's a two-door.
5:27 Speaker 03 Yeah.
5:28 Doug DeMuro? Some sort of custom thing. Okay, so that's, this is Quail news. Let's talk industry news, Fleeb.
5:33 Speaker 05 Yeah.
5:34 Doug DeMuro? Can you give us some interesting industry news?
5:35 Speaker 05 We have some real questions for you. So last week on the podcast, we talked a little bit about, we filmed it right after Q2 results were announced for Rivian. And we figured we have you on the podcast this week. You're the right man to ask. Obviously some increase in revenue year over year, Q2. Also a little bit more, more burn. What is the story that you all are telling around it? What led to that quarter?
5:56 Speaker 03 To Q2?
5:57 Speaker 05 To Q2, yeah.
5:58 Speaker 03 Q2 is a challenge for us because we had the significant drop in production where if you look at Q1, we produced around 14,000 vehicles and Q2 we produced around six. And the reason for that significant drop was a lot of really abrupt changes to the supply chain. In our case, we produced 100% of our cars in the United States and of course 100% of those are electric. So the export controls are on heavier earth metals.
6:21 Speaker 05 Yeah.
6:22 Speaker 03 So effectively magnets really hurt us because we only make electric cars and every electric car needs magnets to make the motor. So
6:31 Speaker 03 we had to do a lot of work to come up with a new supply chain and really like dramatically shift how we were sourcing a lot of the materials to go into our motors. And so we just had like an abrupt slowdown in production and. You know, the the nature of our business is high fixed costs. So the cost went up. The cost stayed the same, but we weren't, you know, we weren't spreading those costs across a lot more volumes. So. You know, we guided that the second half of the year, we're going to actually produce more vehicles in the first half. We think Q3 is going to be a really strong sales quarter, just in part because of the ending of the $7,500 tax credit. So a lot of folks are going to be pushing to get their EVs right now.
7:08 Speaker 05 Are these trucks eligible, the R1T and R1S?
7:10 Speaker 03 There they are. So under, if you lease an R1, you you qualify.
7:14 Speaker 05 Okay.
7:15 Speaker 03 But yeah, so a bunch of sort of compounding factors, but look, we're couldn't be more excited. We're we're coming up on the launch of R2. And R2 is for me, you know, R1 is like a labor of many, many years of love. R2's benefits from an organization is so much more mature. And so the everything from how it's manufactured, to how it's serviced, to the performance relative to its cost is it's really, really cool.
7:42 Speaker 05 Yeah, I remember hearing, was reviewing the Q2 results, that you guys predicted tariffs will impact about will cost about two grand or three grand per vehicle you you sell, which is wild. And I think we often think about tariffs as impacting cars that are imported, but as you said, they're all made in the US, but it's still a what, 3%, 5% to 5% impacts depending on the model. That's notable.
8:01 Speaker 03 The other thing about auto is, I mean, as you guys know so well, it's not, I think a lot of times we talk about tariffs and we sort of equate the economy to as if we're like buying and selling t-shirts and coffee cups, like really simple supply chains. There's a really complex supply chain. So we buy, we take like our headlight. We buy that as an assembly from a US manufacturer. And it comes, you know, it's built in the US. It has about 20 suppliers into it. And those 20 suppliers then each have about 10 to 15 suppliers. So there's hundreds of companies involved with making our headlight. And many of those companies are getting materials that come from outside the United States, and that's a one part.
8:40 Speaker 05 Right, right.
8:41 Speaker 03 And so the the ripple across something with such a complex supply chain is is hard to fully appreciate.
8:48 Speaker 05 Right.
8:48 Speaker 03 Whereas we buy 3,000 parts, put them together, but there's actually. More than 10x that in terms of discrete components that are going into the car. Because we buy assembly.
8:58 Speaker 05 Right.
8:59 Speaker 03 Yeah, so it's, you know, it does, despite the fact that we're very US centric and we're very vertically integrated, it still adds a few thousand dollars in cost.
9:07 Speaker 05 One of the things that we struggle with is like, we care a lot about the market, we read a lot about the market, but we're not deep in it. And I feel like one of the hard parts is, from the outside, is how do you actually figure out what is tariff, what is not? There's a lot of changing rules. And I imagine as you're thinking about suppliers, you've tried to focus on, as everybody, every tech company did, do I move production to India instead of China? But now there's additional tariffs there. Have you been, how have you been managing that?
9:30 Speaker 03 I mean, to your first question.
9:34 Speaker 05 Is there a better guidance?
9:34 Speaker 03 There is a, there is a daily stand-up meeting we have within Rivian that says like, what's changed in the last 24 hours? Which, I didn't anticipate having, but every 24 hours, we review what, what has changed in terms of trade policy, tariffs? And so that informs like, what are we doing that day, that week?
9:52 Speaker 05 Yeah.
9:52 Speaker 03 To react. And then there's a longer-term strategy that we're building. And some of these decisions are really hard. So take wiring harnesses.
9:59 Speaker 05 Right.
9:59 Speaker 03 Very labor-intensive. Almost all of the wiring harnesses for cars built in the United States are manufactured in Mexico because of the much lower cost of labor.
10:07 Speaker 05 And because till about four months ago, that was free to trade across.
10:11 Speaker 03 Yeah, multi-decade North American Free Trade Agreement. And so when that changed, everybody's like, wow. Should we start building wiring harnesses in the United States? But then you don't want to like invest a bunch of capital to build production capacity, then have the rules changing in a couple of years? And then have a really expensive wiring harness production line.
10:30 Speaker 05 Right.
10:31 Speaker 03 So there's, in many cases, there's decisions where we're essentially saying, we're going to continue to source from a lower cost location. And just pay the tariffs in the, in the short term, you know, short term meaning next few years.
10:43 Speaker 05 Yeah.
10:44 Speaker 03 And then in some cases, we've made the decision to bring in, you know, bring into the United States. But it's, these are hard trade-offs.
10:49 Speaker 05 Is the assumption?
10:51 Doug DeMuro? That in a post-President Trump world, some of these things go like, are you operating under that assumption generally that maybe you're not going to have to worry about this stuff soon? And so it's not worth that big investment for some of this stuff?
11:01 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's a it's a good question. I'd say there's there's a we actually have a like a live working memo. And there's a few categories in it. One is, what are the things we think are going to stay? Like, what's what are changes that are going to be, you know, sticky? And then what do we think is going to move around? So one of the things that we think is is going to be persistently with us in terms of like, the US economy is trade policy that makes it very hard to do a lot of business with China.
11:31 Doug DeMuro? Sure.
11:31 Speaker 03 And so it's one of the few categories of topics where the the left and the right agree. There's a very, very strong anti-China trade mentality. And so, of course, we're not building supply chains that have any reliance or dependence on China. One of the ones we think is going to be moving around a lot over the next few years is trade within North America. And it's been such a pillar of our economy and so much CapEx has gone into Canada and Mexico.
11:56 Doug DeMuro? Yeah.
11:57 Speaker 03 That I it's hard to imagine a world where we don't return to friendly trade relationships with our northern and southern neighbors. And and I think that's generally the point of view. Most companies believe that.
12:09 Doug DeMuro? Yeah.
12:10 Speaker 03 And
12:10 Doug DeMuro? So you're kind of operating with that.
12:12 Speaker 03 And so we're not replacing Mexican supply chains with US supply chains, but we are very much making sure we don't have China dependent.
12:18 Doug DeMuro? Yeah, which seems like the story we're hearing from other other companies and other automakers.
12:22 Speaker 05 You guys are also one of the few EV manufacturers that hasn't developed a China market product or a real focus on the Chinese market generally.
12:29 Speaker 03 We yeah, so we actually didn't have a lot of content out of China to start. And, you know, we'd done a lot of the sourcing activity at R2 in like, a lot of the contracts being written in the summer of 2024. And it was pretty clear then.
12:44 Doug DeMuro? Six months too soon.
12:45 Speaker 03 No, but even then, you could say like, regardless who wins this election. Like, we're not gonna go become really close buddies.
12:50 Speaker 05 Yeah.
12:51 Speaker 03 You know, the US and China, so we already made the decision to not really rely.
12:55 Speaker 05 Never mind that at the moment tariffs are not that much more significant than they are some other countries where you may have expected different. Yeah.
13:00 Doug DeMuro? Um, obviously tariffs been a big story for us, but we want to move on to other things.
13:04 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, sorry, sorry, sorry.
13:05 Doug DeMuro? Let's talk about Ford and Ford's recently announced EV platform.
13:08 Speaker 05 Yeah, so last week Ford has announced that they're planning on building a $30,000 pickup truck. And much more importantly, they are also, they've announced this kind of new production methodology where instead of there being a single production line, there's a bunch of different inputs that then create one, that flow into one thing.
13:25 Speaker 05 Huge news for Ford, obviously, right? A $30,000 pickup truck, electric pickup truck will be huge. They obviously, they refer to it as their Model T moment.
13:31 Speaker 03 Yeah.
13:33 Speaker 05 In reference to how popular this will be and to the factory line. What do you think? First of all, Slate, I have bad news for Slate in that that might kill their market. But how are you guys reacting to this? How are all of you reacting to this?
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14:16 Doug DeMuro? Yeah, what are your thoughts? I mean, I mean, obviously this is, it's an interesting thing to hear about. You know, the Mach-E was kind of already Ford sort of entering in the segment, but it seems like they want to go even higher volume and even lower pricing.
14:26 Speaker 03 Yeah. Look, I, I, I say this all the time, I think it's really important we have choice.
14:33 Speaker 03 You know, as a, as a car enthusiast and as someone that wants to see electric vehicles be really widely adopted where people are excited to be in them. The only way we're going to get there is if we have
14:42 Speaker 05 Yeah.
14:43 Speaker 03 more than a handful of, you know, highly compelling choices. And we see today at the sub $50,000 price point, I'd say there's, you know, more than one, less than five highly compelling choices.
14:55 Speaker 05 Right, yeah.
14:55 Speaker 03 And, and you could
14:56 Speaker 05 I won't ask you which is what.
14:57 Speaker 03 Yeah, and you would certainly two, two of them, you would clearly say are the Model 3 and the Model Y.
15:02 Speaker 05 Yeah.
15:02 Speaker 03 And, and they command together around 50% market share. And that's not actually a good thing. It's like
15:08 Speaker 05 Right.
15:08 Speaker 03 It, that's reflective of an underserved market.
15:10 Speaker 05 Sure.
15:11 Speaker 03 When you have hundreds of compelling choices in the ICE world. And so I think it's great that Ford's working on, you know, a, a product that's going to, you know, from the spec sounds really compelling.
