Rivian has run more than 150,000 demo drives this year through the end of August, its chief customer officer said on Monday, more than the company completed in the whole of 2025 and almost all of them since its R2 sport utility vehicle went on sale in June.
Growth in the metric was flat before that.
Rivian reported more than 36,000 demo drives in the first quarter of 2025 and more than 36,000 again in the first quarter of this year, then more than 57,000 in the second quarter, a company record.
The figure matters because it is the closest thing Rivian publishes to a demand indicator for the R2.
The company has not disclosed how many it has built or delivered and reports a single lineup-wide delivery figure each quarter.
The Series
Rivian discloses demo drives in its quarterly shareholder presentations, alongside store and service centre counts, with a footnote saying the figure includes marketing events and its Electric Joyrides programme.
It covers the whole company rather than any single model.
Six quarters are on the record.
The first quarter of 2025 came in above 36,000, of which more than 7,000 were electric joyrides at the South by Southwest festival. The second quarter of that year was above 28,000, the third above 30,000 and the fourth above 24,000, the low point of the series.
The first quarter of this year matched the year-earlier figure at more than 36,000, and the second reached more than 57,000, up 58% on the quarter before and 104% year on year.
Rivian ran the South by Southwest format again in 2026, with the R2 on the course, and has not published how many of the later 36,000 those rides were. On the printed totals the two first quarters match.
Its proxy statement says the company completed more than 98,000 demo drives in 2025.
That is a floor rather than a total, and summing the disclosed quarters of that year gives a higher number, so the gap between this year and last cannot be stated more precisely than somewhere between about a quarter and a half.
What the August Figure Implies
The first half of this year accounts for about 93,000 on the quarterly disclosures, so the 150,000 through August implies about 57,000 across July and August alone.
That is about 28,500 a month, against a monthly average of 19,000 across the second quarter.
Rivian has not published a figure for August or for the third quarter.
The next disclosure is due with earnings in the autumn and will cover the first full quarter with the R2 on sale throughout.
What Drove the Jump
Founder and Chief Executive RJ Scaringe told analysts in July that the company had prepared for the increase.
“The team has had to really come together, we did a lot of prep knowing that the amount of excitement around R2 was going to drive a significant increase in both exposure to the brand, touchpoints to the brand,” he said. “Of course, that’s manifested through these test drives.”
R2 demo drives opened on June 9, the same day the first vehicles reached customers, leaving the model bookable for less than a third of the quarter that produced the record.
Rivian’s retail network expanded over the same period, from 27 experiential spaces and 74 service centres at the end of the first quarter of 2025 to 31 and 81 three months later and 43 and 104 by the middle of this year.
The Number Rivian Will Not Give
Rivian does not publish the rate at which a demo drive becomes a sale.
Scaringe said in July that reservation-to-order conversion on the R2 Launch Edition, the most expensive version of the car at about $58,000, had run “meaningfully higher than we expected,” and returned to the point twice more in the same session.
He declined to quantify it. “We’re not providing specifics around conversion, but that’s a really important metric we look at internally.”
Demo drives are disclosed to the thousand each quarter.
What It Has to Convert Into
Rivian has guided to 65,000 to 70,000 deliveries across its lineup this year. It delivered 22,559 in the first half, leaving between 42,400 and 47,400 for the second, roughly double the rate.
Scaringe put the constraint on production rather than demand, calling the conversion “a great signal” and saying there is “enormous excitement around the product.”
Production is behind. The R2 has been built on a single shift at Normal, Illinois, since saleable output began on April 22.
Rivian expects to add a second by the end of this month, and Chief Operating Officer Javier Varela has said the extra volume will not appear until the fourth quarter.
