Rivian R2 customer deliveries started this week, and the InsideEVs Plugged-In Podcast marked it by bringing on Jason Fenske of Engineering Explained alongside hosts Tim Levin and Mat Hogan. All three had driven the R2, and the consensus was warm. Fenske, who has a reservation himself, described the R2 as fixing nearly everything that frustrated him about the larger R1S, in a smaller and more cohesive package. The headline trade is in the suspension. Where the R1S uses a complex hydraulic anti-roll system, the kind found in a McLaren, the R2 runs simpler coil springs with adaptive dampers, MacPherson struts up front and a multi-link rear. On paper that is a downgrade. On the road and the trail, the panel argued, it is the smarter choice for a mainstream car.
The driving talk is the easy part. The real subject of the episode is survival. Rivian and Lucid are both at the moment every EV startup either clears or dies on, the jump from low-volume halo products to cars that have to sell in numbers. Rivian has pegged the R2 from around 45,000 dollars, though the hosts note real configurations land higher, and a Model Y costs that has fully paid off its tooling. That is the wall. The panel's read is that Rivian holds one advantage money cannot quickly buy: a clear brand. People picture an R2 the way they picture a Subaru, outdoorsy and practical, while Lucid still gets asked what it even is. The group leaned on a useful detail to make the point, that the R2 sits roughly three inches higher than a Model Y, which is exactly the kind of concrete reason a Subaru-minded buyer chooses it over the default electric crossover. Great engineering, the group agreed, does not market itself, and Lucid's unresolved identity is as big a risk as its software.
On the R2 specifics, the panel liked the haptic halo wheels on the steering wheel, with the up and down controls praised and the left-right clicks called finicky. They flagged accidental inputs when the wheel is turned hard, praised the one-pedal tuning off-road, and welcomed small fixes over the R1, including two glove boxes and a simple magnetic center console. Fenske then recounted his Lucid Air ownership, a run of software bugs and finicky door handles that ended with Lucid buying the car back, and a Gravity loaner whose window would not raise. The wider segment weighed Lucid's coming Cosmos, a roughly 50,000 dollar model meant to out-efficiency Tesla, with an Earth model to follow that sounds more R2-like. The plus-minus closed with a minus for Toyota chairman Akio Toyoda, who said his biggest fear is everyone switching to EVs, and a plus for Olinia, a government-backed Mexican startup planning an 8,600 dollar six-seat EV that fits a wheelchair and is aimed at taxi work, due in summer 2027.
Bottom line: This is the most useful kind of EV coverage, three people who drive everything talking plainly about what works and what does not. The takeaway is that the R2 looks like the car Rivian needed, not because it is exotic but because it is sensible, and sensible is what sells at volume. Lucid is the cautionary tale running underneath: world-class hardware can still be sunk by software and a fuzzy identity, and a buyback is not a strategy. If you have an R2 reservation, the panel's enthusiasm should encourage you, with the caveat that early build quality and service capacity are the real unknowns. If you are watching the startups as investments or bets, watch reliability and service, because that is where this gets decided, not on a spec sheet.