Rivian CEO, RJ Scaringe, talks R1S and the Future of Rivian

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1:17We're literally using this like a... Like a podcast studio. This is super fun. Yeah. First time podcasting in an Arabian? This is my first time podcasting in an Arabian, yeah. Amazing. RJ. Thanks for doing this. Thanks for spending the time. Welcome to the Waveform Podcast. We have so much to talk about. So you're the CEO of Rivian, and I've owned and used a Rivian that I've talked about in the past, and I love the thing. It's a truck. We've got this R1S here that we're doing the podcast in. It's a full-size three-row SUV. With the ocean coast interior? With the light interior, which is pretty sweet.

1:55And this is limestone, is what it's called on the outside on the paint talk to me about how you got started with getting into cars and how rivian started what's the like origin story that you give people yeah well i um it's funny we're just talking about origin stories yeah started the company about 13 years ago okay and uh initially we were focused on a very different product so more of a sports car was the initial thought and we spent a couple years iterating through that but ultimately really shifted um to a large what you see today but it wasn't as if it was a we went to bed on a friday and woke up monday and knew what it was yeah it took us a lot of time to really think through the position the company the brand how we can create something that um was different than what was out there but also helped really advance thinking around what could electric vehicle be what could you know new form of mobility be so yeah yeah that that um journey was was a twisty path but ultimately started to align around the idea of products that both enabled and inspired people to go do the kinds of things you want to take photographs of as we sit here with cameras um but a brand built around adventure and enabling those types of experiences that's really interesting i didn't know you started on the sports car path um i did see that the original name for rivian okay was something else yeah and that it was mainstream motors is that true and if so what well i'm glad you didn't and go with mainstream motors that just feels like a very bland like generic megacorp name uh how did that choice happen um yeah so uh i i i started the company and when you start a company you have to have a name to start with yeah i didn't have the final name in mind so i i used that as a placeholder yeah my dad has a business called mainstream engineering so i used that name got it uh which is fun but then we very quickly switched to avera a-v-e-r-a so we're avera motors uh for about a year and a half and it was sort of a play on words it was playing on the word verde and terra so green earth nice um but the name actually sounded phonetically similar to hyundai had a product the azera and so this was back in like 2010 2011 hyundai's this i said you need to stop using the name or we're gonna sue thank we had no money of course i'm not gonna fight with hyundai over a name that nobody knows about you got it hyundai so yeah you keep it um so we then went through this long exercise of figuring out what the name should be and um arrived at rivian which i'm so glad that all happened yeah uh i said like that name a lot more than than avera same but it was something we wanted to find something that phonetically was sounded like flowing and moving but um of course didn't have a meaning in any language and yeah we could get the rights to so it was a hard process to come up with a name i'm i can sympathize we're working on a name for a product that we're making and it's been like weeks oh yeah different words and different made up words and just trying to think of what will work and looking up what's out there piece words together yeah yep same thing yeah we and when we were doing it we we like went out and talked to some third parties that do like naming and branding and i thought how hard could this be and we got a quote back for what they'd charge us.

5:13I'm like, whoa, okay, so it looks like myself and the five or six other engineers at the company had to figure that out without the support of any branding experts. That's funny. But so you got the logo out of Rivian, you got the sort of font and everything, the branding is all set, and Adventure Vehicle is the theme and it's sort of pieced together in that puzzle piece. Yeah, I mean, the logo, we call it the compass, This is, it's basic. It's a graphic representation of a compass. And it's just beautifully scalable. You can imagine it's a brand that can go anywhere. It can take you anywhere. Yeah.

5:48And that's what we wanted. I think the paint colors are a surprisingly good indicator of what the vehicle is designed to do. Do you feel that way? I feel like I look at the adventure vehicle theme and then I see your paint colors and I agree with all of them as choices for that specific vehicle. The Kang in red, the red is just like, just rust and dirt enough to feel like, yeah, I can get this thing dirty. The limestone one, the blue turquoise one, which I'll tell you the story is I wasn't planning on getting one. But I did have a reservation in for a Cybertruck and we were going to do the whole tow hitch rig and thing with the Cybertruck to shoot videos.

