PSA – Shop Your Rivian Trade-In Before You Order An R2

Update, June 22, 2026: I went with Ever in the end. They came back at $76,000 for the R1T, $800 over Carvana and $9,480 more than Rivian’s own appraisal. I will report back on the full experience once the sale wraps up. The takeaway has not changed though. Shop around. The quotes cost nothing and the gap is real money.

If you are about to order an R2 and you plan on trading your current truck or SUV, check your Rivian trade-in value somewhere else before you accept whatever number Rivian puts in front of you. Shop it around first. The spread can be wide.

Here is what happened to me. My 2025 R1T Tri, around 23,000 miles, got appraised by Rivian at $66,520. Carvana looked at the same truck and came back with $75,200. That is more than $8,000 for filling out one more form on a different website.

I also tried Carmax. They wanted the truck brought in for an in person inspection before they would give me a firm number, so I skipped it. Maybe they would have beaten Carvana, maybe not. I was not going to drive over and find out when I already had a strong offer sitting in my inbox.

Now, trading straight to Rivian is not pointless. There is a tax angle. In most states, when the trade happens on the same transaction as the new car, you only pay sales tax on the difference between the two. Worth real money, and I broke it down state by state in an earlier guide. Florida sits at 6%, which on my R2 comes out to about $3,800 in sales tax. Trade to Rivian and that $3,800 basically disappears.

It still does not close the gap though. Carvana came in $8,680 over Rivian and the Florida tax savings is worth about $3,800. Subtract one from the other and I am still up around $4,880 going outside and just paying the R2 tax the normal way.

The math only flips if your trade in tax savings are bigger than the gap between the two offers. Live in a state with no sales tax, or get a Rivian number that lands close to what the outside buyers offer, and trading in can absolutely win. So run your own situation before you assume anything. Either the tax savings beats the extra cash an outside buyer hands you, or it does not, and for me it did not come close.

The depreciation is the part that gets me though. I took delivery of this R1T in November 2024 with a subtotal of $103,400, before a $3,500 Rivian loyalty offer and the equity I rolled in from my last truck. About 18 months later the best offer on it is $76,000. So roughly $27,000 has come off, around 26% of the sticker, in not much more than a year and a half.

For an EV truck that is not bad at all. Plenty of them bleed value way faster, which is probably why the outside offers came in where they did. But it makes the Rivian number look worse than it already did. Take their $66,520 and I am booking something like $37,000 in depreciation instead of $27,000. No thanks.

If you want to shop it yourself, Carvana and CarMax are the easy starting points. Both hand you a fast online number and both take gas cars too. There are also two buyers that only deal in EVs, Ever and Plug. That focus matters more than it sounds. EV-only buyers price off battery health and software features instead of just mileage and age, so on a clean low mileage Rivian they can sometimes land higher than a generic appraisal. Ever is where I ended up. They came in at $76,000, $800 past Carvana, which is the whole reason I am telling you to pull more than one quote.

Anyway, that kind of retention probably does not last. As more R1s come off lease and the R2 starts pulling demand toward the cheaper truck, used values could slide. So get your quotes now, while they still look like this.