Rivian delivered 19,248 vehicles in the third quarter, a company record and 45.8% more than a year earlier, in the first full three months of sales of its R2 SUV.
The company produced 19,751 vehicles at its plant in Normal, Illinois, in the same period, it said in a statement on Friday.
Deliveries rose 57.8% from the 12,194 vehicles of the second quarter, and production rose 56.6% from 12,613.
“Production and delivery results for the quarter are in line with Rivian’s outlook,” the company said.
Wall Street estimated 18,000 vehicles delivered, according to estimates compiled by FactSet.
Rivian reaffirmed its 2026 delivery guidance of 65,000 to 70,000 vehicles.
The previous record for quarterly deliveries was 15,564, set in the third quarter of 2023.
The R2’s First Full Quarter
Rivian began delivering the R2 to external customers on June 9, which makes the third quarter the first to include a full three months of the model.
The company does not break down its figures by model, so it has not said how many of the quarter’s deliveries were R2s.
The totals also include the R1T pickup, the R1S SUV and Rivian’s commercial delivery vans.
Third-quarter deliveries were 8,883 above the 10,365 vehicles Rivian delivered in the first quarter, before the R2 went on sale.
A recall filing showed Rivian had built at least 2,481 R2s by August 10.
Owner-reported data point to a steep ramp, with the highest R2 vehicle identification number seen on the owner-run tracker ‘Rivian Roamer’ at 13,6XX on Friday morning, up from 13,0XX on September 29. Assigned numbers are not deliveries.
Of the 1,656 R2s linked to Roamer by their owners, 885 had been delivered, 48 had a delivery booked, 140 had a number assigned and 583 were still waiting for one.
Among those owners, the median wait was 13 days from configuring an order to receiving a number, and 15.5 days from there to a scheduled pickup.
Roamer covers only vehicles whose owners have linked their accounts, which is a small sample of Rivian’s output.
Second Shift Not Yet Announced
“We expect to scale to two shifts by the end of the third quarter,” Founder and CEO RJ Scaringe said of R2 production on the second-quarter earnings call on July 30.
That deadline passed on Wednesday.
Rivian had not announced the start of the second shift as of Friday morning, and its statement on production and deliveries did not mention it.
The third-quarter figures were not expected to depend on it.
“We are not expecting any material contribution to volumes with the second shift in this quarter, but we will see it in quarter four,” Chief Operations Officer Javier Varela said on the same call.
A Distorted Comparison
The year-on-year comparison is with the last quarter in which US buyers could claim the $7,500 federal EV tax credit, which expired on September 30, 2025.
Rivian delivered 13,201 vehicles in the third quarter of 2025 while producing only 10,720, as buyers brought purchases forward, and deliveries then fell to 9,745 in the fourth quarter.
Against that lower base, production rose 84.2%.
Rivian built 503 more vehicles than it delivered in the latest quarter.
Vans in the Total
Rivian has never published a split between its commercial vans and its consumer vehicles.
Cox Automotive estimated that Rivian sold 4,003 vans in the US in the second quarter, about a third of that quarter’s deliveries.
Rivian sells its consumer vehicles only in the United States and Canada, and has given no timeline for Europe.
Q4 Ramp
Deliveries in the first nine months total 41,807.
Reaching the low end of the guidance range would require 23,193 deliveries in the fourth quarter, 20.5% more than in the third.
The high end would require 28,193, an increase of 46.5%.
Rivian had said the year would be back-loaded, with deliveries “weighted towards the fourth quarter as we ramp R2,” in the words of then Chief Financial Officer Claire McDonough in July.
Rivian raised the range in July from the 62,000 to 67,000 it had reaffirmed in April.
The company will report third-quarter financial results on October 29, after the market closes, and hold a webcast at 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time.
Washington State
In Washington, 9,817 Rivian vehicles were registered as of August 31, according to the latest data from the state’s Department of Licensing.
That total consists of 5,632 R1S SUVs, 2,937 R1T pickups, 1,164 commercial vans and 84 R2s.
The state has not yet published September data, so the figure does not capture most of the third quarter’s R2 deliveries.
Rivian won a dealer licence in Washington last week that allows it to sell directly from its own stores there for the first time.