6:24And then we got an R1T in blue in to do a video with. Okay. So we did the video. I lived with it for a week. I had almost nothing negative to say about it. I really enjoyed it. And within, you can ask people at the studio, like within a week, I was just like, I kind of think maybe we get one of those instead. That seems pretty great. And it's not going to be gigantic and it's going to do all the same stuff we want. And so that's when I placed my orders. That's great. When the product speaks to me, that's the most important thing. So I feel like strong product does the talking for itself. And I think that's pretty sweet.

7:01Thanks. And my sort of initial question is like, all right, every company's got plans. They sort of have this vision of how they want things to go. And I think famously Elon's detailed a master plan where you make a low volume, high price car and that fuels the next one, which is higher volume, lower price. So Rivian starts with a truck, a smaller pickup truck, adventure vehicle type thing. R1S, the SUV is next. what is the what is the thinking behind this these two being the first two and how does the rest of the plan look yeah the so as i said when we pivoted the first the sort of core idea was let's build a brand that enables and inspires these types of adventures as i said and we then identified the flagship products to do that with which we're sitting in one of them now the r1s but the sibling product, the R1T, really intended to be truly the flagship.

7:57Following those, we have a smaller set of products, creatively we call R2, R3, but they move into different form factors, obviously different sizes, and the goal of those is to continue to take the essence of what we've done here in terms of, you know, it can fit your gear, your kids, your pets, do it in a really sort of refined and fun way, but in different packages and smaller form factors. You know, one of the advantages of starting with the flagship product, though, is it gives you the room to put a lot of content in the vehicle. So in the case of these vehicles, electro-hydraulic suspension in terms of damping, air suspension, quad motor, so really sort of full content in terms of everything you can put into the vehicle.

8:41The future products will have a little less stuff but still deliver on the essence of the brand. yeah that's really interesting because i i talk about and this video is not even out yet but it will be soon which is why i talk about why evs are generally expensive and it's obviously every company has to at some point come out with their first electric car whether you're a startup and it's an ev startup or you're ford or whatever and you're coming out with your first ev and it's like you can either differentiate yourself on features and like building it interestingly and having a bunch of cool things that it does or competing on price.

9:16And it's way more compelling to compete on how good the vehicle can be and useful it is. There's a lot of really interesting features with the R1T, like the flashlight in the door. I mean, talk me through some of the more interesting decisions that you thought would separate R1T when it came out as a first EV pickup trip. Yeah, when we were sort of at the drawing board stage, there's all kinds of things. We said, well, if you electrify the vehicle, what can you do differently? of course obvious ones like the front trunk less obvious uh like the gear tunnel and the r1t which goes to the side of the vehicle yeah um but then we started to look for opportunities to just create these little like almost magical moments and the flashlight was one that we were really drawn to just because it's it's it has a place it's always there it's always charged um it's a lithium battery so it's you know it can last for a really long time wasn't there a thing about how many cells are in the battery versus the total number in the truck yeah so in the truck the like in the SUV as well there's 7 ,776 cells okay and so the cool thing about the flash drive is also gives you that last cell to get to four sevens um that was coincidence but we were pretty excited when when that worked out that way that's hilarious because most companies would be like oh yeah we designed it this way we were going to do exactly seven seven seven seven I'm glad you're admitting it was a coincidence it was a lucky coincidence we really enjoyed yeah but yeah all all those types of little features the the one of the biggest challenges in developing a product like this is you have to decide what you're going to say yes to what you're going to say no to and you're you have to make lots of trade-offs so the size of the size of the vehicle the seating configuration and and some of those decisions are really big they sort of set the tone for the whole product and some of those are small like let's say like a radius on the instrument panel but the collection of those millions of decisions ultimately feels like a product that either is like coordinated like all those decisions were cohesively made across the board or you can sense an org structure and so our goal has always been to have it feel as if one united team made several million decisions together over the course of a couple years yeah um and the the result is is of course what we're sitting in today and i'm sure that comes from teams within rivian working together communicating often all of that yeah yeah and one of the challenges in automotive historically is you like the teams and a lot of the technologies either siloed or very often outsourced so electronics software infotainment these are not typically things that that car manufacturers do themselves so for us vertically integrating our electronic stacks that's all the computers in the car the software stack that sits on top of them allowed us to integrate features in a way that you typically don't see.