15:21 Speaker 05 Yeah.
15:21 Speaker 03 Um, I think to do it, you do have to rethink architectures. You know, and there's a lot of focus on the manufacturing architecture. I think another element that we're going to see that needs to change is how we think about the network architectures.
15:33 Speaker 05 Yeah.
15:33 Speaker 03 So the topology of compute and how software is architected in the vehicles, I think going to change dramatically over the next, you know, next five to 10 years. And we've, of course, are driving that within our vehicles.
15:43 Speaker 05 Right, I mean, I, I, the biggest takeaway for me from that new story is a lot of their, what they described as minimizing wiring work, changing the architecture for the car itself, despite it being 400 volt instead of 800 volt, is that that's exactly what we all did with the Gen 2. So I imagine you're all moving that direction.
15:58 Speaker 03 Totally. I mean, so we, we have a, we have a large joint venture we put together with Volkswagen.
16:03 Speaker 05 Yeah.
16:03 Speaker 03 So it was a $5.8 billion deal and we're licensing our, what we call our zonal architecture and our software stack. But what that's really doing is it takes what is on the order of call it 75 to 100 little ECUs, little electronic control units that are domain based. So they maybe are driving a window mechanism or an HVAC system. And instead consolidating all that compute into a very small number of computers. And then having all that decisioning and controls driven by a single software OS, operating system. And so I think that's obviously the future state, but it's, it's going to take some time to get there and it's very hard to do.
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17:56 Speaker 05 Yeah, I have a lot of additional questions, but I don't want Ken to just literally fall asleep, so I want to talk about the exact opposite of this.
18:01 Doug DeMuro? Yeah, which is Chrysler.
18:03 Speaker 05 Which is Chrysler and Dodge, right, so Dodge announced this week or finally revealed, we've noticed coming for a long time, the Charger six pack, which is the Hurricane V six powered Charger and they've also announced that the Dodge Durango is coming back with only V eights exclusively V eights despite the fact that they all they claimed it was gonna go out of production.
18:21 Speaker 04 Well, boy, that was quick.
18:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, so Ken is excited again.
18:24 Speaker 04 Yeah.
18:25 Doug DeMuro? This is an interesting situation that's kind of been brewing in addition to what we're talking about with regards to tariffs now you have this sort of sentiment in the consumer world sort of shifting back I don't want to say away from electric vehicles because obviously there's still a lot of interest there but you know the Chrysler was seemed to be kind of going all in stellantis on electric cars and now okay maybe we want engines again.
18:47 Speaker 05 Electric vehicles.
18:48 Doug DeMuro? Maybe we want engines again, maybe we want V eights again.
18:50 Speaker 05 Yeah.
18:51 Doug DeMuro? Which is an interesting thing to see and it's and it's it's also kind of driven by what might end up being a temporary shift in sentiment and in policy and whatever. But nonetheless, this is kind of happening.
19:02 Speaker 04 But I do feel for the manufacturers because that level of whiplash is, I mean, product cycles are designed so far in advance. And, you know, really has things, obviously, electric has become a way of the direction that things are going. So to have to then all of a sudden change again, it's kind of crazy.
19:18 Speaker 05 By the way, they, it's not like they're shifting, I mean, the Hurricane V6 is new, but for a different product initially for the Ram. They're not bringing out a new V8 for the Durango or a new model for the Durango.
19:27 Doug DeMuro? No, but I would argue people don't want the new stuff. They, they actually, what they specifically wanted was the old engines that made the big power and the big torque and sounded like they do. What are your thoughts on sort of a shifting world of, of consumer demand? Is this permanent? Are we going back in the direction of combustion engines?
19:43 Speaker 03 I think a V8 in the Rivian.
19:45 Speaker 04 We're not putting any V8s in a Rivian.
19:49 Speaker 04 I think you're on the edge of your seat.
19:50 Doug DeMuro? But someone will do a swap it. Someone will do that at some point. Someone will figure it out. There is enough YouTube dollars out there. Someone will figure it out.
20:01 Speaker 04 That's a good perspective.
20:02 Doug DeMuro? Someone put the V8 on a Cybertruck.
20:04 Speaker 05 Uh, yeah, but when you have 1,050 horsepower, it's hard to beat that.
20:07 Doug DeMuro? Well, no, you wouldn't be beating it. You'd be downgrading the floor. But, but what are your things? I mean, it's an interesting situation. Obviously, you're noticing this as well.
20:14 Speaker 03 Yeah, you said it. It's, uh, in the list of things I, I didn't expect, which there's a lot, the list is growing. I wouldn't have expected a lot of the manufacturers that had started to really lean into electrification to so quickly lean back out. And then reinvest in engine programs, you know, vehicle programs built around engine architectures. Uh, and you said it, I'm, I'm sure it's challenging for the teams on those programs.
20:39 Speaker 04 I can't imagine.
20:39 Speaker 03 But you can see why. You know, they're optimizing around the short term. There's clearly customers that can be picked up through that. The hard question, uh, you know, for the manufacturers, I think for us as a, as a country and as, as like an industry, is what does the 2030s look like? So the end state is very clear. And if you under invest in electrification and rely in terms of profitability and product desirableness on sort of your classic old hits, if you will, are you going to find yourself unable to compete when the world inevitably does make that full shift? And so. I say this all the time. I really hope everybody continues to lean into electrification. I think more competition is really healthy.
21:20 Doug DeMuro? So you view this as a temporary shift? You view this as this isn't, this isn't going to be something that lasts and sticks around, but nonetheless, it's happening currently. They're going after this, but maybe they're making the wrong decision, chasing short-term customers and short-term revenue and not focused on the long-term.
21:34 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think, and these, these are big shifts. I mean, it's a shift, especially for someone who's, I think if you've been driving cars for 30, 40 years, you're, it was hard to lose the manual transmission.
21:45 Doug DeMuro? And then we have not accepted that, by the way.
21:47 Speaker 03 So that was a hard thing for some people.
21:49 Doug DeMuro? Just to be clear.
21:49 Speaker 03 And then it's like, okay, well, I lost the manual transmission. And then you lose the engine. And so there's, there's a lot of nostalgia, enthusiasm, but that's quickly shifting away. And like, now my kids are very biased, but my kids are like shocked when they're in a car that you have to like change the gears, like, God, this is like
22:07 Doug DeMuro? Interesting.
22:08 Speaker 03 wildly complex.
22:08 Doug DeMuro? The next generation is already growing up normalizing this.
22:11 Speaker 03 Yeah, to them, it's like, wait, so you have the thing you have to do with your left foot, you know, bang. And like, boy, like an Rivian is so much faster. You just go.
22:18 Doug DeMuro? Nonetheless, we do hear, and it is, it is a lot of manufacturers who are saying, okay, Porsche is saying, McConaughey is not selling, Taycan is not selling, Mercedes-Benz EQ is apparently being pulled out of the, the market, except for the thousands of unsold cars that they're going to still have to try to put down. Is, is, does it make you at all nervous that, you know, you're too early, like that, that, that the EV is still not quite ready for the widespread world that we were thinking maybe five years ago we would be at?
22:43 Speaker 03 Well, let me say this. I think it's, I actually think it's bad for the country. I think it's bad for the US competitiveness to have.
22:50 Doug DeMuro? I agree. We've had this point on many times.
22:52 Speaker 03 US manufacturers not need to innovate. Like when you, when you can rely on the crutch of V8 SUVs, or what you, what you've made a lot of money with historically, you're just not going to build the muscle and the, and the capabilities that you need to in this, this state, in this future state that's going to be needed to be globally competitive. So I think that's bad.
23:10 Doug DeMuro? The US 70s again. Yeah, it's like the 70s again. I mean, the US auto industry actually learned this lesson once before, but all those people are gone.
23:18 Speaker 03 Yeah.
23:18 Doug DeMuro? So they're gonna end up having to learn it again pretty soon. I mean, when the Japanese came in and then eventually the Koreans came in and started really having a big effect because they knew how to build a type of car that the Americans weren't building, which is a point that we've tried to make a million times on the show because we get a lot of comments, "Oh, EVs are crap and screw China, who cares?" Well, if China ends up showing up with these cars that are far better than our cars, that's a problem. Their cars float and they bounce. We're gonna get to that.
23:41 Speaker 03 So I think, well, I think it's, like I'd said, I wish this wasn't the case, but it's hard to ignore that it means less competition in the short term.
23:51 Doug DeMuro? Yep.
23:52 Speaker 03 And for pure play EVs, especially pure play EVs that the brands are built around electrification, so Tesla, Rivian, it's definitely gonna create a positive tailwind. And so, and I think you see it, you know, perhaps most pronounced just with what's happening right now, there's a lot of manufacturers have made cars that are electric but that are not super compelling and as a way to get zero emission vehicle credits or to lower their corporate average fuel economy rather than buy credits from Tesla or from Rivian. And they've incentivized those sales very heavily. So you see like very wonky lease deals. You can lease, there's some electric cars you can lease for like 50 bucks.
24:31 Doug DeMuro? Trust us, we know.
24:31 Speaker 03 I'm incredibly well aware.
24:32 Doug DeMuro? Charger EV, have you not thought about going and picking up a Charger EV for 99 bucks?
24:36 Speaker 03 It's like, sort of like, wow, for like 50 bucks, I get a whole car. But that's gonna go away.
24:41 Doug DeMuro? Right.
24:42 Speaker 03 And so then you're gonna be stuck with a more, like, call it, natural market that's behaving based upon real economics. And then I think that the gap between the folks that are not building EVs.
24:53 Doug DeMuro? Yeah.
24:54 Speaker 03 Is gonna grow.
24:55 Doug DeMuro? So the subtext in your answer is you're not nervous about that you're too early, quite the opposite. You think you're well positioned for what will inevitably happen and these other automakers are maybe the ones who are kind of screwing things up.
25:06 Speaker 03 Transitions like this are always tough and it's, there's no, of course, there's no direct analogy that's, has all the exact same things, but if you go back a long time, peak horse was in the 1920s. So like Peak horse right before there was no horse, yeah. Right before there's no horse. Yeah.
25:22 Doug DeMuro? Peak horse.
25:23 Speaker 03 Yeah. I like that. That's a great phrase. And we are, by the way, peak V8.
25:28 Doug DeMuro? I think. Peak V8, as we should be. Okay.
25:30 Speaker 03 I'd say we're peak V12.
