Rivian plans to make 3D printing available across the company after spending more than $5 million on printers, with the manager of the program saying the savings run “well in the millions” but that speed matters more.
“At this point, we don’t have a choice but to scale up and begin using it through all factions of Rivian,” Jared Beck, Additive Manufacturing Manager at Rivian, told CNBC during a tour of the company’s 3D-printing operations in suburban Detroit. “We’re going to be democratizing 3D printing for the entire company.”
Rivian said its spending on materials for the operations has grown to about $1.7 million a year, according to the report published on Saturday.
Beck said the machines typically pay for themselves within a year by lowering supplier tooling costs and logistics expenses and cutting production times for parts from weeks to days, if not hours.
“It’s well in the millions [for savings], but the main thing is speed for Rivian,” he said.
Printers at the R2 Plant
The expansion includes new machines that can print flexible silicone parts and a bay of printers at Rivian’s plant in Normal, Illinois, where employees will be able to print parts on demand, CNBC reported.
“3D prints should be readily available for every engineer so that they can make a part and get it in their hands as soon as possible,” Beck said.
Normal builds the R2 midsize SUV, which entered volume, saleable production earlier this year. Rivian has since raised its planned annual R2 output at the plant, and Chief Executive Officer RJ Scaringe has said R2 order conversion is meaningfully higher than expected.
Beck worked at Normal as a senior additive manufacturing specialist from 2022 to 2024 and has run the program since September 2025, according to his LinkedIn profile. CNBC described him as head of Rivian’s additive manufacturing.
What Rivian Prints
Rivian has used the technology for electric-motor models for fluid testing, screw guides for tooling, stamping-press inserts and some production parts, including trim pieces to fill gaps in some early builds, according to CNBC. The report did not say which vehicles those parts went into.
Rivian prints R2 mirror components, ergonomic jigs for operators and quality-control shims, Car and Driver reported after its own tour of the Plymouth, Michigan, lab.
One team printed a transparent electric motor, filled it with oil and ran it on a dynamometer, while another printed a full R1 drive unit continuously for seven days before castings for the part existed, the magazine said. The lab also prints stamping dies rated for 40 tons.
Rivian runs 35 industrial 3D printers, 28 of them made by Stratasys, and handles about 6,000 print requests a year, according to Car and Driver. More than a third of those requests are tools and fixtures used on the assembly line, and the fleet uses about 95 pounds of material a day, mostly ASA and ABS plastics.
Two of the company’s first Stratasys F900 printers have run at 90% to 91% utilization after nearly five years, Jonathan Dankenbring, Senior Manager of Prototype Manufacturing, told the magazine.
‘Part of Our Tool Shop’
Dankenbring, who runs the Plymouth prototype shop, has been Rivian’s other main voice on the technology.
“There’s an AM part every 15 feet in the Normal building,” he told Additive Manufacturing in January. “We’re thinking of additive as just part of our tool shop.”
He said in the same interview that “3D printing and machining continue to complement one another each day.” In the fourth quarter of 2025, 86% of Rivian’s printing requests were completed in five days or less, the publication reported.
Speaking to Industrial Maintenance & Plant Operation, Dankenbring said Rivian needs “ways to iterate quickly” and to “fail fast without costing a fortune.” He summed up the approach as “Design once, refine continually and scale intelligently.”
The company’s use of printing reaches into design. “Time is a valuable commodity, so the sooner you can get on the right design path, the better,” Stephanie Pearce, Lead AM Engineer in Rivian’s design studio, said at the TIPE conference in 2023, according to 3DPrint. “That’s where 3D printing comes in.”
Not a Production Part Strategy
Rivian’s program is aimed mainly at prototypes, factory aids and tooling rather than parts that go into customers’ cars.
Additive Manufacturing reported in January that Rivian had no plans to include 3D-printed parts in its official line of R2 vehicles, while using the technology in R2 development, such as printing rubber onto a wire grommet to keep water out.
The trim pieces that CNBC described were used to fill gaps on early builds rather than as planned content.
Rivian is also testing larger equipment. Stratasys said on September 9 that Rivian was among the first manufacturers assessing its new F870 large-format printer in Plymouth, for uses ranging from factory-floor tooling and manufacturing aids to advanced prototyping.
Executives Largely Silent
Rivian’s senior leadership has said little in public about 3D printing. Scaringe and other top executives have not discussed it in substance on earnings calls or in recent interviews reviewed by EV, leaving Beck and Dankenbring as the program’s public voices.
Rivian hosted Manufacturing Engineering and other outlets at its Plymouth center earlier this year, according to the magazine’s February issue.
Rivian was one of three US carmakers featured by CNBC. Ford said its current 3D-printing program has more than 200 machines and that it expects to have 3D labs at more than 23 plants by the end of the year, according to the report.
General Motors uses 135 3D-printed components in its low-volume Cadillac Celestiq, CNBC said.