11:59Honestly, I think this is one of the differentiating features of this EV, which is this software is really good. And I think that's also kind of curious because a lot of traditional car companies are, I've described them as hardware companies first, really good at manufacturing, and then they happen to also have to do software to make it all work, where some of the really good ones, Rivian, Tesla, Lucid you might throw in there, really good software companies that are also making a car that works well around it do you think of that as an advantage for rivian just specifically it's a huge focus for us and when we talk about software there's the things we see you know that manifest in the ui here but the everything that exists under the surface so the way the chassis controls work powertrain controls battery management all of that being developed in-house allows us to quickly iterate and improve the product and add new features add more range uh the our this year's product is more range than last year's product but it's right i got software software updates yeah which is really fun um but you but you have to control the entirety of the software stack to really fully leverage right all the capabilities so no android auto no carplay correct which is what a lot of people it's kind of surprising have you seen the stat apple posted about like 75 of people won't even consider a car without carplay i don't even know if that's true or not but it just strikes me as like every car video i watch they at least have to mention oh yeah you can just put carplay on it the software it doesn't even matter just put carplay on it how do you is i'm assuming it's no plans to add those things but it's sort of a balancing act you have to make this as good as yeah i mean a lot of the things we do like whether it's music or mapping you know we have to make sure we integrate in with the the best-in-class platforms but by controlling the system it just allows us to be the you know the arbiter the the head chef in terms of the experience that you get versus handing over control of what we think is one of the most important parts of the experience yeah i saw lucid added the android i know they added carplay and it was just like a little square in the corner okay it didn't look well integrated well you kind of get the feeling like they're pressured into adding it and now it's there and people are going to use it but like imagine how good they could make their own software to accomplish all those things yeah yeah and the thing about controlling the software stack is we get to continually make it better so you've had your r1t you've hopefully seen this so each every few weeks we have a new software release that either adds features addresses gaps we listen to feedback um our head of software development is on reddit all the time uh that's amazing yeah like hearing what people are saying and interacting so it's great to get the feedback and then we drive our software roadmap and make sure we're delivering on what customers want.

14:41Do you guys feel like you're like lean enough to respond to like, you mentioned Reddit, but like YouTube videos, like literal customers in the forums talking about things that they would like. Are you like actively going in there and going, you know what, this is a good idea. We hadn't thought of it. Let's add this to the roadmap. Yeah. All the time. I mean, whether it's Reddit, um, videos, um, my dad sending me a text today, had some feedback and we integrated it. You've got to add that. Dad feature, yeah. So, I mean, there's all that kind of content that comes in. And we have a roadmap that roughly every three weeks we have a new software release.

15:18And so we'll review what the plans are for that release. And I'll spend time with our head of software and the team. And we often bring things in and say, hey, look, this is something. It was a great idea. Let's get it in as soon as possible. So it might be a matter of weeks before it gets into the vehicle. Nice. so if you have any ideas oh i can we can i can put some things in for the next release full of ideas i mean i talk about this on the autofocus channel where like i give my feedback and it's been cool to see companies take that feedback and then i see a software update or maybe it's the next car and they're eager to point out like hey look at check this out we fixed just make sure you're in the release yeah exactly um okay something else about r1t uh is when you look at the other ev pickup trucks that are out now like f-150 lightning and even cyber truck pre-orders a lot of people's first truck which is really interesting to me is that also true about r1t do you know a lot about like the typical r1t buyer yeah um so most of the customers r1t haven't owned a truck before and one of the things that we're seeing is that um often there's the desire for the function that a pickup would have provided in terms of like an open bed storage the ability to throw things in very easily but the inefficiency the the sort of the ride dynamics the clumsiness of a traditional pickup pickup truck has kept them from making a purchase so maybe they had a sgv maybe they had a hatchback so it's it's just it's a very large percentage of customers um that just haven't owned a pickup before so it's not only in many cases the first dv but it's the first dv and it's their first pickup yeah and so we've had uh folks that you just fall in love with the fact that they can put stuff in the back and then the gear tunnel feature is something we're finding is really heavily used as well yeah yeah first ev is also interesting because then you get to the how do we design this truck in order to accommodate people who have only ever driven a gas car and make them feel familiar with it but also give them the advantages like a lot of things what i think about a lot driving my tesla is that it is really just geared to an ev it's not really trying to accommodate people who have driven a gas car meaning lift off to coast doesn't happen anymore uh lift off the brake pedal to creep forward doesn't happen anymore but if you drive an ev cadillac or an ev4 like a lot of them will have those features by default the tycan um what's the balance like in this car is it mostly optimizing for what evs do best or do you think about like yeah i think gas car people would like this yeah you referenced regen that's that's a big one we um you have two yeah we have two regen modes we have what we call standard and high um we don't have a regen off and what we found is for those that are like used to coasting once you use it for just a little bit of time the ability to do one pedal driving is just a a better driving experience um so we haven't added that uh and we don't have a creep feature either so we don't sort of emulate or simulate a you know automatic transmission do you think that's silly for others to do it it feels like a lot of them make the decision to add that ability specifically just to give i believe it's for the familiarity of like i don't want to stop this behavior i've learned for the last 20 years of driving gas cars it's hard to say we i i think what we found is um a lot of more of our customers you know it's like three quarters of our customers have never owned an ev before so it's like things like 80 yeah um so they come into an ev for the first time and very quickly you reorient around regen you reorient around sort of when you actually need to use the brake pedal which is not that often and um and it you know it's like you learn in a few days and so we haven't had the need to add it it is a it's an interesting question though because it's it's really simulating something that's not mechanically here like you're simulating a torque converter you're simulating a an automatic transmission which is sort of a funny simulating an inefficiency yeah yeah it's interesting it is funny that's uh that's weird well something else i think a lot of ev first time ev buyers have to contend with is charging That's like the number one question I get when I'm out in the Rivian or any other EV people ask about it.