25:31 Doug DeMuro? That's the news. That's interesting takes on the news. Interesting to get your perspective on some of the stuff that's happening, but we got to move on to the talk cars segment. Wherein we talk about cars. Now, you're thinking, we were just talking about cars.
25:42 Speaker 03 I want to really talk about.
25:43 Doug DeMuro? Now, we're going to really talk about.
25:44 Speaker 03 Can we still talk about wiring harnesses?
25:46 Doug DeMuro? No, we want to talk about RJ. We want to talk about RJ. RJ, RJ, in addition to the whole Rivian thing, which there's more to cover there, RJ is a car enthusiast.
25:55 Speaker 03 Yeah.
25:55 Doug DeMuro? All right. What are, what are your? We want to know, what are you interested in? What do you like? What are you driving?
26:01 Speaker 03 We know no manuals. His kids don't know about. I love manuals, yeah. You own one? I do own one. Okay, what is it? I have a Volkswagen Corrado.
26:09 Doug DeMuro? Nice.
26:10 Speaker 03 What? VR6. That's awesome.
26:11 Doug DeMuro? You got a V6, okay.
26:13 Speaker 03 It's a, and that's a, it was the first car I owned. So cool. When I was, when I first had it, I modified the heck out of it.
26:21 Doug DeMuro? Is it still modified?
26:22 Speaker 03 No, I sold it. And then I bought a Corrado VR6 again. Nice.
26:27 Doug DeMuro? Wow.
26:28 Speaker 03 So the kids enjoy it. They're like, it's noisy. It's like so crude in there. Try to understand.
26:33 Doug DeMuro? The Corrado VR6 had active aero.
26:35 Speaker 03 Yeah, a little sport.
26:36 Doug DeMuro? Okay, that is interesting. That is very.
26:39 Speaker 03 I wouldn't say that. Not expecting that one.
26:41 Doug DeMuro? No, no. If I had made a list of cars, I thought he would have, that would have been near the bottom of the list, certainly. What else do we drive? Obviously, you got Rivian. You're taking your kids.
26:49 Speaker 03 R2s, R1s.
26:50 Doug DeMuro? You're driving around R2s?
26:51 Speaker 03 Wow. Yeah, there's camouflage R2s.
26:53 Doug DeMuro? How come I can't drive? He's driving around R2s. What am I?
26:56 Speaker 03 You saw one in person, though.
26:58 Doug DeMuro? I did.
26:58 Speaker 03 I haven't.
26:58 Doug DeMuro? So is that it? You got Rivians and a Corrado?
27:01 Speaker 03 Yeah.
27:02 Doug DeMuro? Is that true?
27:03 Speaker 03 It's true.
27:04 Doug DeMuro? What, what cars have you owned in the past?
27:06 Speaker 03 I've owned all kinds of things. I had a Lotus Elise.
27:10 Doug DeMuro? Oh, really?
27:11 Speaker 03 Which was an awesome. You're also a taller gentleman, do you think? It was hard to get in and out of. You know, it's, but that was just, it's really, really fun car. 944 S2, great car, really fun car. Let's see, a 914 Porsche 94.
27:25 Doug DeMuro? Wow, okay.
27:26 Speaker 03 That I was doing. So I, I grew up restoring classic Porsches and working on classic Porsches. And so the 914, because I could not afford the 356s I was working on. So I bought the thing I could afford, the 914. I think that's most 914s. And I was, yeah. I was doing this, it started as a driving car and I made it not a driving car, meaning it did not function. Cause I was in the process of doing a 993 3.6 conversion.
27:52 Doug DeMuro? Oh.
27:52 Speaker 03 So I had 911 turbo brakes on it. All the suspension pickup points on a 914 are the same as a 911 through 1989.
27:59 Doug DeMuro? I didn't know that.
27:59 Speaker 03 Yeah. So it's very easy to do it like a turbo brake kit. You just take out the spindle. Anyways, I stopped that whole project when I started Rivian. I started a much bigger car project. So since I started Rivian, I haven't, yeah, I haven't had any of those kinds of car projects.
28:14 Doug DeMuro? And you probably don't have a lot of time to go out and actually pursue these sports cars and plus your whole life is these cars. And so just the corona.
28:20 Speaker 03 Yeah, but I mean, like I'm like a, as a Porsche fan, like a Porsche 993.
28:25 Doug DeMuro? The running theme of all these cars though is kind of smaller, lighter weight, more.
28:28 Speaker 03 Manual transmission analog.
28:30 Doug DeMuro? However, the Rivians are kind of the opposite of this. So, so what happened here? You, you saw what the market demanded instead of what you yourself maybe were into.
28:39 Speaker 03 Well, when I first started Rivian, we were working on a sports car.
28:41 Doug DeMuro? Yeah.
28:42 Speaker 03 And realized a couple of years in that it wasn't the right product strategy. And when you build a product, you have to have like, what's the story? What's the brand? How does it resonate? And so we shelved the sports car, recognizing it wasn't the right thing to build around and, and that had been tried. Of course Tesla built its brand, launching the Roadster. And then spent a lot of time really digging deep to say, what do we want to build? What's the brand we want to stand for? And I'm a big adventure enthusiast. And so started to scratch on this idea of a product designed to enable adventure in the broadest sense, like it can fit your kids, your gear, your stuff.
29:20 Speaker 03 And if you look at the types of vehicles that are typically in that space, they're very inefficient.
29:23 Doug DeMuro? Yeah.
29:24 Speaker 03 They're not fun to drive.
29:25 Doug DeMuro? Yeah.
29:27 Speaker 03 You have to have basically a lot of compromises in order to do those things. And so we said, what if we made a vehicle that was designed to enable adventure, but also is super efficient, incredibly fun to drive, had storage in ways you didn't think about storage, you know, so like a gear tunnel that goes right through the side. And so we landed on this idea of building products around adventure.
29:48 Doug DeMuro? When was this? What year was this?
29:50 Speaker 03 This started in. Some point you'd like this, I'll have to show you guys the, um, all the things that happened along the way. But it started in like 2013 and then we had many, it's not like we like.
30:01 Doug DeMuro? But you started specifically going after truck like that. You started focusing on truck in that era.
30:06 Speaker 03 Yeah. So we, we recognized that trucks had become big and a lot of the positioning of them was around, like who can haul more concrete and who can haul more stuff.
30:17 Doug DeMuro? Yeah.
30:17 Speaker 03 A lot of the uses of the trucks are very far from that. So yeah, most people are using them actually to put their, I mean, maybe they put a sofa in the back, but they're largely using like lifestyle.
30:27 Doug DeMuro? Right.
30:28 Speaker 03 So your gear, your, your bikes, your.
30:30 Doug DeMuro? Or nothing at all.
30:30 Speaker 03 Or nothing. Yeah. And so the first thing that we developed that's actually still on this was this idea of a gear tunnel. Cause there's the lack of a trunk in a truck is a classic scenario where you, you have a big bed, but you don't want to put your groceries in the rain.
30:45 Doug DeMuro? Nope.
30:45 Speaker 03 And so we put a big front trunk and then a big middle trunk.
30:49 Doug DeMuro? It is, it's interesting to me that this was, this idea was being developed that early. Obviously in the years since then, it, it worked out. Like in the years since then, the, the forerunner and the G wagon and the raptor and like, and, and COVID happened and adventure became an even bigger thing. And like, you guys were unbelievably well positioned in a way that is quite more than your competitors, right? Like a lot of your competitors debut with sedans, probably because they had years of lead up of developing that sedan. But what turned out to be not what the consumers were interested in.
31:18 Speaker 03 Yeah.
31:18 Doug DeMuro? Like you were perfectly ready with like an electric forerunner. Like it was, it was, it was, it was like ready to go when people wanted it. And, and as a result, Rivian has kind of been the most desirable, I mean, aside from Tesla and Rivian are like up, this is what people want. This is like, you think about EVs, people actually want.
31:36 Speaker 03 The brand's really resonated.
31:38 Doug DeMuro? Exactly.
31:38 Speaker 03 Which was.
31:39 Doug DeMuro? In those vehicles specifically. I mean, it turned out to really work out. Like you must've thought this is, was perfect.
31:44 Speaker 03 Well, what was wild is we, in like 2017, when things started to come into real focus and the vehicle started to have looked something like this. We made all these charts and we'd write down like, what do we want the brand to stand for? And you know, you do these like is, is not, uh, and you'd ask yourself these hypothetical questions. What do Rivian do X? And we were really precise on it. And then we launched in end of 2018 and then we products around the market end of 2021. And it's actually come together a lot in the way that we thought, like we wanted the vehicles to be used actively. Yeah. We wanted people to connect with them and like get inspired to go do things that they may not do in their existing vehicle. And so I get these emails from customers that
32:29 Speaker 03 will say, hey, I, I some, you did something to me. I bought your car. I hadn't skied in 10 years and somehow me buying your car has me skiing again. Like what, what did you put in the air filter? That's cool. Yeah. Which is like, oh, it's like so cool to see your brand connecting the way you'd hope. And now R2 is going to bring it to more people. Yeah. And our three. And R2 has some features that just, oh, I'm so excited. There's the rear glass drops. Yeah. Forerunner style. And the way we. That's the only feature my wife wants in a car. Actually that and CarPlay. So it hits one of the two. And there's rear windows that pop out, which as a car enthusiast is. That's so cool. Really cool. So have like a fresh air mode. You press the button, use the negative pressure off of that. The rear three quarters window? Yeah. And then you pull air from the, through the car.
33:10 Speaker 04 We've got to talk boots. Brunt workwear boots. They've been a great partner to this car pod, but I have been called out in the comments for not being a boot guy. Well, recently I headed to Belgium for the Grand Prix at Spa, a notoriously muddy place when it rains. I decided to take my pair of Brunt Merin boots and everything I said about them in the last podcast is true. They didn't take long to break in. They were very comfortable and they kept my feet warm and dry when the heavens opened at Spa. I also wore them at the Bois Jacques Forest, the site of the famed stand of the Easy Company of the 101st Airborne during Battle of the Bulge. These boots allowed me to get around the foxholes with ease and pay my respects to the men who served there. They helped me create a
33:52 Speaker 04 memory that I will genuinely carry forever. The founder, Eric Gerard, grew up blue collar, worked alongside his buddies in the trades and kept saying that the big brands had stopped caring. They had turned. To fashion brands and hadn't changed in a hundred years. So Eric built Brunt from the ground up for real hardworking people. Every boot is named after one of the guys that he grew up with. Real people, real jobs. You can literally wear them to work, beat them up, and if they're not right for you, send them back. Who else does that? Brunt was tired of the workwear brands that were cutting corners. You work too hard to be stuck in uncomfortable boots that don't hold up. So they built something better. Boots that are insanely comfortable and
34:35 Speaker 04 are built for any job site. So for a limited time, our listeners get $10 off at Brunt when you use the code cars, that's C A R S, at checkout. Just head to bruntworkwear.com and use the code cars and you're good to go. And after you order, they'll ask you where you heard about Brunt. So do us a favor and tell them you heard it from me and this car pod.
