R2 production officially started in April, Q1 came in ahead of estimates with a third straight quarter of positive gross profit, deliveries grew 20 percent year over year, and Volkswagen raised its stake to 15.9 percent. RIVN is down 31 percent on the year anyway. The gap between what Rivian is doing and what the market is pricing in has rarely been this wide.
Rivian's AI-defined vehicle framing sounded like marketing theater when Chief Software Officer Wassym Bensaid first dropped it on stage at Autonomy and AI Day back in December. Five months later, with Rivian Assistant actually shipping and a wider AI strategy coming into focus across voice, autonomy, and the Volkswagen joint venture, it's a lot harder to write off as buzzword theater.
Customer R2 deliveries are about to start, and the next 30 days are going to tell us more about where Rivian is actually headed than anything that's been pitched on a stage in the past year. The marketing is done, production is rolling, and the story is about to shift from pricing and trims to what real ownership actually looks like. I've got an R2 coming too, so I'll be sharing the full experience here as it unfolds.
Rivian's RAP1 chip and Gen 3 Autonomy Computer aren't just spec bumps. They're the moment Rivian stops renting compute from someone else and starts owning the whole stack, the same way Apple did when it walked away from Intel and built its own silicon.
RJ Scaringe’s headline $403 million pay package isn’t actually money in his pocket. Most of it is grant-date fair value on stock options that only pay out if Rivian’s stock more than doubles, the company hits real profitability targets, and he stays CEO long enough to see it through. The cash he actually took home in 2025 looks more like $25 million, and most of that came from selling existing shares back to the Also spinout.