19:22What are your thoughts on the current state of EV charging? Yeah, it's a challenge. In the United States, there's been a massive underinvestment in charging infrastructure. And realizing that, we decided to build out our own infrastructure. So it's early stages. But we call it the Rivian Adventure Network. It's a DC fast charge network. We have about, I mean, we're early today, we have about 30 sites that are up. Each one has six DC fast chargers that can charge. The charger can charge up to 300 kilowatts, which means it's protected for future products as well. These take up to about 220 kilowatts today.

20:01But, you know, as we have new products come out, that'll continue to grow to fully utilize the charging capability of the chargers. But in terms of independent networks, there's only a couple that are out there outside of Tesla. and they're not very good. A lot of them have real reliability problems or uptime problems or not very predictable. So this is one of the reasons we're investing so much money and so much capital into building out a very large network. What we've said publicly is we'll have over 600 charging stations within about two years. Worldwide? Well, first in the U.S. Just in the U.S.

20:35And really opening up, as you'd imagine, the key corridors up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, and then connecting the West Coast to the East Coast. So that's the prioritization. I think Tesla's network is a very strong network, clearly the best network that's out there today. And what we're building, we hope to create a network that has equal level of density in terms of chargers, but also in terms of uptime. Yeah. Do you think of it as competing with Tesla? Because I feel like with the Rivian, the more you can build out your own network, the better experience it will be for Rivian customers.

21:07And the better the public charging experience gets, the better it is for going on road trips. If you get a home charger, the whole thing starts looking really good. But there's just like a couple of Tesla chargers that have added this adapter that can work and they'll show up on the map, which is great. Do you wish there were more open on Tesla's network? Yeah, I think that I think more will open on Tesla's network. We've the ravines can charge on that on Tesla's network where they're open. And the way I think about it is over time, I hope, charging starts to become more ubiquitous and it becomes less of an issue.

21:45Because we can't rely on that happening independently from us, we've decided to build our own network. It's many hundreds of millions of dollars to go do that, but it creates a much better customer experience. So a year from now, the density of Rivian chargers will really help solve a lot of these core issues. and we'll see third-party networks start to build up as well. But because our chargers are, we design them, we build them, we build them actually in the same plant, we build the vehicles. They're really high quality, so the uptime is high. We monitor them. It's a key part of the customer experience.

22:18And so one of the challenges with the independent networks is if you're a first-time EV buyer and you're on a road trip and you go to one of the choices, let's say Electrify America, and it doesn't work, that's a really frustrating experience. Agreed. It's not something Rivian can control. It's outside of our control. And so by building our own network, we can ensure that the chargers themselves are well-maintained and working. So you kind of have like an infrastructure in place to keep the uptime high. There's people monitoring them, that type of thing. Oh, for sure, yeah. Yeah, for sure. Because that seems like the biggest difference between a well-maintained and a not well-maintained charging network.

