Rivian’s new model, the R2, goes fast — zero to 60 mph in 3 seconds. Turns out, so does Rivian’s construction team.
The electric automaker is starting 2026 with 2.6 million square feet of new space in Normal, where the R2 will be made. Construction took only 11 months — a staggering pace that required creative problem-solving, thousands of workers, and a $1.5 billion investment. The project — the size equivalent of building 14 Walmarts — even came in under budget.
As a result, the first R2s — test models called manufacturing validation build vehicles — drove off the line earlier this month, with the first customer deliveries expected by June.
“The biggest challenge was just the pace and the speed and making sure we kept the teams motivated and driving forward to that,” Tony Sanger, vice president for production facilities at Rivian, told WGLT during a tour around the R2 expansion.
R2’s launch is high stakes for Rivian, which has faced major headwinds on its journey to becoming McLean County’s second-largest employer, including COVID, supply-chain disruptions, trade disputes and now a Trump administration that is openly hostile to EVs.
While its first models (the R1T pickup and R1S SUV, both starting at over $72,000) were priced for early adopters and luxury buyers, Rivian hopes R2’s lower price point (starting at $45,000) will appeal to more types of customers. The midsize SUV will be made in Normal to start, then also at a second manufacturing plant being built in Georgia.
It’s hard to overstate the size of Rivian’s R2 expansion in Normal. The 2.6 million square feet (SF) of new space is roughly equivalent to the size of the entire Mitsubishi plant when Rivian first took it over. Now, after 12 expansions, Rivian’s footprint is approaching 9 million SF. Around 2,000 skilled tradespeople had some role in building R2, Sanger said.
That includes New Normal 2, or NN2, a 1.1 million-square-foot building erected on the site of the former test track just east of the original plant. It’s close to College Avenue on the plant’s south side. (Rivian does still have a high-speed banked test track on site, with plans to soon add a buzz, squeak and rattle, or BSR, test track for the R2.)
Another R2 addition is the 1.2 million SF supplier park and logistics building sited across Rivian Motorway to the west, with a tunnel underneath the roadway to cut down on the time it takes to transport parts.
If Rivian ever gets to full capacity, with three shifts of workers, it’ll be able to make 215,000 vehicles a year in Normal, including 155,000 R2s. It made 42,284 vehicles in 2025.
Rivian will no longer say how many people it employs in Normal, though clues suggest it’s somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000. When asked how R2 expansion will impact headcount in Normal, a spokesperson said, “We will be hiring in the coming months.”
Pivoting to Normal
Sanger gave WGLT a drive-by tour of the R2 expansion last week. WGLT was not allowed inside the new buildings; the company itself has released few photos from the inside.
Initially, R2 wasn’t supposed to be built in Normal. That changed in March 2024 when the company — looking to save cash and get R2 to customers faster — paused construction plans in Georgia and decided to start making R2s in Normal.
That was a big moment for Sanger, who leads a team of about 40 people who oversee Rivian construction projects. He was working on Georgia at the time.
“When Rivian decided to pivot to Normal, I mobilized my entire team to put the project in Georgia on hold and focus solely on how do we build and launch R2s here in Normal?” Sanger said. “It was a pretty intensive process. The first 90 days, our teams were collectively digging in. What does this look like? How big is it? Where do we need to site it?”
Sanger said they made a lot of choices to speed things up, with design and construction together taking about 18 months.
The NN2 building, for example, was erected with precast concrete wall panels. In the original plant, much of the equipment in the general assembly area are supported from the overhead steel structure. NN2 inverts that, with everything supported from the slab up. That cut down on the long lead time of having steel trusses fabricated.
Another example: NN2’s width was designed so it could shed rainwater off the edge of the roof, rather than pulling it down into the building and then draining it out. That sped things up by simplifying the civil engineering work needed, Sanger said.
Rivian’s Normal property now has three separate general assembly areas and three body shops, but all models share a paint shop. (That paint shop also recently got a big upgrade, increasing capacity from 28 vehicles per hour to 48.)
