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RJ Scaringe got it His PhD is from MIT studying internal combustion engines. Then he started a company to be able to work. In 2009, right out of high school, he founded what would become Rivian. The company spent almost a decade in the dark before arriving at the 2018 LA Auto Show with two cars that no one saw coming.
The road, however, has not been easy. Rivian lost $3.6 billion in 2025, and has burned nearly $25 billion over the past eight years. It has he spent a lot of money at the same time than almost any other EV manufacturer. Rivian’s IPO was the world’s largest in 2021, and one of the largest in US history, just days after the company was worth more than $100 billion. Its stock has fallen from a high of $130 to about $16. Since the R1 went on sale in 2021, Rivian has sold 175,000 vehicles. At the same time, Tesla has sold 8 million.
But in 2024, the Volkswagen Group paid a total of 5.8 billion dollars to cooperate in the development of software and the technology of electrical engineering with Rivian in a major agreement. This year, Uber announced that it will invest $1.25 billion in Rivian to build and deploy up to 50,000 autonomous robotaxis.
Even so, the company wants its own The new R2 SUV to work. Not just selling, but selling more.
I sat down with Scaringe to discuss what happens if the R2 fails, why the R1 was founded on dead technology, how to compete with China, the failure of the Cybertruck, and the virtues of buttons inside cars. But we started at an easy place: his thoughts on the most impressive EV of 2026. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
JERMY WHITE: What do you think? Luce of Ferrari?
RJ SCARINGE: The way Jony (Ive) and Marc (Newson) design is intentional, so no decision on the car was intentional. Through that lens, you have to like to look at it differently. It is very different from what people expect.
Do you like Luce, though?
Can I buy it? I don’t own a Ferrari. There are things about it that I really like. The internals are amazing, as are the well-designed haptics, switches, buttons. You can see Jony’s fingerprints everywhere.