22:53Because it's just like there has to be some level of effort to maintain quality. yes i mean i i review every week i get the uptime report for every one of our chargers and that's one of the things is we we deployed our these first initial sites with mostly concentrated on the west coast um we want to make sure the systems were all working our teams were able to service them the uptime is extremely good on those what is a good uptime on a charger i mean like as a percentage 99 99 okay you have five something like that it needs to be because it's if it doesn't work if it doesn't work it's like immediately it starts affecting It's a very bad experience, yeah.

23:29I'm on a road trip. Charger doesn't work. That's not good. Yeah, so also having multiple chargers per site ensures that if there is an issue with one of the dispensers, there's another one there. Okay. Yeah. So every one of our sites has two cabinets that do all the power conversion, and then we have six dispensers. Gotcha. Are there, I guess I always ask about future plans, but potentially larger sites in the future? Yeah, so we have six. Because other cars can charge on Rivian's network, right? We're going to open it up right now. It's Rivian's only. but it's six, nine, twelve, sort of groups of three.

24:01Yeah, cool. I like that. I think we have two sites of nine chargers today. Got it. Are there any on the East Coast? I feel like I've looked for them. There's a couple, but in like a month there'll be more, and a month after that, it'll start populating and growing quickly.

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28:32No, we sort of went into it knowing it's going to be expensive. I think what's more surprising is sometimes just how hard the process to get everything approved is. Building the site, sometimes everything from a zoning and permitting point of view takes more time than the site itself. Right. Interesting. So the pipeline, we have several hundred sites in the pipeline that are in various stages of permitting and zoning. Paperwork stages. Interesting. Chargers are being built, and then the charger gets set up really quickly. Got it. Okay, that's cool. So you've got R1T is out. then you get to r1s for customers there is also and i don't know if you even know this like a quarter mile down the road around the corner there's an amazon facility okay sometimes i'll drive in here and i'll see like nine rivian delivery vans pass me in a row and i'm like they're doing it too they're also doing that what's that business been like is that a huge part of what keeps rivian afloat is that uh sort of a 50 50 split with the customer business what does that look like for you yeah the one of the challenges we've had in the last uh in the last year really if we look at 2022 is we launched the truck the r1t we launched this the r1s and we launched two versions of the van a 500 cubic foot version a 700 cubic version and a product launch you know launching manufacturing on something like this is any vehicle is really hard there's several thousand parts that have to come together from hundreds of suppliers and um the wipers going on there uh and so you have hundreds of suppliers with thousands of parts all of them to be synchronizing coming together and to do that in any vehicle is hard to do that in a vehicle when you've got this supply chain crisis happening in the backdrop it's really hard and to do that when you've got the challenges of operating with covid it was it was incredibly hard um and to just sort to stack those four different vehicles over the course of the last year was, was, uh, tested our, our operational capabilities.

30:28And it showed all the gaps that we had. And we learned so much in the last year, but as it stands today, the, the T in the S, the R1 platform is ramping and the van program, uh, while it's a completely different vehicle top hat, we do share some of the electronics, um, share some of the, um, propulsion element elements of the propulsion platform but um but it's a much easier vehicle to build it's you know there's like one seat and a jump seat yeah it's like a big box with shelves in the back so yeah it's it's uh it's a different kind of vehicle than this when you look at this is a lot of content it's a complex vehicle to build definitely so the amazon vans and the commercial vans we're ramping those as you say you're going to start seeing a lot of them on the roads yeah it's it's kind of i feel like that's the most common rivian vehicle i see on the road right now maybe it's just because of being in new jersey being around the Amazon facility?

31:17There's more R1s on the road. There are a lot around here. The key is we deploy those in clusters. I see. So there's probably a big cluster here, and then they also have to have their own charging setup, and they get walked through the advantages of the vehicle and what to do versus not to do. For a driver, I mean, imagine you're in a van all day long driving. This is your office. So the comfort, the drivability, things like regen, these all become really key elements. of what it feels like to be at work during the day. So we've spent a lot of time on driver comfort and with drivers in the feedback loop through the development process.