34:57 Doug DeMuro? There's been enormous pressure to launch R1, given all the, how long it took, you know, and the investors and all that. R2, though, is gonna be the real, I mean, these are expensive cars. R2 is much more affordable. R2 is gonna be the big volume, I imagine.
35:12 Speaker 03 For sure. So these have an average price of over $90,000. And so
35:17 Doug DeMuro? So R, there must be just, I mean, do you feel just as much pressure trying to launch R2? Or like, this is the big moment where
35:22 Speaker 03 It's a big moment. Yeah. It's also next year, early part of next year. And so with R1, it's our first product, and out of the gate, it resonated really well. It's like Truck of the Year. Last couple of years in a row, Consumer Reports does this brand appeal study, and we've been at the top of the list. Highest rate of repurchase. All these amazing things that we only dreamed of. And so now the hope is we can take this really strong brand success we've had at this premium price point at the, you know, at the flagship level, and take it into the price point where you see things like a Model Y. You see, like, things like even as, as sort of normal, if you will, is like a Honda CRV, you know, Twitter, Wranglers.
36:05 Speaker 03 Forerunners, of course. So you pick up just this huge amount of market that's, you know, folks are gonna be cross shopping with a lot of different things. And so because the price overlaps so much with the Model Y, we often think, you're often gonna ask, like, is this, like, directly trying to compete with the Model Y? Of course, there's gonna be cross shop because the price is there. But really, it's, it's gonna be addressing the You know, the vast majority of folks that are actually not buying an EV. But when they see this, it's like, boy, that thing's like faster than a Porsche zero to sixty. It's got this incredible off-road capability. I can put my kids in it. Their window drops.
36:39 Doug DeMuro? It is almost amazing the things that the Rivian vehicles combine into one.
36:46 Speaker 05 This is not an ad for Rivian, by the way.
36:48 Doug DeMuro? No, I just, I mean, I was my car of the year, both the SUV and the truck were during the years they came out. And I think it's pretty amazing to think they combined into one. It's kind of an interesting thing that you can do with an electric car. Is kind of make them be fast and off-roading and luxurious and all that. But nonetheless, there's, you know, there's, is there an enthusiast component of electric cars that's missing? This is our friend Ken's thoughts here.
37:07 Speaker 04 So, yeah, so you mentioned that initially you were considering, you conceptualized having a sports car and realized that was the wrong product strategy, which makes sense. And obviously, Rivian's focused on like some more adventure stuff.
37:16 Speaker 03 Yeah.
37:16 Speaker 04 But how do you feel about the electrification of sports cars in general? Someone who said, you know, you like the analog cars, you love old Porsches and experience they.
37:24 Speaker 03 Veyron Corolla.
37:25 Speaker 04 At least like looking at, you know, the future of the sports car. You know, Matteo Rimini has said very seriously, it's like, no, you need an engine for that experience. It's what customers of the ultra high-end stuff want. You're going to pay over a million dollars for a car. You want to go, when you start it, you want to feel like, feel that. What are your thoughts on that?
37:41 Speaker 03 Well, I think the customer for a million dollar car is very different than the customer for us.
37:45 Doug DeMuro? But what do you think about like the Porsches? I mean, I.
37:47 Speaker 04 Porsche is a great example.
37:48 Doug DeMuro? Obviously, there's a lot of cool cars that are electric. But are, are you as an enthusiast, you grew up or are you like worried about the loss of manual, the manual, the flat six, the air-cooled, in that segment at least?
37:59 Speaker 03 It's a different flavor. And so, so an electric, if you dream of like, what is an electric Porsche sports car, look and feel and drive like? It's not going to have all the same, it's not going to hit all the same buttons that, you know, a manual transmission Porsche is going to hit. In the same way, frankly, that like a 993 hits different buttons than a new GT3 RS.
38:22 Doug DeMuro? Right.
38:22 Speaker 03 Like they're, they're very different cars.
38:24 Doug DeMuro? Right.
38:24 Speaker 03 So I think depending on your own history with cars, you may be drawn more to things that are more nostalgic or older. Like, so I'm actually drawn to like some of those older cars just because they're things I grew up with, things I grew up dreaming about. You know, I know you're a big fan of your Carr J T that like one of the last analog, you know, really supercars. And so there's something about that. And I think when you look at the sports car space, putting aside like the hypercar space, because I think it is a different customer. I think in the sports car space, people are going to find new ways to enjoy electric vehicles. And like regen is a really interesting thing. And so you start to think about like, what role can regen play in in creating another driver accessible
39:08 Speaker 03 way to control the, you know, the vehicle and, you know, coming into a corner. And so there's, I think, just things we're going to start to see that people think about and dream about.
39:16 Doug DeMuro? Have you driven that Ioniq 5 N that has the shapeshifting?
39:19 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
39:20 Doug DeMuro? We drove it and were astonished by how honest it was, feeling like a dual clutch shifting. And it really hit me that like, if the automakers start putting this in these cars, it kind of, it doesn't replace a manual transmission experience, but it sort of replaces a dual clutch experience.
39:36 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think what's funny about that is it's replicating a less capable system. I think for, for people like that are maybe
39:45 Doug DeMuro? Enthusiast.
39:45 Speaker 03 Enthusiast in the classic sense.
39:47 Doug DeMuro? Yeah.
39:47 Speaker 03 That works. I think there's going to be new modalities, though, of, of things that are going to emerge around electric vehicles. I think, especially when you start to look at like multi motor, multi motor per axle. I mean, have you, you guys have just drove up in the quad?
40:01 Doug DeMuro? Yeah, I've drove up in a quad.
40:02 Speaker 03 You haven't done any off roading it, but
40:03 Doug DeMuro? No, but
40:04 Speaker 03 The new quad has some torque vectoring features that are so fun.
40:08 Doug DeMuro? Yeah.
40:09 Speaker 03 Like laugh out loud fun. We call it kick steer, where you're like driving on a trail. And with, like, it's like, it's like Gran Turismo easy. You just like press the buttons and the car pivots on its axis.
40:21 Doug DeMuro? Right.
40:21 Speaker 03 And you can make these right angle turns in a way that you're just like, you're like, wow, I feel like I'm a, you know, a groupie rally driver here. And it's so much fun. And it's safe and it's, it's stable.
40:32 Doug DeMuro? Does simulated shifting and torque vectoring capabilities, does that play that same role for like the next generation of enthusiasts?
40:40 Speaker 03 I mean, I don't know. I think Lamborghini is already looking at that. They were testing their Ioniq 5 N at the factory, like to go see how it was, yeah, how it was put together. I think, like, there is definitely something there. I felt Like that was the future of it for.
40:52 Speaker 04 But I I don't know, like it's I don't know because I'm a dinosaur already. I like V12 and manuals like that's what I like. But your kids, like you said, grew up and they like.
41:01 Speaker 03 But look, but that's uh, I mean, we talked about horses jokingly. There are lots of horse enthusiasts still, people that own horses. It's it's an it is not the best way to move around, no longer. There's much faster, more efficient ways to move. But people enjoy them and so they still own them and I think. You know, hypercars, I think are more in that category, which if you're in a, if you're in a million dollar car. You know, the this is. It's far from practical, like that's not a practical choice and so you're not. Implicitly by buying a million dollar car, you're already making a decision that this is an impractical purchase. And so I think. When you're making an impractical purchase, there's all sorts of things that are maybe not practical.
41:40 Speaker 04 Yes.
41:41 Speaker 03 And so. In our case, for like R2 or even R3 and R3X, which I think.
41:45 Speaker 04 I'm very excited for it.
41:47 Speaker 03 I'm very excited for it. The channel you're like. Can't you don't.
41:51 Speaker 04 I am really, I R2 is very important and I I I think the R3 is like my cherry on top.
41:56 Speaker 03 But when you, when you go off roading, whether it's low speed up a trail or higher speed on like a gravel trail. Electric is really enjoyable. It is. The the instant torque is nice. Yep. Um, you're never, you're you never find yourself in the wrong gear on a rock like, oh, jeez, I'm rolling backwards. It's just like instant torque. The danger.
42:16 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's.
42:17 Speaker 03 But. I I'm half joke. I'm very deep. Offering enthusiasts. Deep like. Deep danger. One of the challenges with off roading is does have a barrier to entry that is because it takes. Yeah. Like knowledge of like, what does a differential do? What's the center locking differential? What's the rear differential? And suddenly you get into like a quad motor R1 and you just. Tapped off. It's like you just can do it and suddenly.
42:38 Doug DeMuro? You know, on that subject, one thing people talk to us a lot about, not necessarily in terms of Rivian, although maybe more with quad, but. The Hummers um is just the sheer size of these vehicles and the sheer acceleration level.
42:49 Speaker 03 We've been driving the R1S quad, uh, the the Gen 2 quad around.
42:53 Doug DeMuro? It's insane.
42:54 Speaker 04 It's really quick.
42:55 Doug DeMuro? Is there any?
42:55 Speaker 05 2.6.
42:56 Doug DeMuro? We all smile and laugh about it. Like, we think it's awesome. Is there any? Do we have any responsi- like, corporate responsibility fears about people having? People, I actually get asked this question a lot, particularly when the Hummer came out, which I was pretty into, and I still am.
43:09 Speaker 04 Well, I love that they always say, "Are you afraid that, like, a little old lady's gonna drive?" It's like, well, if there's a little lady driving a Hummer EV, that's one thing.
43:15 Doug DeMuro? But, yeah, there's some. These cars are really fast and really big, and it doesn't require any special, you know, when we were kids, you had to be really legit to have access to a car that was anywhere near this.
43:25 Speaker 04 Right, but electric cars have democratized speed in such a quick way.
43:28 Speaker 03 I remember when the, um, when the 993 Turbo came out and it hit 0-60 in 3 seconds, and it was like the top of the chart for 0-60, and I was like, "Wow, I can't drive a car in 0-4 seconds."
43:37 Doug DeMuro? Right now, you can do it in, now, now Dennis can do it.
43:39 Speaker 03 And now I can be with my kids in the back and, like, a lawnmower in the vehicle. I can do 2.5 seconds in an R1T.
