The electric automaker Rivian confirmed Thursday it plans to add a second shift for R2 production at its Normal manufacturing plant within the next two months.
R2 is Rivian’s new, lower-cost midsized SUV, which went into production this year after a major expansion at the plant. The first customers took delivery of their R2s just last month.
In an investors call Thursday, Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe said they’re working now to ramp up production. The company’s hundreds of suppliers can make that complex and challenging, as they need to all ramp their own production at the same rate, Scaringe said.
“The coordination to make sure everything’s ramping consistently and in an organized fashion across all the different suppliers is really a key focus for us, and it’s the reason we start on a single shift and get everything moving efficiently and effectively before we bring on a second shift,” he said.
A second shift, expected by Sept. 30, will move Rivian closer to profitability. It allows Rivian to make more vehicles at more hours of the day, taking full advantage of a $1.5 billion investment in the R2 expansion in Normal.
It’s unclear how many new employees Rivian will hire for that second shift, if any. In a departure from past practice, Rivian no longer discloses how many people work in Normal.
Rivian began customer deliveries of R2 on June 9. The vehicle has earned rave reviews in the media.
Scaringe said a “significant number” of R2’s first buyers are first-time EV owners.
“That’s really powerful,” he said. “This is mobilizing demand for EVs that’s been latent, that’s been sitting on the sidelines, because the product that would motivate someone to move from an [internal combustion engine, or ICE, vehicle] to an EV hasn’t existed until R2.”
Tariff refunds
Rivian earlier this month sued the Trump administration to get back the money it paid for tariffs that the courts later ruled to be illegal.
Rivian is hoping to get back “tens of millions of dollars,” chief financial officer Claire McDonough said Thursday. It’s already received about half that money, she said. The rest is tied up in a Department of Justice appeal related to the tariffs, she said.
Delivery vans
Amazon, a Rivian investor and customer, announced in 2019 that it was ordering 100,000 electric delivery vans for its fleet. Those vans are made in Normal, alongside Rivian’s other EVs.
Seven years later, Amazon now has 40,000 of those Rivian vans in its fleet delivering packages in North America. Collectively, Rivian says they’ve surpassed one billion miles driven.
The case for electrifying business fleets is that, over time, they’ll cost less because they require less maintenance and, obviously, don’t need gas. Scaringe said Rivian hopes other companies will see the cost benefits that Amazon has felt -- and then buy EV vehicles too.
“That’s taken longer than we would’ve expected or hoped for, in terms of other fleets adopting a strategy toward electrification and a strategy of adopting not only an electric vehicle but a highly connected, intelligent vehicle. But the signal that’s being sent through Amazon’s significant ramping of this is really outstanding, in terms of a billboard for the capability and a billboard for what the [electric delivery van] can deliver from a business point of view,” he said.
Rivian also released its second-quarter financial results on Thursday.