31:54And one of the things we found was most important was actually getting in and out of the vehicle. So you have to get in and out of the vehicle about 300 times a day. So the van is asymmetric. So on the driver's side, there's a forward hinge door, which actually on a route, you don't use that often. And on what we would call the passenger side, there's a pocket door. so a door that sort of slides into the body itself. And so the ease at which you can hop out of the driver's seat, grab a package, and then get out of the vehicle through this open pocket door makes just that whole process a lot easier.

32:28And so that, coupled with, of course, the drivability of an EV, and then a really heavy focus on thermal control, so the seats are cooled and heated. Nice. And when I say cooled, not just vented, but actually, you know, cooled refrigerated air blowing up through the seat which on a hot day feels really nice to sit down on a seat it's almost like when you when you go into the kitchen you open the refrigerator to cool off and it blows a burst of cool air it's like your seat does that to you so it's really something that the drivers um have responded to positively and it's the sought after vehicle right within the you know within the distribution centers that's really interesting yeah yeah it seems a lot now which is funny but i guess that that kind of reminds me of like all the decisions that have to go into making like each every little thing was someone's like real choice they had like an a b c choice and they were like all right we're going to put the little logos here on the wireless charger uh and i've even mentioned in some of the autofocus videos like a little tiny feedback on what i might have done a little differently like in this one i'll say when i pop something on the wireless charger it slides around we're fixing that a little ridge are you this is this was there's a lot of things that aren't right about the charging pad but it's um phone slides around too easy the way the induction coils are set up and i spaced well enough to allow for such a wide variance in phone sizes yep so this is um this is going to get updated pretty soon you're ready here first it's it's being updated autofocus here absolutely it is super frustrating right now when the phone slides but there on top of that there's a lot of really well thought out things like the charges back here and then the cable routing coming out here so if you do a wired phone that works great there's also the the speaker that's more of like an that's okay there are some features that skirt the line for me right between feature and gimmick i'm like am i going to use this speaker yeah where is this skirting a line for you too just like a fun thing let's just add a speaker just we got the space why the speaker's fun um we have a uh option that's coming going to come out soon which there's another first uh that speaker when it goes in there's a look on the back of it yeah can i pull this out uh tripod's probably in the way but i think on the bottom there's like a little retaining hook and what that's for is if the vehicles when the vehicle's and drive that latch closes yeah so that if you were to break hard or get into an accident the speaker doesn't become a projectile yep but that that latch and the whole electronic mechanism around that creates an opportunity for this to be a modular space so we actually have instead of a speaker we have a drawer module that's going to go in so imagine like a little that could be box that carries stuff yeah that's going to be an optional basically you can choose the speaker or this drawer okay that's cool but the um the thing about the speaker is it's really handy when you don't plan to need a speaker uh and you have a speaker so like if you're at a campsite if you're at a friend's house helping to move a couch if you're have a garage dance party whatever whatever which my kids love to do okay like all those kinds of things you're not planning for um you have a really nice speaker with a big battery that can last a while yeah it's also a charging dock which is handy so we a lot of people use it for a charging dock which is like the most over designed charging dock you can imagine it's pretty great yeah yeah yeah and i think there's a lot of things that that are like that when i see a vehicle that has a feature i immediately think like is this designed for a person or for a demo and i wonder like okay yeah most of the features in here are like very well laid out and then there's a couple that are just like ah i think i might use that flashlight once in a while well flashlight i flashlight we find gets used a lot it is all the time yeah the theme is the speaker is probably bigger than it needed to be you probably we probably could have gotten over the smaller one i mean i've literally used it where my phone's dead and i'm like damn i need a phone charge so i'll grab the speaker i'm like carrying the speaker out with a wire attached to it okay you're like boy i wish we'd made this a little smaller that's funny um yeah so what is another thing that you find is something you don't use a lot um okay the one small detail small detail with the gear tunnel on the r1t okay is if i have something that's not big enough and i'm driving and it slides around and i put it in on the left side but when i arrive at my destination it's on the other side yeah is a little ridge maybe a good idea or is it just like should i only ever put golf clubs in there like what's the usual use case for the gear tunnel that's fun um so there's a whole series there's a whole group of people have thought about what like do we put retainers or different sort of cubbies if you will within the gear tunnel there's a floor mat that we're working on that has a ridge um what we're finding most people use it for duffel bags yeah which is very common yeah um not basketballs or things that roll easy for exactly that point yeah uh but but things that sort of you put there stay in place obviously golf clubs uh snowboards is a really common one uh that we see all the time snow boots is a really common one the camp kitchen's gone the camp the camp kitchen's is gone gone it is yeah but was it just not enough people um it's a good question no it's a really popular feature it was more there was more people that wanted it than more the take rate was higher than we expected we went we're going through a redesign process to redesign it to something that uh it's very cool we're going to show it soon that doesn't consume the whole space okay so one of the challenges with the kitchen as we originally designed it is people had this painful uh decision between do i want to use my gear tunnel or do i want the entire thing the entire thing used up with the kitchen yeah so we have a cheaper lower cost update design that that is much less that doesn't take up the whole thing that's cool yeah yeah i feel like that so we pulled it off the off of our configurator while we go through the redesign originally we thought we'd keep it the same but it's changing so much that it's it's going to be a a reset to how we think about kitchens we think the kitchen space is really interesting for a vehicle it's designed to to be out to go out doing things it's you know we all congregate around food it's a really great way to bond so and you have enough power to cook many many meals in the vehicle so uh that was something we spent time on interesting yeah so i guess in the in the larger big picture you're the ceo of rivian i'm sure a lot of decisions get to the point where like other leaders have talked to me about this.