43:44 Speaker 04 Yeah.
43:45 Speaker 03 And so, yeah.
43:46 Speaker 05 Is that a good idea? It's a 7,000-pound vehicle.
43:49 Speaker 03 Yeah, so.
43:49 Speaker 05 I mean, you guys have done a great safety system. Like, it seems so safe to do that 0- that 2.5 seconds 0-60.
43:54 Speaker 03 Yeah.
43:55 Speaker 05 But is it?
43:56 Speaker 03 It's very safe. There's a whole bunch of.
43:57 Speaker 05 Yeah, but is it wise?
43:58 Speaker 03 Is it wise? I think it's important, like, why does a car like that exist?
44:03 Speaker 05 Yeah, sure.
44:04 Speaker 03 And why do we make a 2.5-second 0-60 SUV in traffic?
44:07 Speaker 05 Yeah.
44:09 Speaker 03 We think it's important to answer some of your questions, which is, like, you can still have fun in an electric vehicle. And it's, like, you know, you see the badge on the back for the Quad is this little gear guard figure that Harris being blown back? Like, we're having fun with it.
44:24 Speaker 05 Yeah.
44:24 Speaker 03 It's, we're embracing the silliness of a 2.5-second 0-60.
44:29 Speaker 05 Right, right.
44:30 Speaker 03 SUV, and it's, it's a brand-building vehicle. It's not going to be the highest-level vehicle. But it really helps people get excited around, maybe they get a try or a dual motor, and of course, it opens up the door for people to say, "Oh, wow, I want to consider this R1."
44:45 Speaker 05 Right, right. Can I ask about that? All right, so the only visual differentiations of the Quad motor are the brake calipers.
44:51 Speaker 03 Yeah.
44:52 Speaker 05 And the, and the R1S badge that says Quad.
44:55 Speaker 03 Yeah, and the gear guard with his hair.
44:56 Speaker 05 Sure.
44:57 Doug DeMuro? What is destroying?
44:57 Speaker 05 Why not more?
44:58 Doug DeMuro? We're astonished by this. When we were kids, you get an M3 and it's got rocker panels and it's got badge and wire, it's got different wheels and it's got a wing and it's got, there's all this stuff because you want people, you want your neighbors to know, I got the expensive one.
45:11 Speaker 05 I don't, so I love the subtlety, but K1075 is special because it looks visually distinct.
45:16 Doug DeMuro? Most people who are spending more over a regular one want to show off.
45:20 Speaker 05 Why not wide fenders? Why not spoiler?
45:22 Doug DeMuro? Why don't we have some flared fenders on this thing?
45:24 Speaker 05 I mean that question seriously, legitimately.
45:26 Speaker 03 I think, given infinite time resources, we probably would have done maybe different front and fascia.
45:33 Doug DeMuro? Oh.
45:35 Speaker 03 This was, we liked the subtlety of this one.
45:37 Doug DeMuro? Yeah.
45:37 Speaker 03 And I think over time, you may see like our next, like Gen 3 Quad, maybe have something that's a little bit different than the Tri, but it's a, it was like a lot of debate around this, like how aggressive do we go? And we went with subtle here. Over time, we think its personality around Quad could continue to evolve.
45:57 Speaker 05 I was telling our producer yesterday that I love it and therefore it's probably not the right product for this.
46:03 Doug DeMuro? Well, you see with like G-Wagon, right? Which is a competitor. The regular one looks like the regular one. The 63 has the big wheels and the brush guard front.
46:11 Speaker 05 It's gotten harder and harder to tell at a glance.
46:12 Doug DeMuro? Well, a lot of them are 63s, but they really do sell it, right? They really, and I think that probably appeals to people and you still see that in a lot of ways.
46:19 Speaker 03 For our brand, we also have, there's a degree of subtlety to, I mean, you walk around this lot, that SUV is faster.
46:26 Speaker 05 I know.
46:27 Speaker 03 To 100 miles an hour than almost everything on this lawn.
46:29 Speaker 05 Yeah.
46:29 Speaker 03 Which is really wild. And so the fact that you're starting there, it sort of says, okay, do we, we don't actually need all these like scoops and all this.
46:38 Doug DeMuro? Yeah, sure.
46:38 Speaker 03 It just doesn't need it.
46:39 Doug DeMuro? But that was probably always true, right? We knew that the M3 didn't in the 90s need a rear wing.
46:45 Speaker 05 Yeah, the Corolla, they didn't need active air, but it had it.
46:50 Speaker 03 But it had it. I need that extra downforce.
46:52 Speaker 05 Can I do?
46:52 Speaker 03 One other question.
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48:39 Speaker 05 So, in a bunch of drag tests, or drag races, the RAVI is fastest off the line, but then loses out to some other cars because of the speed limiter.
48:46 Speaker 06 Yep.
48:47 Speaker 05 I assume you guys have done some testings without it. Where do you get?
48:50 Speaker 06 Well, you asked the question for on safety.
48:51 Speaker 05 Yeah.
48:52 Speaker 06 So, we made the decision, on the non-quad, we'd limit it to 110. And then in the quad, we limited it to 130, really just because, otherwise it would just kill the quarter-mile time.
49:03 Speaker 05 Right.
49:04 Speaker 06 And in fact, 130 is only enabled when you go into sport mode.
49:07 Doug DeMuro? But how fast could this thing go if we let it run?
49:10 Speaker 06 A lot faster.
49:11 Doug DeMuro? What's the top speed?
49:12 Speaker 06 But the reason we don't...
49:13 Speaker 05 On your R1S, which I assume maybe has some special features?
49:16 Speaker 06 I've gotten a lot faster than those.
49:18 Speaker 05 Yeah. On a close track, but look, what were you getting to? You could go a lot faster.
49:26 Speaker 03 But I mean, these are not cars you can hack, so nobody will ever unlock.
49:30 Speaker 05 Well, no, but you know, but it's gotta be a benefit to be in the CEO.
49:32 Speaker 03 But the reason is at 130, you're committing a felony on every road in the United States.
49:38 Speaker 05 Yeah, but not on this Bonneville South Flats.
49:41 Speaker 03 Sure.
49:41 Speaker 05 Yeah.
49:41 Speaker 03 But, but again, we just said like this, if you're going to the Bonneville South Flats, you're probably not taking this.
49:47 Speaker 05 I don't know. I like it.
49:48 Speaker 03 It was like a corporate decision.
49:50 Speaker 05 All right. It's a good one.
49:51 Speaker 03 Let's err on the side of safety and the cars are so quick. I mean, you're on throttle for a second. You could be going 150.
49:58 Speaker 05 Yeah.
49:58 Speaker 03 Way faster than you realize.
50:00 Speaker 05 All right.
50:00 Speaker 03 So that was part.
50:01 Speaker 05 At least 150.
50:02 Speaker 03 150.
50:02 Speaker 05 What we got. That's the news item for the day.
50:04 Doug DeMuro? Can Aston have 40? We don't know yet.
50:06 Speaker 05 All right. I lied. I have one more question. What is special about your R1S, your R1T? What, what can regular people not get that you have?
50:13 Doug DeMuro? What, what features are you demoing that you're not allowed to reveal yet?
50:16 Speaker 05 The Porsche family is famous for having special one-off models built of cars.
50:21 Speaker 03 Yeah.
50:21 Speaker 05 You're the founder and CEO. What, what do you, what do you have in your?
50:24 Speaker 03 Not particularly different. I, I drive like the R2, of course, is.
50:29 Speaker 05 Yeah.
50:30 Speaker 03 Just because it's a, you know, it's on out.
50:33 Speaker 03 But the R1, I'm usually a software release or two ahead of everything else, which is just part of my, my job.
50:38 Doug DeMuro? Yeah. And other people are too in the company.
50:40 Speaker 03 Yeah. Like a lot of our team is on early release. And so.
50:43 Speaker 05 Yeah.
50:44 Speaker 03 And that's fun. And it's also because you're on early release, you, you spot things you can change.
50:47 Speaker 05 Yeah.
50:49 Speaker 03 That's one of the things I really enjoy is because we do a software release every month. We can be continually adding features and it is very dynamic. So I'll get like emails from customers with an idea. And you know, I'll call our head of software, I'll call with him and be like, hey, let's get this.
51:03 Speaker 05 Really?
51:04 Speaker 03 Yeah.
51:04 Speaker 05 How legit is that?
51:05 Speaker 03 It's very cool. That is like. My dad was bugging me for the longest time on the car wash feature, the way it was activated and what, in the way the mirrors folded. So I, we changed it and in the release notes, I was like, thank you dad for the advice. Like, and I, something like, please stop asking me.
51:23 Doug DeMuro? On that subject with regards to founders and we're going to move on to market report next quickly and then we'll move on to questions. A lot of people ask questions they have for you and we want to talk to it. But I do have one other question, which is regarding your sort of the face that you are for the business versus say Elon. Elon is, chose to make himself kind of like the, you know, Tesla and Elon are inextricably linked in basically everybody's minds. The result of that was a cult of personality kind of formed around him and I think that that probably had a huge benefit for the success of that brand for a long time.
52:00 Speaker 03 And risk now.
52:01 Doug DeMuro? Now we're seeing maybe some of the drawbacks of that. You have never been kind of as outgoing in terms of tying yourself to this brand Elon. Was that intentional? Do you regret it? Were you looking at Elon saying, hey, I'm cool too during this process?
52:16 Speaker 03 Yeah. I think, I think like if you start a company, there's always, or if you're like the core part of running a business, you're going to be linked to it. I think for me, we've, we've been reserved, more reserved just in how we've come across as a company. I'm more reserved as a person and I think we've been intentional in trying to be as inclusive as possible. And so as a brand, I say this all the time, we have, you know, a widespread of demographics. We have Republicans that buy our cars, we have Democrats that buy our cars. We want to be appealing to both.
52:55 Speaker 03 And have tried really hard to make sure that the environment is like, is the broadest possible welcome mat to all customers. And I think Tesla did that for a while. I think, I think, you know, I think the brand they built is still really strong. But my personality is much different than.
53:13 Doug DeMuro? Yeah. And that's what it came down to. You think there's like, you didn't, you weren't the guy who was going to be out there tweeting the president.
53:19 Speaker 03 Yeah. And I think just like my social presence is much smaller and.
53:23 Doug DeMuro? And intentionally, like you feel that that's just who you are more.
53:26 Speaker 03 Yes, it's more, it's not, it's not as designed as maybe you're thinking. It's more of like the resultant of just two very different personalities.
