Audi CEO Gernot Döllner confirmed on Tuesday that the German automaker’s first vehicle built on Rivian‘s electronic architecture will arrive as early as 2028.
RJ Scaringe, the founder and CEO of the American EV maker, described last week the joint venture with the Volkswagen Group as “the largest software licensing deal in the history of the automotive industry.”
“We are making a deliberate bet on strong partnerships and leveraging the power of the Group,” Döllner said in a statement amid Audi‘s 2026 Annual Media Conference.
“Set to arrive as early as 2028 is the first Audi built on the new E/E architecture from RV Tech — a joint venture between the Volkswagen Group and Rivian,” the CEO added.
Early Days
In a separate interview with Inc. released on Tuesday, Scaringe traced the partnership’s roots to a bet he made nearly a decade ago on vertical integration.
“In 2017, 2018, we’re having some discussions around this and some of our investors were saying, hey, should we really make all this stuff in-house?” Scaringe said.
“And I was like, we absolutely should. And if we do this really well, we’ll probably be able to sell it to other manufacturers,” he added.
‘Fast forward to 2024 and we ended up doing the largest software licensing deal in the history of the automotive industry,’ Scaringe added.
“It’s a $5.8 billion deal where Rivian technology is now being embedded across the Volkswagen Group portfolio products,” he said before noting that brands under the German giant which are not sold in the US are also included.
So that’s Porsche, Audi, Volkswagen, a bunch of brands that aren’t sold in the United States, brands like Skoda or Seat. And so those will be our platform, our software, and lots of other vehicles.”
Audi First, Others Follow
Audi will be the first Volkswagen Group brand to bring a vehicle to market with the complete Rivian-developed software architecture — a distinction Döllner has attributed to the premium marque’s demanding technical standards.
“Audi has the highest requirements when it comes to functionality,’ Döllner told Autocar last October, in an interview that first detailed the scope of the integration.
The VW ID.1, due in 2027, will be the first Group production car to incorporate some Rivian elements, but Audi‘s vehicle will carry the full software stack.
Döllner said at the time that mules were already being built.
“It’s 2028 where we’ll see it in the market. We are heavily working on it with the Rivian–Volkswagen joint venture, building up mules right now and working intensively together, so the first cars are already on their way.”
The technology will debut in two all-new models, Döllner told the UK media outlet.
“If you take a step like that, you do it in a new platform,” he said. “From there, we’ll roll it out from these two models, step-by-step, to the complete line-up.”
Which Models
Döllner has not confirmed which two Audi models will be first, but the A4 e-tron — an all-electric compact executive sedan on the VW Group‘s upcoming Scalable Systems Platform — is widely considered the leading candidate.
The CEO told Autocar in October that “an electric A4 is definitely a focus field for Audi,” describing it as “a future Audi car on a future platform.”
The SSP architecture is scheduled to underpin production cars from 2028, aligning with the Rivian software timeline.
At Monday’s conference, Döllner also confirmed the Concept C — a sports car previewing the brand’s ‘Radical Next’ design philosophy — will enter production in 2027.
“The Audi Concept C offers a very concrete glimpse of what Vorsprung durch Technik will mean in the future,” Döllner said.
What the Architecture Changes
The Rivian E/E architecture replaces the software systems that have plagued the Volkswagen Group for years — most visibly through the delayed and eventually dissolved Cariad software unit.
Döllner described the practical impact in his Autocar interview.
“It means for us, first of all, reducing complexity. In developing the car, we will have much leaner and faster processes in the way we develop the car,” the CEO said.
The architecture centres on a central computing unit with zonal computers, enabling over-the-air updates and faster feature deployment.
But Döllner said the digital backbone would coexist with a return to physical controls — a deliberate response to customer feedback.
“You have less virtual buttons in the car and more haptic elements, because that’s definitely the customer requirement we get from the market: customers want to have specific functions and direct access,” he said.
“And it gives us the ability to bring back materiality to the interior of the car — that real metal feeling, the ‘Audi click,’ so also emotion. But underneath it’s a central computer unit with zonal computers behind, so that’s no contradiction — it fits together,” Döllner added.
