Rivian announced in February that it was opening orders of its fully electric delivery vans — co-developed with Amazon since 2019— to other commercial customers.
However, since then, the company has only publicly announced a partnership with HelloFresh, its “first major fleet customer,” to which it delivered 70 vehicles in April.
Since then, the company has only announced a deal with HelloFresh, its first major fleet customer, delivering 70 vehicles in April.
The global logistics giant DHL was seen piloting Rivian’s vans last year. However, a purchase deal was never announced.
Speaking with Goldman Sachs analyst Mark Delaney in a fireside chat this Wednesday, founder and CEO RJ Scaringe admitted that the electrification of the commercial business has “gone slower than we thought it would.”
Despite that, the executive said he expects that “the commercial space will electrify” until 2030.
“I think the natural big buyers of commercial vehicles have been slower to adopt,” Scaringe noted, saying that “there’s lots of compounding factors for that, one of which is some of the businesses that would be buying these are capital constrained.”
According to Rivian‘s chief, the “big shift that’s happened geopolitically” when it comes to electric vehicles has led these companies to “be careful on how quickly they electrify.”
“But I think over the course of the next 5 years, we’re going to start to see a number of folks jump in,” Scaringe stated.
“And what’s going to drive that is nothing other than the economics,” he assured. “The total cost of ownership and the total cost of, let’s say, delivery is notably lower in electric vehicle, if you take a long enough time horizon.”
Rivian‘s first partner was Amazon — which initially backed the company in 2019, with the EV maker committing to deploy 100,000 commercial vans to the retail giant by 2030.
Questioned by the analyst if the 100,000 units were still on track, Scaringe reaffirmed the target and said that Rivian is already “thinking about what comes beyond that initial 100,000 unit contract.”
“As I think all of you know, Amazon‘s fleet is considerably larger than that. And so there’s real opportunities for us to continue to penetrate across the fleet,” he said.
Despite the ramp-up being slower than originally expected, the company expects it “to grow quite meaningfully as we look at going into 2o26 and 2027.”
As of the end of June, Amazon had more than 30,000 electric delivery vans from Rivian operating in the United States, up from 20,000 reported at the end of last year.
The retail giant began deploying the custom-built vans in mid-2022.
The company said its Rivian fleet delivered more than one billion packages in 2024 alone.
In the same interview, RJ Scaringe hinted that Rivian will adopt a direct-to-consumer business model in Europe, as expansion to the Old Continent is expected to happen in 2027.
Despite recognizing the need to build local infrastructure, the chief executive noted that Rivian has “some footprint in Europe today” with its Amazon-integrated vans.
“So we’ve got some experience in both setting up infrastructure and then operating that infrastructure in Europe, we have our European entities to do that already,” Scaringe said, however admitting that they “need to be scaled dramatically to support R2.”
