Rivian has hired Jody Kerns, who most recently ran Cybercab general assembly at Tesla’s Gigafactory Texas, as its new Director of General Assembly for the R2 program in Normal, Illinois. Kerns announced the move on LinkedIn on October 11.
At Tesla, Kerns was Senior Manager of Cybercab General Assembly, and he points to the Cybercab launch and a project he calls WEOL as the work he’s proudest of from his time there. Now he’s heading to Normal, where he says the goal is to help make the R2 the best electric SUV on the market.
General assembly is where the body, battery, interior and wiring all come together into a finished vehicle, so this is the part of the plant that has the most say in how fast R2s roll off the line and how well they’re put together when they do.
The timing makes sense for where the ramp is right now. Rivian had a second R2 shift in place by September 30, and Normal is designed to build up to 155,000 R2s a year once it’s running three shifts. Getting there takes people who’ve launched a brand new vehicle on a brand new line, and Kerns did exactly that at Giga Texas within the last year.
