El CEO de Rivian, RJ Scaringe, presenta el nuevo SUV eléctrico R2 durante Aspen Ideas

Great to be here.

Such a great event where it pulls different people together to talk about different ideas. We're at such an interesting inflection point where we have AI really entering both the consumer mindset, but it's entering how we run our businesses, how we design our products, and so we were excited to be able to participate and help sponsor, and we have shuttle services here so folks can get exposed to our EVs, and you know, it's just exciting to be here.

We just launched a new car, so it's the R2. It's a much lower price vehicle that really [clears throat] captures and embodies what is Rivian, but it has a rear drop glass, so you can press a little button on the outside or on the inside, and the rear glass drops, and it's like so nice for putting groceries in, you can put a surfboard in. My kids love to put the dog back there, so it's really my favorite feature.

Well, I started Rivian 17 years ago. You know, the journey of building a car company is complex, a lot of capital, big team, lots of suppliers, product needs to generate excitement, and the first embodiment of what we were trying to build was our flagship product, the R1. We launched that at the end of 2021, but the vision was always to get to a high volume, more mass market product, and so R2 starts at $45,000, and it captures all the brand essence that was in R1, but is much more attainable product. The average price of a new car in the United States is about $50,000, so it really fits in beautifully with the overall market.

So, we've taken the view from very early on that we wanted to vertically integrate in a few key areas. And for us, that was all of our software, all of our electronics, our high-voltage electronics. And there were a lot of hard decisions around that. So, it takes a lot of money. We spent many, many billions of dollars building our technology stack. And I remember it was probably 7 or 8 years ago. I said, 'You know, if we do this really well, we maybe we can even sell this to other manufacturers.' And so, fast forward late 2024, we actually did a $5.8 billion software licensing deal with Volkswagen, which is a really cool thing for me because I grew up as a car enthusiast. I loved Porsches and Volkswagens specifically. And so, it's now see our software and some of our electronics making their way across the portfolio of products within Volkswagen Group. Everything from Porsches to VWs is really exciting. And that's cool. It's technology developed here in the United States, primarily in California, that we're going to see used across the world.

The charging network's taken longer to build out than I think many thought it would, including myself. We took the decision about 5 years ago to contribute to that. So, we're building our own, what we call Rivian Adventure Network. It's one of two networks today in the United States that has uptime over 98, 99%. So, it's our network and Tesla's network. Tesla's network's much bigger, but Rivian vehicles can access the Tesla network. Teslas can also have access to Rivian network. Rivian's network is also open. But I think over the next 5 years, we're going to continue to see a lot more growth in that. Tesla's network will continue to expand. Our network will continue to expand. And you know, for folks that haven't been in an EV before, what always happens is you think this is going to be a big challenge, but you find that it's really nice. You can charge at home. You're rarely actually using these networks to go long distances. The average number of times a Rivian customer uses our high-speed charging network is like three or four times a year. And so, most of the time you're charging the vehicle at home, and it's really nice to not have to go to the gas station.

So, I started a robotics company last year. Name of the company is Mind Robotics. I'm enormously excited for this, and its focus is developing robots that can do human-like tasks in manufacturing. So, it's very focused on industrial settings. We've raised a little over a billion dollars in capital for this. We put together just an incredible team. And we're going to be deploying the first robots from Mind into Rivian in the early part of 2027.

It's a hopeful reflection point. When you look at the amount of things that have changed in the last 250 years, the amount of progress that's happened, and then you try to think about what the next 50 years, 100 years look like. As we're at the birth of AI, I mean, AI is a few years old. So, in many ways you could think of it as AI is in the first pitch of the first inning of a nine-inning game. And so, we're very early in seeing this enormous inflection in how society functions, how our businesses operate, how AI interacts with us every day. And for some that's a little overwhelming. It's like, 'Wow, I can't even imagine what 20, 30, 40 years from now is going to look like.' But when you look back and you say, 'Boy, just 250 years ago the US was created.' And think of all the things that have happened since then. It's really exciting to think about what's in front of us, what we can create, and the United States has built an environment that is so inviting and supportive of new ideas and building those new ideas. And the entrepreneurial spirit of our country, and I've certainly benefited from this, is just remarkable.

So, we announced that it was a $1.25 billion deal we did with Uber. We're deploying robo-taxis. So, the R2 product in a robo-taxi form starting in 2028. First two cities will be Miami and San Francisco, but over the next few years following that, we'll roll out across a number of big cities, 25 different big cities. And hopefully it'll be across the United States, across Europe with a robo-taxi platform. And so, that's a really exciting thing. We're going to see a few different ways to accomplish this, a few different companies are in this space. But the idea of getting your time back, you can be in a car, you don't have to be driving it. And in the robo-taxi structure, you're renting the ride, you're paying for the ride. But that same technology is going to be in our consumer vehicles. And so, you can start to imagine a world where the car that you own can drop you at the airport, can pick your kids up from school, can go to the grocery store and get stuff for you. And that's not like science fiction 30, 40 years from now. That's going to happen in the next few years. And so, that's something we're really excited about with Rivian. The rate of progress to get to that obviously needs to be high. We're going to see a lot of things continue to develop over the next 2, 3 years, but I've never been more confident in that technology rolled out than we are today.

The beauty of cars, I grew up a car enthusiast, and the beauty of what fueled my enthusiasm for it was there's so many different choices, and a car is a representation of a bunch of people coming together and developing and engineering something into one product. And so, as a result, you can think of so many different versions of that. You have different types of cars, different ways that they look. And so, when we approach designing our products, we pour love into it. So, it, of course, was thousands of people that are involved in developing it, but we want it to feel so cohesive, so aligned, and so on. R1 does that. And I think R2 does an even better job of that, where it drives incredible on road, it's incredible off road, it can fit your gear, it has a bunch of cool little detailed features within it. But I hope there's lots of other choices. I think for us to see electrification grow to ultimately 100% of new vehicle sales, I'm hopeful that R2 helps inspire more choices from other manufacturers.

Thank you for having me.