38:41If it's an easy enough decision, it gets solved quickly by people who work in that specific department. And if it's a more difficult decision, it gets escalated more. And eventually your job just becomes sifting through the most difficult, interesting decisions that you have to make along with strategy. How do you think about steering the Rivian ship and the decisions that you have to make? And maybe if you have an example of some tougher decisions, how you go through that process yeah it's you know in in something as complex as a vehicle um you know if our products were they're making i don't know insulated cups or something much simpler conceivably like you could be i could be involved in every decision you know what's the radius of the edge of the cup how does the tops grow on on something like a vehicle there's some you know so many millions of decisions that need to be taken that by by by very definition i should be involved in a small fraction and as you said it's it's the really key foundational decisions or the really hard subjective decisions um so on these products on on r1 um the team was a lot smaller when a lot of the core decisions were made so i was very much in a lot of the details of r1 as we're now working on future products uh where i'm focusing a lot of my time is on the the key technical decisions so So the decisions around compute platforms, battery cell architecture, network architecture.

40:02So what's our topology of computers within the vehicle? And I get very involved in those items. But then we have really strong teams that can do some of the detailed design work on, let's say, executing seats or executing body structures. But, of course, when anything escalates around a design tradeoff, that's a classic one. Like, would you like it to look like this? It'll cost more. it'll weigh more i see or we can make it look less cool um but it'll cost less and way less those types of trade-offs sometimes it's hard to have them made automatically it requires some level of escalation and they kind of i guess add in they they compile so you can make one of those decisions and it might feel like just one but if you made all the decisions in one direction then you'd end up with a different product entirely where maybe there's one thing that you steer one way while another thing you steer the other way for sure i mean it's on a vehicle with a cost target if they decide where you're going to spread investment right like so do you want to put a thousand more dollars into the interior do you want to put it into the hood do you want to put it into the chassis do you want to put it into range so these are all this complex web of trade-offs yeah well that that trade-off web gets super complex when you aim for like a 35 000 car like this is the this is the ultimate question i always get which is man i want an ev but they're also expensive when are they going to have like a volkswagen golf that's electric and it's got all the same range and everything and it's the same price i don't know about you but i see that as like a horizon thing like the battery technology has to get cheaper there's a lot of expensive parts of electric cars how do you think about the eventual goal of potentially a much more affordable attainable ev for the masses yeah it's it's really important and what we don't want to have happen as as consumers or for us as a company is to just dilute it down to where there's no personality or excitement so i think that's where we talk about this a lot is um you can do innovation through additions you add features you add content um you add technology um the ability to do innovation through subtraction where you really distill down to the core essence of what is what is the product and the brand stand for so as you know we're deep into our our next set of programs on the r2 platform and those vehicles there's huge debates around like where we apply spending where we put the materials cost is it in the suspension you know how capable does the vehicle need to be off-road relative to let's say on-road driving dynamics or in terms of interior content and so these are these are really big decisions so you know something like this we have a sunglass holder here yep that adds money costs yep do we want to do something like that or would you rather have you know a removable flashlight in the door these are those are the decisions and so for the the r2 product lineup we have less dollars to spend and so they're those two like things that we didn't have to debate as much on a flagship product like this we really are debating heavily that's really interesting yeah and so what's core to the brand is a flashlight in the door really critical right versus being able to manage certain off-road conditions, which drive costs the body structure and it's a chassis.