53:33 Doug DeMuro? Got it.
53:34 Speaker 03 Not that one's right or wrong. I think it's been super productive for Tesla, as you said, for creating tons.
53:39 Doug DeMuro? Was there ever any push from your PR folks or from your marketing saying, come on, get out there?
53:43 Speaker 03 From your shareholders?
53:43 Doug DeMuro? Do more crazy stuff.
53:45 Speaker 03 Yeah. I don't know if there's been a push, I think.
53:51 Speaker 03 I mean jokingly, people are like, you know, say, RJ, you're not gonna go do this.
53:56 Speaker 03 We don't need to get into what.
53:57 Speaker 04 Well, I mean, you're on a podcast. We don't have a week for you.
54:00 Speaker 03 Drugs on the podcast. No, nothing like that. I mean, it's, I think sometimes some of this stuff gets taken so seriously. Like I, I've owned two Teslas. I think there's a perception that
54:14 Speaker 03 one company has to, for one company to be successful, everyone else to fail. And what's so wonderful about like the auto industry and for, as a car enthusiast, is many companies can be successful. It's very different than tech. Yeah. Like if you think of like big tech, there's like generally there's like one or two dominant players in a segment for a market. And in auto, you can have all these different flavors, different personalities. Right. And the personalities maybe have some echoing effects from their leadership or their founders. And so, you know, our products have a lot of my personality in them. Right. And some of their subtlety and, and like quiet confidence. Yeah.
54:52 Speaker 04 There's one last question I want to ask, just based on that. Are there any other automotive CEOs you look at and you admire what they've done with their vision for their companies? Along those same lines that what you've done with yours?
55:01 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, it's such a small world.
55:03 Speaker 04 It is.
55:05 Speaker 03 You know, so we, I have great friendships with a lot of different CEOs and
55:11 Speaker 03 yeah, it's fun to trade notes and a lot of times you find yourself, you know, you all send them a text, be like, hey, I really like this. You all get a text like, hey, nice job. You know, so it's sort of, it's, it's more,
55:23 Speaker 03 you know, it's more collaborative behind the scenes, I think, than you'd think, you know, and especially in the last few months with all the Yeah, sure. significant changes. You know, certainly I've talked to other CEOs and said, hey, like, how are you guys thinking about wire harness supply or, you know, just to think about like how we're all responding to trade tariffs and things of that nature. Texting Mary Barrow asking, on a group text with Jim and Jim Farley. No, but you mentioned Mate. He's a friend of mine, good friend of mine. He's, I think he's outstanding. He's done some really interesting things, great technology. Both started companies around the same time. So we've, we've known each other over the years. In that world too.
55:58 Speaker 04 So cool.
55:59 Speaker 05 I'll mention just because it happened off camera earlier. You did say that the E30 M5 is the greatest car ever made.
56:05 Speaker 03 I didn't say greatest car ever made.
56:08 Speaker 03 I didn't even say the best M car, but best M5.
56:10 Speaker 05 What is the best M car?
56:12 Speaker 03 Probably the E46.
56:13 Doug DeMuro? Oh, wow.
56:14 Speaker 03 We'll accept that.
56:15 Doug DeMuro? Wow.
56:15 Speaker 03 Sorry.
56:15 Doug DeMuro? Well, actually, what do you guys? What is our audience well?
56:18 Speaker 04 The E46 F3 is more like what BMW is about. Straight six is their core competence engine historically. Car is perfect 50/50 weight distribution and it's small, lightweight, tall, small, high revs. It's like what an M car is supposed to be traditionally. The M5 is just the best.
56:33 Speaker 03 I have a friend that started an E30 conversion where he's putting a E46.
56:40 Speaker 04 That's a good thing. That'll make that thing a borderline.
56:43 Speaker 03 But it's funny, he's like, I should have just bought a GT3RS. Cheaper.
56:46 Doug DeMuro? Yeah.
56:47 Speaker 04 But I would have been, but that's, but that, anybody can just do that. He built something cool.
56:51 Doug DeMuro? I want to talk market report and specifically since you're here, we want to talk EV market report, which is typically where we talk about used car values and you know, what used cars are sold strong recently, sold poorly, what's, what's cheap, what's expensive. We haven't actually talked in the market report segment that much about EVs. We talk in the news segment a lot about EVs because they're in the news, but in the market report, we don't cover it all that often, but it is an interesting topic because there is some crazy EV depreciation. Are you aware already that Rivian's, what did we say?
57:17 Speaker 05 We've, our one, high mile R1Ts, we've seen 50, 5,000 mile R1Ts are in the 50s now.
57:23 Doug DeMuro? In the 50s, I mean, this is going to be a car in the 40s pretty soon. That's a pretty appealing car on a, from a used perspective.
57:27 Speaker 05 I won't go back in time a little bit. In 2022 and 2023, we saw a ton of interest in the R1T and then the R1S. For a long time, I remember that first R1T sale. Do you remember Doug?
57:37 Doug DeMuro? Yeah.
57:37 Speaker 05 2022, right after it came out, we were 30 grand.
57:40 Doug DeMuro? We were making, we were making big money on the Rivian's.
57:43 Speaker 03 We were losing money on my cars at the time. They're like, all these people are buying and selling, we're making money.
57:48 Doug DeMuro? Yeah, we were, we were making more money on Rivian's than you were.
57:50 Speaker 04 That's true.
57:53 Speaker 05 But now obviously there's a little bit of depreciation. They seem to depreciate like normal vehicles to a large extent. As the CEO of the company, how do you think about what the used market looks like? How to maintain a Ferrari as an exotic car manufacturer? Obviously has to think a lot about how do we shoot our customers? What do they expect? Is that true as the CEO of a new company?
58:11 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, you might be surprised. We spend a ton of time talking about depreciation. We're very, we track it very closely.
58:16 Speaker 05 Is there a fear, is there a goal, is there a target?
58:19 Speaker 03 The Rivian's are actually relative to.
58:21 Doug DeMuro? They're incredible. It's amazing how much we're holding up.
58:23 Speaker 03 I appreciate much.
58:24 Doug DeMuro? Which shows the level of interest and excitement in the car. I think more than any other individual thing, depreciation kind of proves what the actual interest is, right? Because you could put a sticker price wherever you want to, but we know transaction prices for a lot of cars are lower. Maserati and then, and then what ends up happening in the used market is really where they're priced, right? And I think the fact that Rivian's have held up relatively well.
58:45 Speaker 03 Yeah.
58:46 Doug DeMuro? Is a pretty good marker of demand. But so, so, so you put a lot of thought into it. You're thinking about this.
58:52 Speaker 03 So I mean, so the obvious thing is like, what happens in, um, when we did the gen one and gen two? You think about like what happens to the gen one vehicles? And so as you referenced, like a $55,000 R, 2021, high mileage, gen one, R1, four year old car. It's actually not bad.
59:09 Doug DeMuro? You're right.
59:09 Speaker 03 Car was probably purchased at 75.
59:11 Doug DeMuro? Yeah.
59:11 Speaker 03 So it's doing pretty well.
59:13 Doug DeMuro? It's doing well, but it is starting to get, I mean, two, two, three more years, we start to see this thing in the 30s. That's pretty cool.
59:17 Speaker 03 As, as a car. I, I think it's a good thing.
59:19 Doug DeMuro? Yeah.
59:20 Speaker 03 So, um, I mean, before I jump to that, because that's an important point. The other thing we spent a lot of time thinking about is pricing changes.
59:27 Doug DeMuro? Yeah.
59:27 Speaker 03 And so when you, when you move your pricing around a lot, and we've had an experience where we did move pricing before we, right as we were launching and it had a whole bunch. We didn't go down there.
59:36 Doug DeMuro? Oh, we remember.
59:36 Speaker 03 No tier three.
59:37 Doug DeMuro? No, I'd love to go down that road, but we'll, we'll save that next time.
59:40 Speaker 03 But, but we made a, you know, we made some tactlers and how we did it, but just recognizing the sensitivity to movements in your price up or down. Um, what it can do to people who just purchased a car.
59:51 Doug DeMuro? Sure.
59:52 Speaker 03 What it can do to the secondary markets or depreciated value. So we have a whole pricing process. We're like, I hate the word committee. We have a pricing committee. That makes sure that we're not sort of knee jerking around with pricing.
1:00:03 Doug DeMuro? Yeah.
1:00:04 Speaker 03 And, um.
1:00:04 Doug DeMuro? Nice little Tesla call out there.
1:00:06 Speaker 03 Well, and then what we do on the pricing is if you do that really well and you do maintain residual, it helps you get to much better lease rates.
1:00:12 Doug DeMuro? Yeah.
1:00:13 Speaker 03 And so if you look at the Rivian lease rates, they're, they're quite attractive and a big part of that is that our residuals are so strong.
1:00:18 Doug DeMuro? Yep. You might be the only EV CO that can say that. I think it's, a lot of EV lease deals have been based on residuals that have not been reality.
1:00:26 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:00:26 Doug DeMuro? On that topic, I want to talk about your thoughts on the, the other market report topic is the other thoughts on other EVs. You look at used market, it's wild how cheap some of these EVs are.
1:00:36 Speaker 05 Model Ss are sub 10, early, early model Ss that are 13.
1:00:39 Doug DeMuro? But even fairly recent, you can get a Model 3 Performance now for under 20, right?
1:00:44 Speaker 05 20 for like a high mile, early one.
1:00:46 Doug DeMuro? These are cars that do 0-60 in 3 seconds that are, that are only a couple of years old. I mean, it's absolutely unbelievable that depreciation.
1:00:51 Speaker 03 Well, this is, I was just gonna say, I think one of the exciting things for me, as much as we don't want our vehicles to depreciate, the, you know, the, the passage of time leads to the vehicle's price coming down, in, in part because the technology becomes a little older. But they're really important for building the brand to get people exposure.
1:01:09 Doug DeMuro? Sure.
1:01:09 Speaker 03 So, you know, I, I'm, I grew up a Porsche enthusiast. I've never bought a new Porsche. I've owned multiple Porsches. And like the ability to be exposed to a brand that you aspire to through a vehicle that's 10 or 20 years old is really powerful.
1:01:24 Doug DeMuro? That's really.
1:01:25 Speaker 03 And so, you know, with R1, it's gonna do that with, you know, 5, 6 year old cars. You're gonna start to see people be able to afford it they couldn't before. And then R2 will do that as well.
1:01:33 Doug DeMuro? Yeah.
