RV Tech, the software joint venture between Rivian and Volkswagen Group, has selected Flow Engineering as the platform to manage the engineering of its next-generation vehicle architecture, the software firm said Monday.
The RV Tech deal builds directly on that earlier relationship, since Rivian adopted Flow as its single engineering system of record in February, bringing its full engineering organization onto the platform.
The three-year partnership gives the venture, known as RV Tech, a single system to keep the requirements, design and testing of its software-defined vehicle architecture aligned as that architecture spreads across multiple brands and dozens of models.
RV Tech is designing one shared electrical and software foundation intended to run beneath both companies’ future EVs, a task whose complexity multiplies with every brand and program that adopts it.
What RV Tech Is Building
Formed in November 2024, RV Tech is developing a zonal electronic architecture that concentrates a vehicle’s computing into a few central computers rather than spreading it across dozens of separate control units.
The venture has said the design cuts the number of electronic control units in a Rivian vehicle from seventeen to seven and removes roughly 1.6 miles of wiring per car, lowering cost and improving reliability while leaving enough computing power for over-the-air updates and automated-driving features.
That architecture is engineered to scale across Volkswagen Group‘s ten brands and onto the group’s future high-volume platform, which the company has said could eventually underpin up to 30 million vehicles.
Michael Goertz, RV Tech’s VP of Architecture, system engineering and controls, described the venture’s aim as marrying the software approach of Rivian with the scale of Volkswagen Group to deliver a common architecture across many vehicle programs.
The Engineering Problem
The difficulty RV Tech described is not writing the architecture but keeping track of it once many brands build on it at once.
Because the Volkswagen Group spans ten brands and each model ships in several variants for different markets, bodies and drivetrains, the venture must validate the shared architecture one configuration at a time.
Christoph Arnegger, RV Tech’s Director of Process, methods and tools, said the real challenge across multiple brands and vehicle programs is to preserve the context and traceability as requirements, architecture and tests evolve together.
Tying every requirement to the design it shapes and the tests that check it is demanding within one company and a different order of difficulty across many brands and programs simultaneously, and the venture said the work has already moved into real-world validation, where each function tested must trace back to the requirement behind it.
Managing that web of dependencies can consume engineering time that older requirements tools, built to record a design once it settles rather than track one that keeps changing, were never designed to handle.
Flow brings the venture’s requirements, architecture and tests into one connected system, so the effect of a change appears the moment an engineer makes it rather than surfacing in a review weeks later.
Who the Companies Are
Flow Engineering is a Silicon Valley systems-engineering software company whose requirements platform is used by more than a thousand engineers at Rivian across its R1 and R2 programs, along with other hardware developers.
Flow, backed by Sequoia Capital through a $23 million funding round last year, has now extended from the automaker itself to the joint venture that supplies architecture to Rivian and Volkswagen Group alike, a progression that puts the same engineering backbone beneath both the R2 program and the shared multi-brand architecture.
RV Tech, co-led by Rivian Chief Software Officer Wassym Bensaid and Volkswagen Group Chief Technology Officer Carsten Helbing, has grown to more than 1,500 employees across the US, Canada, Sweden, Serbia and a newer site in Berlin.
The venture sits at the center of a deal under which Volkswagen Group committed up to $5.8 billion to Rivian and the joint venture, paid in tranches tied to technical and financial milestones, a structure that lifted the German group’s stake to 15.9% and made it Rivian’s largest shareholder earlier this year.
Where the Architecture Stands
RV Tech’s zonal architecture will make its debut on Rivian‘s R2 midsize SUV, which entered production this year, and will later carry the R3 and R3X.
On the Volkswagen side, the architecture completed winter testing in March across reference vehicles from Volkswagen, Audi and the group’s Scout Motors brand, an important step toward the first Group model to use it, an entry-level electric car expected in 2027.
The venture has also signaled it could license its stack, potentially including autonomy software, to automakers beyond Volkswagen Group, a prospect that would turn the shared architecture into a broader revenue source for Rivian.
The Flow selection adds an engineering-tools layer beneath that effort, a system the venture said it needs to keep thousands of engineers across several countries working from one current picture as the architecture reaches more brands and, eventually, millions of cars.
The Broader Context
For Volkswagen Group, the partnership is an attempt to fix years of costly software struggles by adopting an outside architecture, even as the group runs its own training programs to build the same capability internally, and after reports of integration friction that Volkswagen brand executives have publicly played down.
The depth of that reliance has prompted questions about where the relationship leads, and earlier this year Rivian founder and Chief Executive RJ Scaringe dismissed a direct question about whether Volkswagen Group should buy the company outright, telling an on-stage interview that an acquisition was “not the outcome we were looking for.”
