Rivian has extended a $1,500 purchase discount for Amazon employees on its R1 vehicles through September 30, keeping the perk open to the end of the quarter as consumer demand for the pickup and SUV softens.
X user and the founder of the independent platform Rivian Roamer Chad Moran wrote on social media that the discount, which applies to the R1S and the R1T, had been pushed to the quarter’s close.
Separately, Moran said that Rivian and Amazon would host a demonstration-drive event at Amazon’s HQ2 campus in Arlington, Virginia, on July 22.
Neither Rivian nor Amazon has announced the extension or the event publicly.
The discount and the HQ2 event both sit within a partnership that has bound the two companies since 2019, when Amazon backed Rivian and ordered 100,000 custom electric delivery vans, an order that made the retailer the automaker’s anchor customer.
The Discount and Its Timing
The $1,500 discount applies to the flagship R1 line, the R1T pickup and R1S SUV that sit above the newer and cheaper R2.
The perk lands at a moment when the R1 models most exposed to it have lost ground with retail buyers.
The pickup has been the weaker of the two, and the R1T’s estimated annual decline of roughly 30% into the second quarter has left it well below the volumes it posted a year earlier.
The discount also arrives as Rivian works to put more people behind the wheel this summer, and a price incentive paired with a test drive is a familiar way to move hesitant shoppers toward an order.
Why the R1 Needs the Help
The extension follows a stretch of soft R1 demand that the second quarter laid bare.
R1 deliveries, combining the R1S and R1T, came to an estimated 7,402 units in the second quarter, down 6.3% from the same period a year earlier, according to figures from Cox Automotive.
The R1T carried the sharper decline, with estimated deliveries of 1,219 units, down 30.4% year-over-year, while the R1S held roughly flat at 6,183, up 0.6%.
The softness is not new, as full-year R1 deliveries fell about 15.1% in 2025 from the prior year on the same estimates, a slide Rivian has attributed partly to buyers awaiting the lower-priced R2.
The second-quarter total did edge up about 3.5% from the first quarter, a sign the line has stabilized quarter to quarter even as the year-over-year comparison remains negative, but the R1T’s steep annual drop shows the pickup bearing the brunt of the pullback.
What Carried Q2
While the R1 slipped, Rivian‘s commercial and new-model lines picked up the slack, with Amazon van deliveries and the first R2 units offsetting the consumer softness in the quarter.
The R2, whose customer deliveries began June 9, contributed an estimated 789 units in its opening weeks, the first consumer volume from the model on which Rivian is staking its move toward scale.
Those lines helped Rivian deliver 12,194 vehicles in the quarter, a total that topped its own guidance and prompted the company to raise its full-year target to a range of 65,000 to 70,000.
The mix underscores why steadying R1 demand matters, because the consumer pickup and SUV remain the higher-margin vehicles the discount is meant to protect while the R2 ramp builds through the second half.
Management has said the bulk of R2 volume will arrive later in the year, leaving the R1 line to hold the consumer side of the business through a transitional stretch, and giving a targeted discount aimed at a receptive audience clear strategic logic.
That closeness between both is what makes an employee discount possible in the first place, giving Rivian a direct line to a large workforce at a company it already supplies at scale.
In the first quarter of the year, Amazon accounted for about 52% of Rivian‘s automotive revenue even after Volkswagen passed Amazon as the largest shareholder in May.
