Rivian has spent years as one of the more credible challengers to Tesla, and on The Vergecast, editor Andy Hawkins and host David Pierce argue its next car will decide what kind of company it becomes. The R2 is Rivian's push into the mainstream, and the discussion puts first versions in the 57,000 to 58,000 dollar range, with a base model under 50,000 dollars arriving late next year. Hawkins, who visited Rivian's Normal, Illinois factory shortly after a tornado damaged part of the R2 line, describes a mood of resilience mixed with real pressure. Rivian is projecting 20,000 to 25,000 R2 deliveries in the second half of this year, a figure the show frames as ambitious for a company of its size.
The stakes are easier to understand next to the car the R2 sits below. Hawkins says the R1 started around 70,000 dollars and could climb past 100,000 once optioned, which capped how large its audience could ever be. The R2 is the attempt to widen that audience, and it lands in the most crowded and price sensitive part of the electric SUV market, up against established options such as the Tesla Model Y and the Ford Mustang Mach E. The show also places the launch in a harsher backdrop than two years ago: the hosts note the US federal EV tax credit has gone away, which they argue has cooled demand across the board. For a would be buyer, the takeaway is that the R2 has to be good and affordable at the same time, in a market that has stopped growing on its own, which is a far harder brief than launching into a rising tide.
Much of the conversation is about whether Rivian can execute rather than whether the car is likeable. Hawkins, who has sat in the R2 but not yet driven it, describes it as a smaller R1S that keeps the design and software people liked. He says Rivian's R1 vehicles score well for owner satisfaction but poorly for reliability, which he ties to earlier software issues the company says it is addressing over the air. The hosts also walk through Rivian's other bets, including a roughly 5.8 billion dollar software arrangement with Volkswagen and a robotaxi deal with Uber, and question whether the company has at times chased survival deals at the expense of building cars. On autonomy, Hawkins reports that a Verge tester found the R2's hands free system rough, saying it tried to run a couple of stop signs, and that Rivian has said a software update is coming. He stresses these are early impressions. The financial picture gets attention too. Hawkins says Rivian has not been profitable on a yearly basis and still loses money on each R1 it sells, which he frames as the reason lowering costs with the R2 matters so much. He adds that an even cheaper R3 is planned to follow, and that the Volkswagen and Uber deals have helped fund the company through the gap. The hosts note that launching a genuinely new car brand at scale in the United States is rare, with Tesla the main modern example, which raises the degree of difficulty for anything Rivian attempts next.
Bottom line: Strip away the tornado and the robotaxi talk and the story is simple: Rivian has to sell a lot of R2s, profitably, in a bad market, without the delays that dogged its first car. That is a genuinely hard task, and the show is right that no amount of brand goodwill substitutes for it. If the R2 hits its delivery targets and the reliability reputation improves, Rivian looks like a real second American EV success story. If it stumbles, the software and autonomy deals start to read less like a grand strategy and more like a lifeboat.
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