1:01:35 Speaker 03 Yeah. What's really fun for us is you typically, when you look at, let's say Porsche or existing brand, a legacy brand, they don't have any participation really directly in that used marketplace. Because once they sell the car to, to wholesalers, to dealers, it sort of becomes
1:01:54 Doug DeMuro? Yeah.
1:01:55 Speaker 03 out of the world.
1:01:55 Doug DeMuro? Right.
1:01:56 Speaker 03 And so, in contrast, we get to play in that world for a long time.
1:02:00 Doug DeMuro? Sure.
1:02:00 Speaker 03 We, we're active participants in our used marketplace. In the long, in the fullness of time, I hope and anticipate being able to participate. So like transacting on these, so buying our own cars back, creating a really smooth, seamless experience for first time Rivian customers, buying a used Rivian. Because so much of these vehicles depends on software, our ability to keep those vehicles current is really powerful.
1:02:24 Speaker 05 Remove self-driving and stuff like that.
1:02:26 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:02:27 Doug DeMuro? Okay, we gotta move on to questions from our audience. We, we told.
1:02:30 Speaker 03 I know, right?
1:02:32 Doug DeMuro? We told our audience that you were gonna be on. They, we asked them to ask questions. They asked a lot of questions, some of which are very, very interesting directed at you. Uh, and we have a few minutes for them. Starting with the first question from our user Buick.
1:02:42 Speaker 05 Oh, Buick.
1:02:43 Doug DeMuro? Buick for RJ.
1:02:44 Speaker 05 Which by the way, only makes EVs in most of China, mostly for China.
1:02:47 Doug DeMuro? Do you think there could be room? For a Rivian, everybody wants future product information. Which he's not gonna give us.
1:02:53 Speaker 03 Please talk about R4 right now.
1:02:55 Doug DeMuro? Do you think there could be room for a Rivian with a removable roof? Or perhaps maybe even more doors to direct, or maybe even removable doors to directly compete with the Wrangler and Bronco? That has been a shockingly strong segment, Wrangler-Bronco.
1:03:08 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
1:03:09 Doug DeMuro? Are we thinking about...
1:03:10 Speaker 03 Sounds like my dad.
1:03:13 Speaker 05 He's got some great ideas.
1:03:15 Speaker 03 So, we've never shown it, I might as well just say it here.
1:03:18 Speaker 05 Wow.
1:03:19 Speaker 03 When we developed R1, we originally had, in effect like tooled it, and there are some of these still in our fleet that had a removable carbon fiber roof.
1:03:30 Doug DeMuro? Really?
1:03:31 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:03:31 Doug DeMuro? Like removable, like you can take it off?
1:03:33 Speaker 03 If, I mean, you can't see it on camera, but it was a Rivian like this, so the whole glass roof was replaced with a three-piece carbon fiber.
1:03:41 Speaker 05 Like a Targa top almost.
1:03:43 Doug DeMuro? Like it would be removed and like taken away from the vehicle?
1:03:45 Speaker 03 It was removed and fit nicely into the front trunk.
1:03:47 Doug DeMuro? Wow. Wow.
1:03:48 Speaker 03 And we decided to not do it because it was adding a lot of complexity to production. We had all kinds of challenges with supply chain. But it, but it was actually a really neat thing because you could drive in an open top setup. So, I wouldn't say never, we certainly recognize the appeal, especially for an adventure vehicle, being able to take the top off. You know, in R2, we've already talked about how the glass goes down, so we've...
1:04:14 Doug DeMuro? We're thinking about it. There are thoughts, they're in the minds, they're in the minds.
1:04:18 Speaker 03 We are enthusiasts that recognize the coolness of removing glass from the car.
1:04:22 Doug DeMuro? On, okay.
1:04:23 Speaker 05 You're gonna set up like a concept car tour for us, right? We'll continue.
1:04:26 Speaker 03 Oh yeah, right behind this display, we got all of it.
1:04:30 Doug DeMuro? Similar subject, from Hemoglobin. RJ, would you ever consider, and I think this is especially an interesting one. Would you ever consider offering gasoline range extender versions of Rivian trucks like Scout plans on doing with theirs?
1:04:43 Speaker 03 No.
1:04:43 Doug DeMuro? Never. This is not a, this is never gonna be a thing.
1:04:46 Speaker 03 0.03.
1:04:47 Doug DeMuro? Do customers ever ask, like, obviously Scout thinks there's a market for it.
1:04:52 Speaker 05 And you guys are a part of that development.
1:04:54 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:04:54 Doug DeMuro? And there's, and there is a, gonna be a lot of overlap between, crossover between your vehicle and their vehicle. A similar sort of situation. Do you, do customers ever ask for it?
1:05:03 Speaker 03 Not really.
1:05:06 Speaker 03 And I, you know, I recognize some brands are going to do that and we've seen that range extended EV do really well in China, but for us, it's just, it's not something we'd focus on. It's
1:05:17 Doug DeMuro? You're not going to do combustion.
1:05:18 Speaker 03 It's, I think it is an intermediate solution. And so it's a lot of effort to develop capabilities that are unavoidably throwaway capabilities. And so if you're an existing manufacturer that already has a team, maybe you could see why, but we're so clearly, you know, focused on a pure EV play.
1:05:37 Doug DeMuro? Right, right. It's a lot, it would be a lot of work to get into the combustion engine game at this point.
1:05:42 Speaker 03 And it doesn't align with what, like how we think about products. You make a bunch of different decisions around vehicle architecture.
1:05:47 Doug DeMuro? Sure, sure. Okay. Next question from CX Niner. Question for RJ. How are you going to make sure that Rivian stay fun and exciting? Tesla made a ridiculous truck that got everyone's attention. Hyundai has a manual transmission. Somehow Chinese EVs can jump. One of the interesting things we talk about a lot is how in the past cars got, were distinguished heavily based on their powertrains.
1:06:07 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:06:08 Doug DeMuro? And now with EVs, that won't be the case anymore. And so automakers are going to kind of have, it seems to me, it seems to us that automakers are going to have to keep doing kind of more unusual stuff to, to get, like you see this jumping Chinese EV, I'm sure.
1:06:21 Speaker 04 Yeah, the Chinese in general have really gone there.
1:06:23 Doug DeMuro? They've got some weird stuff.
1:06:24 Speaker 04 They're just doing what kids would do.
1:06:26 Doug DeMuro? They've got those cars and it's, and they've got some weird stuff.
1:06:29 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:06:30 Doug DeMuro? I'm sure you're thinking about like, especially as cars can drive themselves, what can, what can we do for the driver? Jumping Rivians. I'm here, that's why I'm here.
1:06:37 Speaker 03 No, jumping Rivians. I mean, like the kicksteer feature I talked about. That's, you have to use it. It's sort of, it's, it's crazy. It's really cool. The whole car rotates on its axis and you can, you know, you can spin it's all kinds of things, but you know, is that something you're going to use going to the grocery store? Probably not. So it's, it is a feature like that that's exciting. I think across every vehicle, we, whether it's R2 or R3, or even thinking about things beyond that, we actually are very Uh, structured in saying like, what are the things if you had to show your friend? Hey, check this out.
1:07:10 Doug DeMuro? Yeah.
1:07:10 Speaker 03 What are the things you'd immediately point to? And you know, you, you talk about his quirks and features. Like, what are some of the things that just like stand out, leave an impression? And every car will have some collection of those. Some will carry between vehicles. Like we have a flashlight in R1.
1:07:26 Doug DeMuro? Yep.
1:07:26 Speaker 03 Flashlight in R2.
1:07:27 Doug DeMuro? Speaker in R3.
1:07:28 Speaker 03 The T, yeah. Um, and then some will be unique to each vehicle. Our R1T has this gear tunnel.
1:07:33 Doug DeMuro? Is there, is there thought of just like weird stuff? Like, should we be thinking about like fish tanks in cars or?
1:07:39 Speaker 03 Oh.
1:07:39 Doug DeMuro? Like, you know what I mean? Like, do, do, are you thinking, are you trying to think about where is this gonna go? The windshield.
1:07:44 Speaker 03 Speaking of features, did you see the, the cars in, there's some people in China, they're doing wraps? Yes, with the fish. With fish, an actual fish.
1:07:51 Doug DeMuro? Okay, are we thinking about fish, eh, fish wraps?
1:07:53 Speaker 03 Factory wraps? That is not in our model, but I couldn't believe that that was a real thing. I was like, this is wild. I know, it's like, is that AI or is that real? Yeah.
1:08:01 Doug DeMuro? Is, is there thought about like weird, like, eh, do you have futurist type people working on like, what weird crap is gonna be out there that we have to be ahead of?
1:08:08 Speaker 03 Yeah, it, I mean, it, it, a lot of, uh, a lot of some of the most interesting wild ideas run up against what you can do from a regulatory point of view.
1:08:18 Doug DeMuro? Yeah.
1:08:19 Speaker 03 And so, uh, linked to that is when you design the car, a lot of thought goes into what becomes a projectile. So in the event of a collision, like if you have a fish tank, it looks cool. Until you get into like a, a bad accident, you've got like a fish tank in your face. There's just not enough room on that line to like get the insurance form right.
1:08:36 Doug DeMuro? Yeah.
1:08:36 Speaker 03 Exactly what a lot of work. Fish tank not start to like become something that's flying. Like, koi everywhere.
1:08:42 Doug DeMuro? Okay, question from Joe Silver. RJ, if you could drop a Rivian skateboard platform under any classic vehicle body, like a Resto mod, what would it be and why? What would you choose?
1:08:54 Speaker 03 Hmm, I have the answer to that, but I wouldn't take the whole platform because it's, it's bigger than the vehicle, but.
1:09:00 Doug DeMuro? Uh huh, but okay, but pretend it would be.
1:09:01 Speaker 03 I would take a, the new dual motor, so two motor per axle. That's in the quad, it's also in the back of the tri and put it on a 21 window bus.
1:09:10 Doug DeMuro? Ha, that sounds like terrifying.
1:09:13 Speaker 03 It sounds perfect because it's like 600 horsepower in the back of a of a
1:09:18 Speaker 05 Now Volkswagen has done something sort of like this. What are your thoughts about this Volkswagen ID Buzz situation?
1:09:24 Speaker 03 It's a little different, but it's a different idea than what I'm talking about.
1:09:27 Speaker 05 It is different. It is different, but they've they've they've modernized it a little bit.
1:09:30 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's cool. It's in the list of vehicles. If I was going to buy a non-Rivian, it'd be one of my like, list of things I'd
1:09:37 Speaker 05 What else on that list?