43:19So these are the really fun, crunchy debates that we have internally. So R2 is a lower-cost overall platform for a vehicle. Much lower cost, yeah. That's why the decisions are more frequent between potentially things instead of just, why not both? Because it's a$90 ,000 truck. Yeah, and so we talk about it a lot. There's only so many really cool features we can add in the vehicle. yeah and and each one has a price tag and we you know we're constantly adding all those up and saying we is the sum of the parts where we want it to be it's a balancing act yeah yeah and this evolves over time too because i'm sure you know whether the target for r2 is low or you get like 10 12 years down the road and then there's a 25 000 vehicle like eventually accessibility is the goal is there a future do you share the vision of like eventually every car's electric is that like an inevitable future so it's like it needs to be the outcome yeah yeah i guess that that just means yes eventually we will have to get to incredibly affordable evs everywhere that do satisfy various people's needs yeah i mean when you think about um it's pretty wild we're we we we lived through this period of time in human history where for like this brief moment the whole world ran on fossil fuels and you can imagine history books five years from now a thousand years now looking back and there was like this blip of time where like our generation and our parents and our parents parents lived on like hundreds of millions of years of accumulated carbon in the form of fossil fuels and that just won't be the way the planet runs and it shouldn't be and the sooner we can get off of it the less risk we put in our on our you know planet's ecological systems and of course on climate so like our view is we need to make the switch as fast as we possibly can but it's unquestionable that the switch will certainly happen in the very near term, in the next 15 years, I would say.

45:09What would you say to other more traditional car companies who are lagging on their switch to making good EVs? Because there's a lot of them out there, and I talk to them, and I talk to obviously the ones that do make EVs, I review the products, and then there are some that just seem to not be super interested in making a good quality EV, Or maybe there's legislation that's like, oh, we've got to get our emissions average down, but we're not really focused on that yet. Are there messages that regular people can send voting with their wallets? What would you say to them? I think people are starting to vote with their wallets.

45:40You're seeing, I mean, you own EVs, you own an Rivian, you own a Tesla. I mean, once you move into an EV, it's really hard to go the opposite direction. and and i think that is going to become even more true as we solve charging so as we build more charging and charge for the reason as i said rubyans investing so heavily in our charging network um but i'd say that the other reality is is we shouldn't make the choice to an electric vehicle just about electrification it should just be the best thing you can buy so true if you're buying a seven passenger through a suv and you want something that's a premium capable vehicle this should be the best thing you could buy and that's yeah and the fact that it's electric is is a great thing from an from an environmental point of view from a dynamics point of view but but ultimately the the product in totality needs to just be the one you want yeah yeah i think that's kind of what makes uh the cheaper evs a tougher sell right now is because they're not necessarily the best thing at that price where you see like the 30 to 45 000 evs where they they had to make a lot of the choices which were we're going to cut a lot of personality here or we're going to cut a lot of the the things that people typically expect in a car of this price to offer an ev where i guess strategically speaking the best way to start is at the top yeah where you make that convincing value proposition this is the best version yeah and it is electric so now we've set the tone for electric and then we can work our way down in price yeah that's what uh for us with r2 is so exciting is the ability to have you talked about like cut the personality the vehicle have all the same like rich per sign that we find in the r1 platform okay but like curated so thoughtfully that the fact that there's less content and maybe we spend less money so instead of a quad motor there's less motors but but the dynamics the capabilities all that still really feel special yeah okay well i'm looking forward to r2 it sounds like that's gonna be exciting when should we expect to see the first r2 stuff that is not too far out uh we're not going to show it for a little while um but sometime in the next roughly year okay nice yeah well uh i think we should do a walk around in the vehicle and we'll do that on the autofocus channel so if you're watching the podcast thanks for watching thanks for spending the time for the waveform audience i'm sure they'll enjoy it and uh watch the autofocus video when we walk around the r1s thanks for watching see you guys later peace