Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe told analysts on Thursday that the rate at which R2 reservation holders are converting to orders has run “meaningfully higher” than the company’s internal projections.
While declining to attach a single production metric to a ramp he described as gated by suppliers, Scaringe recalled the $58,000 Launch Edition price point and reaffirmed plan to begin a second production shift.
The exchange came on Thursday’s earnings call, after Goldman Sachs analyst Mark Delaney asked for “examples or metrics” on the ramp’s progress and whether R2 deliveries over the next year would be “gated more by supply or demand.”
Scaringe answered the second question and sidestepped the first.
On its earnings release, the company did not reveal how many R2 vehicles it produced or delivered in the second quarter of the year.
Supply Is the Gate
“Ramping production of a vehicle, especially where it’s a first-time launch of a new vehicle, is complex,” Scaringe said. “It’s an orchestration of ramping hundreds of suppliers.”
The suppliers all need to ramp at the same rate, he said, because “our overall production output is throttled by, or gated by, the slowest moving supplier.”
That coordination burden, Scaringe added, “is the reason we start on a single shift and get everything moving efficiently and effectively before we bring on a second shift.”
R2 — as all other Rivian vehicles such as the R1S, R1T and the commercial vans — is built at the Normal plant in Illinois.
The founder said Rivian went into the launch “fully recognizing the complexity,” carrying learnings from the R1 program the company “certainly didn’t have to this level” the first time around.
On where the ramp stands, Scaringe offered direction without numbers: “We’re continuing to make progress week over week,” he said, pointing to the improved guidance as the evidence.
“The biggest category of focus for us has been supply base,” he said, making sure suppliers are ready to ramp “to much higher levels” in the back half — “in particular as we start to plan for running fully utilizing the plant and running across two shifts.”
No line rate, weekly output or second-shift date followed — extending a non-disclosure the results release repeated hours earlier.
Cox Automotive figures imply roughly 789 R2 units reached US buyers in the second quarter, and owner-logged VIN assignments — past 5,000 this week as EV reported — remain the only public proxy for output.
The Demand Signal
The demand half of the answer carried the most important part.
“There’s an enormous excitement around the product,” Scaringe said, “and we’ve been really encouraged by the conversion of reservations to orders on our launch edition.”
Rivian had modeled that conversion internally, he said, recognizing the launch trim is “a $58,000 version of the vehicle, the most expensive version of R2.”
“That conversion rate from reservation to orders has been meaningfully higher than what we expected, which is a great signal,” Scaringe said.
The company disclosed no conversion figure, reservation count or order backlog to anchor the claim.
A Timing Wrinkle on the Cheaper Trims
Scaringe said the company is “looking forward to introducing the other trims, our mid spec and our base or standard spec, as we look at the early part of 2027.”
That grouping sits uneasily against the published ladder.
The mid-spec Premium, at $53,990, has been slated for late 2026, with the $48,490 Standard Long Range to follow in early 2027 and a $44,990 Standard in the summer.
Either reading matters for the arithmetic. The 20,000-to-25,000 R2 delivery target for 2026 rests on the Launch Edition and Performance trims alone.
CFO Holds the Exit-Rate Line
Delaney’s follow-up went to the financial consequence by asking whether Rivian still expects a positive gross margin exiting 2026 as the ramp collides with rising input costs.
Chief financial officer Claire McDonough held the line.
“We continue to expect that R2 will achieve a positive gross profit as part of our exit rate for 2026,” she said, enabled by producing the R2 “at much higher volumes” and “the fixed cost leverage that will enable within the business.”
The reaffirmation carries weight against the record.
Rivian withdrew its 2027 group profitability target in March, and the quarter’s results included roughly $100 million of incremental cost from running the R2 line below normalized volumes — the drag McDonough has guided will persist through the third quarter before flipping to a benefit in the fourth.
The commercial side carried its own first as Rivian’s vans passed one billion cumulative miles as Amazon’s fleet topped 40,000 across North America.
The mix effect the release describes runs through both ends of the lineup, in a quarter when the Volkswagen joint venture supplied $308 million of a record software quarter that generated more gross profit than the group as a whole.
