Rivian will need to deliver between 23,193 and 28,193 vehicles in the fourth quarter to meet the full-year guidance it reaffirmed on Friday, a total that would exceed its record third quarter by 20% to 46%.
The company delivered 19,248 vehicles in the third quarter and 41,807 in the first nine months of the year, according to its quarterly statements.
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 range covers all of Rivian’s vehicles, including its commercial delivery vans, and the company does not break the figures down by model.
The Arithmetic
Rivian delivered 10,365 vehicles in the first quarter, 12,194 in the second and 19,248 in the third.
Subtracting that nine-month total from the guidance leaves 23,193 deliveries at the low end and 28,193 at the high end.
The midpoint of the range, 67,500, implies 25,693.
That is equal to about 7,700 to 9,400 deliveries a month, compared with an average of about 6,400 a month in the third quarter.
Any figure inside the range would be a second consecutive quarterly record.
It would also be between 2.4 and 2.9 times the 9,745 vehicles Rivian delivered in the fourth quarter of 2025, the first quarter after the $7,500 federal EV tax credit expired.
At the low end, the fourth quarter would account for 35.7% of the year’s deliveries, and at the high end 40.3%.
Rivian Expects a Bigger Quarter
Rivian has said since July that the year would be weighted to its final three months.
“We expect deliveries will be weighted towards the fourth quarter as we ramp R2,” then CFO Claire McDonough said on the second-quarter earnings call on July 30.
The R2 SUV, which Rivian began delivering to external customers on June 9, has completed only one full quarter of sales.
Rivian said in February that it expected to deliver 20,000 to 25,000 R2s in 2026, within the company total.
The increase also depends on a second production shift for the R2 at the plant in Normal, Illinois.
“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, referring to the third quarter.
Founder and Chief Executive Officer RJ Scaringe said Rivian expected “to scale to two shifts by the end of the third quarter.”
That deadline passed on Wednesday, and Rivian had not announced the start of the second shift as of Friday morning.
No Production Guidance
Rivian has not given a production target for 2026, so the fourth quarter’s output can only be inferred from the delivery range.
The company produced 10,236 vehicles in the first quarter, 12,613 in the second and 19,751 in the third, a total of 42,600.
That is 793 more than it delivered over the same nine months, vehicles that were built but not yet handed over at the end of September.
To support deliveries inside the guidance range, fourth-quarter production would need to be of a similar order, less whatever Rivian draws from that stock.
Vans in the Guidance
The guidance and the quarterly totals combine the R1T pickup, the R1S and R2 SUVs and Rivian’s commercial vans.
“We expect to deliver 65,000-70,000 total vehicles across R1, R2, and our commercial van,” McDonough said in July.
Rivian has never published a split, so the fourth-quarter figure it reports in January will not show how many of the deliveries were R2s or vans.
Cox Automotive estimated that Rivian sold 4,003 vans in the US in the second quarter, about a third of that quarter’s deliveries.
How the Guidance Moved
Rivian set its 2026 delivery guidance at 62,000 to 67,000 vehicles in February and reaffirmed it in April.
It raised the range to 65,000 to 70,000 in July, after second-quarter deliveries exceeded its outlook.
Meeting it would lift annual deliveries by 54% to 66% from the 42,247 vehicles of 2025.
Deliveries in the first nine months of 2026 were 440 short of that full-year total.
Rivian will report third-quarter financial results on October 29, after the market closes.
