Rivian has yet to deliver a single vehicle to a paying customer but the company has managed to establish itself as perhaps the most promising new contender in the electric vehicle space since Tesla.
In a freshly-released video from the electric car manufacturer, we get a glimpse into the history of Rivian as told by founder and chief executive RJ Scaringe.
The company was founded in 2009 and for two years, it worked on an all-electric sports car. However, after all that effort, Scaringe decided a sports car wasn’t what the company needed and decided to venture into the pickup truck and SUV space. Until 2017, the company operated in stealth mode and didn’t become public until it purchased an old Mitsubishi factory in Normal, Illinois back in early 2017.
Read: Amazon Places Order For 100,000 Electric Delivery Vans From Rivian
The Rivian R1T truck and R1S SUV
Over the years, Rivian has hired some of the industry’s leading executives, engineers, and thinkers to establish a team to rival those of the very best established car manufacturers. Key employees come from the likes of McLaren, Ford, Faraday Future, Netflix, Intel, Tesla, and others. The company’s chief technology officer is none other than Mike Bell, a former Apple VP who was instrumental in the creation of the iPhone.
Rivian has secured billions of dollars’ worth of investment since it came out of hiding from the likes of Ford, Amazon, and many others. As part of a $500 million investment from Ford, Rivian will work alongside Lincoln to develop an all-new vehicle based on Rivian’s skateboard platform to compete in the SUV space. Rivian is also building 100,000 electric delivery vans for Amazon and continuing to fine-tune its own R1T and R1S models before production begins later this year.