Rivian’s Chief Customer Officer said the company is relying on test drives rather than advertising to sell its new R2 SUV, and that it has run more than 150,000 demo drives this year through the end of August.
“At Rivian, word of mouth has always been stronger than a billboard,” Greg Revelle, the company’s Chief Customer Officer, wrote on LinkedIn on Monday. “Seeing an ad is one thing, getting behind the wheel is the gateway to our brand and Rivian ownership.”
The LinkedIn post comes about two weeks before the EV maker reports its vehicle production and delivery figures for the second quarter of the year.
Rivian has previously reported the figures in the first few days of the following quarter, which would be in early Ocotber.
Revelle said Rivian had run more than 150,000 demo drives to the end of August, calling it a record-breaking year, and thanked staff “across 140+ sales and service centers that are leading the charge with our customers to make these moments happen every day.”
Rivian announced Revelle’s appointment on January 12 and tied it directly to the model.
He “joins Rivian as the company prepares to produce and launch R2,” the release said. Revelle’s own words at the time: “I’m looking forward to helping the company scale and bring R2 to market in the coming year.”
The Evidence
Rivian reports demo drives as an operating metric each quarter, alongside store and service centre counts, and says the figure includes marketing events and its Electric Joyrides programme.
The run, from its second-quarter presentation: more than 28,000 in the second quarter of 2025, then 30,000, 24,000, 36,000 and more than 57,000 in the second quarter of this year, a 104% rise year on year and the highest the company has recorded.
That puts the first half of this year at about 93,000, so Revelle’s 150,000 through August implies roughly 57,000 across July and August alone, or about 28,500 a month.
The second quarter’s pace, compressed into two months instead of three.
Rivian completed more than 98,000 demo drives in the whole of 2025, according to its proxy statement. Eight months of this year have beaten that by half.
The retail footprint has grown with it, from 31 Spaces and 81 service centres a year ago to 43 and 104 at the end of June.
What It Has to Deliver
Rivian is targeting 20,000 to 25,000 R2 deliveries this year inside a raised full-year range of 65,000 to 70,000 vehicles. It delivered 22,559 across all models in the first half, leaving between 42,400 and 47,400 for the second half, about double the rate.
Scaringe told analysts on July 30 that reservation-to-order conversion on the R2 Launch Edition was meaningfully higher than expected, and described production rather than demand as the constraint.
“We’re really excited,” Scaringe said. “As I said in my opening remarks, the 57,000 drives this past quarter is a record for Rivian. The delivery of that, enabling that number of drives, as you said, roughly doubling where we’ve been in the past.”
“[…] Of course, that’s manifested through these test drives. With that, we’re not providing specifics around conversion, but that’s a really important metric we look at internally,” he added.
Rivian has never published a conversion rate, and has not disclosed how many R2s it has built or delivered.
The production side is still catching up. The R2 has been built on a single shift at Normal, Illinois, since saleable output began on April 22, with a second due by the end of this month and the extra volume not expected until the fourth quarter.
Greg Revelle
Revelle oversees the whole customer journey at Rivian, including sales, marketing and operations.
He arrived from Revatek, a startup he founded around off-grid energy storage for the outdoors, and before that held leadership roles at Kohl’s, Best Buy, AutoNation and Expedia. He sits on the board of Cars.com.
RJ Scaringe said on his appointment that Revelle had “a proven track record of leading large teams in a dynamic environment.”