That shared paint shop means NN2 needed to connect to the original plant. It does that through a series of above-ground tunnels that look like the jet bridges you use to board an airplane — only much bigger. That created a problem, however, as Ameren’s power lines run right through the property and would block their path. It would’ve taken too long (and a lot of money) to ask Ameren to bury its lines, so Rivian’s team just bent the tunnels below the lines to dodge the issue.
“We worked closely with Ameren, and with Nicor on the gas, and just very close coordination with the utilities to make this happen as fast as it did,” Sanger said.
Sanger’s team also had to get creative to build that tunnel under Rivian Motorway (a state route) connecting the new supplier park and logistics building to the main property. It got a special permit from IDOT so it could build the tunnel itself, using precast tunnel segments made in Illinois.
“Because of that tunnel, the trucks that leave these docks headed for NN2 can be there in a matter of 2-3 minutes, versus if they had to go out on the highway, wait for a light or go through the roundabout, that would have been 6 to 8-minute travel time,” Sanger said. “So again, we’re finding ways to make the factory much more efficient.”
The new supplier park and logistics building (codenamed “Project Grit” during its development) is jointly occupied by Rivian and its suppliers. Its north side includes a new plastic stamp shop that makes parts for R1 and R2. The middle is occupied by suppliers, like Adient (seats) and OPmobility (bumpers).
‘Go slow to go fast’
Construction had to be fast, but it also couldn’t disrupt Rivian’s existing production. It’s a little like doing heart surgery on a patient who is running a marathon and can’t really stop.
“It was in setting the mindset for every contractor that showed up on site that the most important thing you have to do every day — after being safe — is you have to ensure that the plant remains operational,” Sanger said. “So we would do a lot of pre-planning with anything that might have an impact on operations, working closely with operations to make sure that all of those things didn't happen.”
One example: They mapped the entire site with ground-penetrating radar to find all the utilities, to ensure they didn’t accidentally strike a critical line that would’ve shut down R1 operations in the original plant. “It was that mindset of, go slow to go fast,” Sanger said.
Another constraint was financial.
“If you look at auto manufacturing, it’s all about keeping the cost in the vehicle down, which is not only the cost of the parts that go in it, but it's also the conversion cost of the labor and the overhead in the plant. So the more efficient I can make a building to lower the utility rates, what they truly cost, that truly shows up in the cost of a vehicle,” Sanger said.
Those concrete wall panels on the NN2 building that sped up construction? They’re also more thermally efficient than the steel and metal panel building next door. NN2 is heated by electric heat pumps instead of natural gas.
And the R2’s lower cost is supposed to be one of its main selling points. As one engineer put it to Sanger, customers get 80% of an R1 at half the cost.
“It’s working very closely to balance the amount of automation with the amount of precision that you need from the humans in the space, to be able to deliver a vehicle that is easier to manufacture than the R1, and also do it with slightly less components in the vehicle,” Sanger said.
Jan. 15 was a big day, when those first R2 manufacturing validation build vehicles came off the line. Rivian and founder CEO RJ Scaringe was there to mark the occasion.
“It was fantastic to see,” Sanger said. “It was kind of a culmination of everything we've been driving for the last 18 months.”
The work isn’t over. A new roundabout is still under construction at Rivian Motorway and College Avenue. The cold weather has slowed that work, Sanger said, and they’re waiting for the temperature to get and stay above 40 degrees before resuming concrete work. That should happen sometime in March, with the roundabout opening a few weeks later.
“Nobody’s more disappointed that it’s not complete than I am,” Sanger said.
Also this spring, Rivian will work with Norfolk Southern to double the size of its rail yard to handle the shipping of R2s as they ramp up production, he said.
And then it’s back to Georgia, where another massive construction project awaits.
That doesn’t scare Sanger. R2 wasn’t even the biggest project he’s ever done. He’s led multibillion-dollar, mega-programs like this throughout his career.
“It was about coming in and helping Rivian organize and structure around, how do you deliver very large capital-intensive projects at speed?” Sanger said. “Teaching them how to execute these kinds of very large programs has been a lot of fun.”