1:09:39 Speaker 03 What else on the list? Uh, I think the Taycan's like a fun car. It's it's um, it's like a four door 911 that's electric. So it's a lot of things.
1:09:46 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah. It drives like that, too.
1:09:48 Speaker 03 And I think it's a car that I often, when people ask me about that car, I say, you have to look at it through the lens of this is a sports car that has four doors.
1:09:55 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:09:55 Speaker 03 It's not trying to be a, like, an everyday luxury sedan.
1:09:59 Speaker 05 But I think it's Is there a gas powered car on that list or diesel powered? Yeah.
1:10:04 Speaker 03 Probably one.
1:10:05 Speaker 05 What?
1:10:06 Speaker 03 A 911.
1:10:06 Speaker 05 Yeah. Yeah, so you seem like a, a, the 911ST would be
1:10:10 Speaker 03 One car, yeah, that's the only thing. I think every enthusiast
1:10:14 Speaker 05 Yeah, wants one. How does that?
1:10:15 Speaker 03 It's like every enthusiast and every car company CEO
1:10:18 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:10:18 Speaker 03 Either wants one or has one and will never tell them.
1:10:21 Speaker 05 That's true. Hide the 911s in case we're just your job. In the vein of your father, can I make a request? I love minivans.
1:10:27 Speaker 03 Okay, yeah.
1:10:29 Speaker 05 R1, R2V.
1:10:31 Speaker 03 21 or 23 window bus.
1:10:32 Speaker 05 Yeah, but I want like a modern, regular looking mini. I just want the utmost practicality.
1:10:37 Speaker 03 Can we do like a 19
1:10:39 Speaker 05 R187.
1:10:39 Speaker 03 7 caravan.
1:10:40 Speaker 05 Yeah, or just an R1V. Can we make that happen? Sliding door on the side, lower, lower
1:10:46 Speaker 03 I love those, too. I mean, clothing, so.
1:10:49 Speaker 05 Something to consider, yeah. Small market, but yeah.
1:10:52 Speaker 03 Not in the
1:10:53 Speaker 05 Oh, a lot. Vans are on the list. Okay, one more question from Joe Silver. RJ, if you gave a Rivian's design team zero budget constraints for a halo vehicle, what would they build? Or maybe what would you direct them to build? To build like a halo car at the top of the range?
1:11:08 Speaker 03 Yeah, so we do a lot of exercises as, and the design team. Someday we may have to show all this. That like when you're designing, when you're going through like R2, where R2 is today. The team gets like pulled into like, like painful details. So you're like designing the inside of a headlight. Like reflecting surface. And so your brain gets so locked into sketching R2s and every detail on R2. And so we need like ways to reset thinking. And so to like get your brain remixed. And so we actually do a lot of things that the design team will do like a two week sprint on an exercise just to get our brains reset. And so that has meant we've designed all kinds of things like what would Rivian look like if it was a
1:11:52 Speaker 03 a movie character like in a
1:11:56 Speaker 03 But one of the exercises, which was a particularly fun one and we're directly related to that question is what would Rivian look like if we made a hypercar?
1:12:03 Doug DeMuro? Yeah.
1:12:04 Speaker 03 And so internally that that design effort, design project recall, what would the R1R look like? So it was like the R1 guts in terms of performance.
1:12:13 Doug DeMuro? Right.
1:12:13 Speaker 03 With a completely different body.
1:12:15 Doug DeMuro? Right, right, right.
1:12:15 Speaker 03 You have no constraints. Like imagine like carbon fiber monocoque. And it looked freaking awesome. It's like the thing you really want.
1:12:23 Doug DeMuro? Is it like off roady focused or?
1:12:24 Speaker 03 It was so good that like at the end I was like, let me go talk to Claire.
1:12:29 Speaker 03 So what do you think if we get all the numbers in the right place? 2029, I think we want to slip this like 500 unit production thing in and it was like, yeah, not yet. Forever a car enthusiast. Not yet. No question. But yeah, we have an idea of what we would do.
1:12:43 Doug DeMuro? Interesting.
1:12:46 Speaker 03 When you're making high volume, it's really hard financially to rationalize doing something like that. R1R sounds pretty good.
1:12:53 Doug DeMuro? What have you done with the old, like old concept or old cars that you've had is test mules and things like that? Do you have like personal affinity for like the first Rivian that drove?
1:13:04 Speaker 03 We have them all. They're in a warehouse. I have a warehouse full of all these.
1:13:07 Doug DeMuro? Is this ever gonna be like someday, these things get out and?
1:13:10 Speaker 03 I think the thing that would blow people's minds is to see the evolution of this.
1:13:14 Doug DeMuro? Yeah. What it used, what it once looked like.
1:13:16 Speaker 03 Well, there's like three distinct. Errors of R1. R1 started as a much smaller truck.
1:13:24 Doug DeMuro? Really?
1:13:25 Speaker 03 And then it grew, and then it went a very different route in terms of aesthetic and it looked.
1:13:29 Doug DeMuro? Hmm, interesting.
1:13:30 Speaker 03 It didn't look at all like it needed to look.
1:13:32 Doug DeMuro? Have you ever shown these? Have you ever shown?
1:13:33 Speaker 03 Never, never. So before R1, it was called A1. And then before A1, it was called P1.
1:13:40 Doug DeMuro? Huh.
1:13:41 Speaker 03 P1 looked very different. It's really cool. You, as enthusiasts, you guys will all love it.
1:13:45 Doug DeMuro? Yeah, I'm sure.
1:13:46 Speaker 03 But, and then A1, it's actually probably less cool.
1:13:50 Speaker 03 It became, it was too theoretical. It was like all, it looked like engineers had too much control and the design team was like shoved and locked into a closet. And then this was like every, everything was balanced.
1:14:02 Doug DeMuro? Yeah, that makes sense.
1:14:02 Speaker 05 It's a good show. I was, we've talked to a lot of your design team, including the interior design team, and I want to say, the interior of the R1S that we've been driving around is the single nicest.
1:14:11 Speaker 04 Well, that's, well, that's just saying like, because you're here, like.
1:14:13 Doug DeMuro? I'm really nice ever. You've never been to my box?
1:14:15 Speaker 05 The single nicest interior for my aesthetic.
1:14:17 Doug DeMuro? You need to get into a spectator.
1:14:19 Speaker 05 No, because it's, it's simple. It's a lot of natural wood.
1:14:21 Speaker 04 Which color are you in?
1:14:22 Speaker 05 Uh, the same as this, like the lightest blue leather and the light, it truly is my favorite interior.
1:14:27 Speaker 04 Sleep on, for the love of God, just buy one already. Just like, get one. Come on.
1:14:32 Speaker 05 No offense.
1:14:32 Speaker 04 Buy. He never buys a car. He always talks about these things.
1:14:35 Speaker 05 Under $20,000 only.
1:14:36 Doug DeMuro? Okay.
1:14:36 Speaker 05 You gotta wait a long time for a car.
1:14:38 Doug DeMuro? Do we have any fellas, do we have any final words for RJ? Do we have any final thoughts or questions?
1:14:41 Speaker 05 Thank you so much for doing this with us. I'm sure, I, I love going deep on the mechanics of running a car, because I think you for engaging in that. And for a great mechanic on the BMW E395 is the best.
1:14:51 Speaker 04 Best M5.
1:14:52 Doug DeMuro? The greatest M5.
1:14:53 Speaker 04 Best M5.
1:14:55 Speaker 05 Uh, what are you hoping to see the rest of the day here? I know you're with your kids.
1:14:58 Speaker 04 What's, yeah, what's something cool you're gonna go look at?
1:15:00 Speaker 03 As, um, a responsibility I have, I feel like with my kids is to make sure that they're properly, uh, exposed to all the right things. So I'm gonna walk them around and, and help, help explain to them why cars are the cool cars to look at.
1:15:14 Speaker 05 I, I know somebody with a Kuntas.
1:15:16 Doug DeMuro? Take them by the Kuntas.
1:15:17 Speaker 05 Right there.
1:15:17 Doug DeMuro? Yeah. That's where the really cool stuff is. Aside from the Rivian booth, of course.
1:15:20 Speaker 05 Of course.
1:15:21 Speaker 03 There was a Diablo SV that drove by before, and then right behind it was a. Really like zero taste modified new Lamborghini.
1:15:32 Doug DeMuro? Okay.
1:15:33 Speaker 03 And my son says, he asked about the Diablo, he's like, is that nice? I'm like, that's pretty cool. And then the next one, he's like, how about that? I'm like, no.
1:15:41 Doug DeMuro? Horrible.
1:15:42 Speaker 03 And, and so I was trying to explain why.
1:15:44 Speaker 04 I wish I had a dad who was like that.
1:15:45 Doug DeMuro? Yeah, what did you tell him? How'd you explain? You said, this, this person has no taste.
1:15:50 Speaker 03 Well, the Diablo is an interesting car because it was, it's become more loved recently.
1:15:54 Doug DeMuro? Yeah.
1:15:55 Speaker 05 Correctly so.
1:15:56 Speaker 03 Yeah. And, and you know, we, for me, I grew up, you know, Diablo was like the car that, I think, I think Diablo is interesting because of the story of it too. It was like, you know, it's like a tube frame car.
1:16:08 Speaker 04 Yep, that weird transition into Volkswagen ownership.
1:16:12 Speaker 03 Before the cars were really fully developed, like from a car company.
1:16:15 Doug DeMuro? Right.
1:16:15 Speaker 03 When they were still.
1:16:16 Doug DeMuro? Right, yeah.
1:16:17 Speaker 03 Like parts fell off and had a lot of charms.
1:16:20 Speaker 05 But, uh.
1:16:20 Speaker 03 You know, now they're.
1:16:21 Speaker 05 Still putting wings on in the back of their factory parking lot.
1:16:24 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:16:25 Speaker 04 Especially the rear wheel drive ones.
1:16:26 Doug DeMuro? Get out there and show them all the cool cars, not just the Rivians, which are also cool cars. Thank you so much for coming on. We sincerely appreciate it and all the insights.
1:16:34 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:16:34 Doug DeMuro? And, uh, thank you for watching This Car Pod.
1:16:37 Speaker 04 Best episode we ever have done.
1:16:39 Doug DeMuro? Best we've ever done. Goodbye, everyone.
1:16:41 Speaker 04 Goodbye.
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Previous How Long Will Electric Cars Survive? Best Ferrari Under $100K? The Next Popemobile? Next New McLaren F1 Is Not A McLaren, Doug Goes Carspotting In His Countach, WRXs Ranked! THISCARPOD! 74 Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated