Rivian has begun internal deliveries of its R2 midsize SUV, with Chief Software Officer Wassym Bensaid confirming on Thursday that he has received his own vehicle.
Bensaid announced the delivery on X, posting two photos: one showing the R2 in the Rivian app, the other showing the vehicle’s infotainment screen prompting “What will you call your R2?”
“New ride! What should I call my R2?” Bensaid wrote.
Bensaid is also co-CEO of the software and electrical architecture joint venture Rivian formed with Volkswagen Group in late 2024.
Production Start
Founder and CEO RJ Scaringe confirmed on Wednesday that the plant had begun volume and saleable production of the R2 despite an EF-1 tornado that struck the south end of the facility on Friday night, ripping the roof off part of the building.
Rivian is scheduled to report first-quarter results and update both Wall Street analysts and retail shareholders on R2 demand and production ramp up on April 30.
Speaking live from the factory to Bloomberg Tech host Ed Ludlow, Scaringe said the production ramp plan remains intact.
“Our ramp up this week and into next week, we’re not making changes to the plan,” Scaringe said, without detailing the impact beyond that window.
“I mean, of course, you can’t plan for these kinds of things, and we didn’t expect a tornado to hit Friday night, but, you know, the teams responded really well,” Scaringe said.
He described the past three days as “around the clock” work to remove water from the facility and rebuild the damaged south end, calling the recovery effort “the ultimate example of resilience of the business.”
“We still had vehicles come off the line this morning,” Scaringe said.
The tornado hit the plant’s logistics area, forcing Rivian to reroute material flow through alternative dock doors.
The Launch Edition Sequence
Scaringe confirmed that the variant Rivian is launching first is the top-of-range “launch edition” — not the $45,000 base specification he has consistently referenced in prior public commentary.
A mid-specification version and the $45,000 base model will follow over the next twelve months.
“It’s impossible to sort of make everyone happy with when you have a launch edition,” Scaringe said on Wednesday. “So we decided to launch with the premium spec, but we’ll be introducing like a mid-spec vehicle, and then the $45,000 version will come thereafter, but that all rolls out over roughly the next year.”
Two-Stage Autonomy Rollout
Rivian‘s launch-edition R2 will ship with the company’s existing NVIDIA-based compute stack and a further-developed version of the self-driving platform already deployed in the R1 lineup.
A second-generation autonomy stack — built around Rivian‘s in-house-developed silicon and LiDAR — will enter production at the end of 2026.
“Our in-house silicon, which is 800 TOPS per chip, we have two of those chips in the vehicle. We couple that with cameras, radar and a lidar that sits at the top of the windshield that comes in at the end of this year,” Scaringe said.
“Our launch edition still has a very highly capable self-driving platform, which is essentially a further development of what’s in our R1 vehicle now.”
Scaringe mapped out the hands-off driving rollout across both the launch-edition R2 and the second-generation R1. Later this year, Rivian will begin rolling out point-to-point Level 2 — hands-off wheel, eyes-on-road, with the driver typing in the destination and the vehicle completing the journey.
“Into next year we’ll start to roll out Level 3,” Scaringe said. “So hands off, eyes off for specific domains. In this case, you know, starting with highways.”
The higher-compute variant will reach “a higher ceiling of what the vehicle can ultimately achieve,” Scaringe said, and will serve as “a really valuable part” of the company’s autonomy data flywheel.
Demand Signals
Scaringe pointed to recent reception events as evidence of early R2 demand.
“We were in Denver a couple of days ago, and there’s, like, a super long line just to sit in the car,” Scaringe said. “So we love to see the enthusiasm. And I can’t wait to continue to ramp up production, start seeing these on the road.”
Scaringe said he has been driving an R2 personally “for a while,” describing the combination of “the package, the driving dynamics, the efficiency, of course, the design and just the aesthetic feel” as “incredible.”
The Investor Test
Rivian is scheduled to report first-quarter results and update both Wall Street analysts and retail shareholders on R2 demand and production ramp up on April 30.
The volume production start marks the end of Rivian‘s multi-year transition from its first-generation R1 platform — sold at premium price points — to a volume-oriented model positioned against the US industry average vehicle price of approximately $50,000.
Scaringe’s confirmation that the launch edition starts well above the long-promised $45,000 base price — with the cheapest variant rolling out “roughly over the next year” — is likely to draw investor scrutiny.
In California registration data reported by EV on Tuesday, Rivian posted the steepest year-over-year decline among the state’s top 30 selling brands at -35.9% in the first quarter, with registrations falling to 1,841 units from 2,872 a year earlier.
The company has guided for full-year 2026 deliveries of 62,000 to 67,000 vehicles.
