Rivian bets R2 EV can turn it into a household name like Tesla

PARK CITY, Utah — Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe is energetic as he makes his way through displays for the electric vehicle maker’s new R2 SUV.

The company founder moves quickly from the EV’s suspension and software systems to different models of the R2 that will soon begin to reach American consumers, including a roughly $45,000 entry-level model that Rivian said Tuesday is being pulled ahead from late 2027 to next summer.

But there’s an anxiousness in Scaringe’s voice as he talks to employees and media at the R2 launch event in western Utah and prepares to release the vehicle, starting Tuesday, to the world.

Scaringe founded the EV maker in 2009. He has grown Rivian into a company with a $22 billion market cap that ranked highest in Consumer Reports’ most recent customer satisfaction survey, but lowest in predictive industry reliability due to consumer-reported problems with its early vehicles.

That’s unusual for an automotive brand. Typically, the more problems a brand has, the lower its customer satisfactions rank — but not Rivian.

It’s a testament to the brand Scaringe, a 43-year-old automotive enthusiast and tech entrepreneur, has built. That kind of customer satisfaction is also harder to maintain as a brand grows, which is Rivian’s goal with the R2.

The new SUV is meant to transform Rivian from a niche EV manufacturer that sells luxury vehicles — largely in California and states where electric vehicles sell well — to a more mainstream brand that can not only compete against U.S. EV leader Tesla but with broader mainstream automotive brands such as Jeep and Subaru.

“Its goal is for it to be a high-volume product,” Scaringe told CNBC. “Certainly, we’re going to draw on some Tesla customers, but the market of non-Tesla customers is many, many times larger.”

Wall Street analysts have described the R2 as Rivian’s make-or-break moment, comparable to Tesla moving from its pricey, first-generation EVs to the mainstream Model 3 and Model Y that currently dominate the U.S. market.

Scaringe doesn’t object to such a categorization.

“When you build a company from scratch, everything is make or break. There is no company if things don’t work,” he said. “Saying that it’s ‘make or break,’ it’s like, of course, it is.”

Rivian is also hoping to achieve its main goal with the R2: profitability. The EV maker lost $3.6 billion last year, while only delivering 42,247 vehicles.

After promising investors it would be profitable on an adjusted basis by 2027, Rivian earlier this year withdrew that target without disclosing a new time frame to achieve the milestone. That comes as its automotive segment lost about $6,000 per vehicle it delivered during the first quarter of this year.

Scaringe reconfirmed to CNBC that Rivian now expects to…