Munro Live got two of Rivian's R2 engineers to stand in front of a bare battery pack in Plymouth, Michigan and explain it properly. What came back is a long walkthrough of how a modern structural pack actually works. The R2 pack is not a box bolted under a car. Its lid is the cabin floor, the seats mount to it, and it carries crash loads that a body structure would normally handle by itself. According to the engineers, Rivian moved from the 2170 cells used in R1 to a larger 4695 format, and consolidated the high voltage electronics into a single serviceable unit the team calls the powerhouse. The stated goal was taking cost out without the customer feeling where it went.
The part worth thinking about as a buyer is what a fully potted pack means five years from now. The engineers say the cells sit in potting compound that bonds to the enclosure and contributes to stiffness, and that the pack was designed from day zero never to be serviced at cell level. That is a deliberate trade. It buys structural performance and a simpler sealed design, and it means damage becomes a pack level repair rather than a module swap. Anyone planning to keep the car past its warranty should be asking about replacement pack pricing and how insurers treat that repair, because sealed packs have been a recurring friction point in EV repair economics. Rivian's own answer is to move everything that might plausibly need attention, the power conversion and the rear zonal controller, outside the cell volume and under the rear seat where a technician can reach it. The other thing worth registering is how far this is from R1. The engineers describe that vehicle as a more truck like structure with air suspension and adaptive damping, against a unibody R2 on steel springs, and they are open that the brief was to keep the driving character while removing the hardware that used to deliver it.
The engineering detail is dense. The video reports the pack uses two longitudinals specified to absorb roughly 120 kilonewtons of frontal load before it reaches the cells, and an inverted tub design whose draft angle builds in side clearance for pole and barrier impacts. Folding the floor into the pack removed a redundant layer worth about seven millimetres, which the team says it spent on underbody ground strike protection and extra cell venting space. Up front, R1's semi active dampers, hydraulic roll control and air suspension are gone, replaced by coil springs, a steel anti roll bar and a MacPherson strut. Rivian says swapping aluminium castings for stamped steel across the chassis structures cut cost by roughly 49 percent while taking around 8 percent of the weight out as well. The front drive unit disconnects, so the car runs rear drive until a clutch engages, and the inverter sits beside the motor rather than on top of it to keep the frunk usable. Two details stand out beyond the headline numbers. The front castings are two pieces rather than one and are bolted rather than integrated, which the team says was driven by the need to absorb manufacturing variation when a body and a battery are decked together. And several brackets are shaped to fracture deliberately in some crash modes while holding load in others, a level of tuning the engineers describe as the hardest part of the whole programme. The seats bolt down through the body and into the battery, so they carry structure too.
Bottom line: this is what cost reduction is supposed to look like. Half the money out of the chassis structures, a little weight out too, and the parts a driver actually touches left alone. The R1 hardware that is gone, air suspension most of all, will bother a slice of the existing owner base, and they are entitled to that. Everybody else gets a car engineered by people who can explain on camera exactly which bracket is meant to fracture and at what load. If Rivian can build it at the volume it needs, R2 is the product that decides the company.
Commentary on a third-party video. Figures and claims are as presented in the source and have not been independently verified. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it.