A Diagnosis From Both Sides
The two CEOs offered strikingly similar assessments of why the partnership exists — from opposite sides of the Atlantic.
“Car companies historically were not built as software companies or computer design companies,” Scaringe told Inc. in the interview filmed late last week.
‘They don’t really design electronics. They don’t design software. And as a result, this has long been something people talk about, which is your consumer electronics are so much more advanced than your car,” Rivian‘s chief stated.
Döllner, speaking at Tuesday’s conference, acknowledged that Europe has lost ground. “The industry — and Germany as a whole — needs to reinvent itself,” he said.
“Today, the US and China are driving the major technology trends, while Germany and Europe have fallen behind. Innovation for customers must therefore become the top priority again,” the CEO added.
Scaringe said Rivian built the capability that traditional automakers lacked.
“We have more software developers than any other technical domain — certainly a lot more than mechanical engineers,” he told Inc. “And we made the decision to vertically integrate the way we design all the computers in the car.”
“It’s a really exciting thing for our teams,” Scaringe said of the VW deal, “because it allows us to help make more cool electric cars under brands beyond just Rivian.”
The Financial Stakes
The (up to) $5.8 billion joint venture — branded RV Tech — represents a significant and growing revenue stream for Rivian.
In the fourth quarter of 2025, Rivian reported $447 million in software and services revenue, with approximately 60% — or roughly $273 million — attributed to the VW partnership.
Rivian CFO Claire McDonough said at the Morgan Stanley TMT Conference earlier this month that the company expects software and services revenue to grow approximately 60% in 2026, implying roughly $2.5 billion for the year — up from $1.56 billion in 2025 and $484 million in 2024.
“That’s driven both by the growth of the joint venture, but also importantly, as the car parc continues to grow and expand, we see a compounding of many of the other services within the portfolio,” the CFO said.
McDonough added that Rivian anticipates receiving $2 billion from Volkswagen this year out of the $2.5 billion in outstanding tranches: $1 billion in equity tied to winter testing milestones and a $1 billion non-recourse loan expected later this year.
The remaining $500 million is due in 2027.
At the J.P. Morgan conference earlier this month, McDonough described the partnership as ‘very strong’ and said Rivian had adapted its second-generation architecture for multiple VW Group brand programmes in 13 months — “multiple times faster than they would have ever been able to execute against working with their own supply base.”
Buyout
As reported by EV on Tuesday, Scaringe dismissed in a separate interview a direct question about whether Volkswagen Group should acquire Rivian outright.
The exchange took place during an on-stage interview at the Fast Company Grill during SXSW in Austin last week, where Scaringe laid out Rivian’s evolution from a one-person startup in 2009 into a vertically integrated EV maker.
Fast Company editor-in-chief Brendan Vaughn asked the question directly: ‘Why don’t they just buy you?’
Scaringe paused for several seconds before responding. ‘That’s not the outcome we were looking for,’ he said — five words, no elaboration. The host moved on. Scaringe pivoted to the revenue split of the business and the expected growth trajectory from the R2.
In January, German outlet Manager Magazine reported that the partnership is falling short of expectations, with VW Group CEO Oliver Blume assembling a task force to address mounting delays.
Rivian‘s leadership has pushed back firmly, and Scaringe called the partnership ‘very, very strong’ on the Q4 earnings call in February.
For Audi specifically, the financial equation is shaped by a difficult 2025. The brand sold 1,623,551 vehicles last year, including 223,032 EVs.
Döllner and CFO Jürgen Rittersberger forecast 2026 revenue of €63 to €68 billion with an improved operating margin of 6 to 8%.
Audi’s Product Offensive
Döllner confirmed the Q9 — a full-size SUV targeting the BMW X7 and Mercedes GLS — for 2026, along with a next-generation Q7.
The A2 e-tron, an entry-level compact EV on the MEB platform, will debut in autumn 2026 with production at Ingolstadt.
A Q4 e-tron facelift is also planned for this year.
