Rivian’s CEO Says RAD Vehicles Will Be Fundamentally Different

Rivian’s skunkworks performance division, named RAD, which is short for Rivian Adventure Department, won’t be slinging sticker jobs.

In Park City, Utah, Rivian Founder and CEO RJ Scaringe sat down in an exclusive one-on-one interview on The Drivecast and said RAD products are “not just like new badging on them. They’ll going to be fundamentally improved under the skin.” This will translate to meaningful hardware changes to enhance the performance of RAD models.

Listen to the entire conversation starting at the moment Scaringe talks about what RAD vehicles will consist of below.

The RAD department was formally announced in February. The department’s mantra? Ask “Should we push this further?” and the answer is always “Yes!”

“RAD is, it’s a one of the most enjoyable parts of developing a car, especially something like the R2, is you have all these tradeoffs and compromises you have to make. And I think the magic is when you can balance those tradeoffs really beautifully such that the vehicle feels really cohesive. But what that means is there’s certain parts of the vehicle where, for it to hit a price point, you have to decide, you can only spend so many dollars. And so where do you allocate the bill of materials? Do you put it into, you know, if you put it all into the chassis, that means you’re going to suffer in other areas. If you put all into the interior, you’re going to suffer in other areas. So we’ve tried to really evenly and thoughtfully deploy dollars across the vehicle to create the best possible combination of things. But inherently with that, we make decisions around certain aspects of performance that we think satisfy the most people. But we know that we could turn the dial up further. So, could we turn the dial to 11 and improve the performance of the vehicle dynamically? Of course, we have the the engineering capabilities to do that. And so RAD is an opportunity for us to take the vehicle which is really—it’s fantastic. I’m very happy with where we’ve landed with R2, but turn it to 11,” Scaringe said.

Scaringe continued by saying, “And so what that means is thinking about it on-road, off-road dynamically, thinking about it in terms of, even some of the things in how it aesthetically appears—so some of the visual imagery around the vehicle. And so we launched RAD really recognizing that we create this really balanced set of vehicles, but we actually want to have some vehicles that are a little less balanced, if that makes sense, where we really go a little further on excitement, performance, and adventure. And, so that’s what you’ll see from us. So I think when when you see these, they’re not just like new badging on them. They’ll going to be fundamentally improved under the skin, but that’ll add cost. And so it’s going to make them more expensive, but it’ll make them really, really exciting.”

The R3X wasn’t in any way associated with RAD when it debuted. Scaringe addressed this and noted, “We showed R3X, and at that time, we hadn’t announced RAD. But when you think of RAD and what it embodies, and R3X was spiritually representative of the types of things we’ll do with RAD. And we just hadn’t, when we launched, when we showed R3X, we actually hadn’t arrived at and realized we wanted to create a performance sub-brand as a way to categorize these vehicles. But you know, if we were launching or were showing R3X today, we would have called that a RAD vehicle. And so if you look at that, the track is wider, the vehicle is sitting a little higher, the wheels are, you know, these are they’re both larger in diameter, and wider. The interior was really dialed up.”

The cork dashboard and woven bucket seats were like stuff out of a fever dream. “Yeah, and those the woven seats were just so cool. But it really had a motorsports-inspired feel to it, like a rally-inspired feel, and capability. And so that’s just one example of what this could start to look like. And and by the way, if you look at the colors that were on R3X, and you look at the colors on the RAD products, or the way we’ve talked about RAD, you can see how the inspiration really ties,” Scaringe said.

Even Scaringe acknowledged RAD is an absolute skunkworks division right down to the genesis of its formation. “The coolest thing about RAD, and having been a car enthusiast my whole life, you know, and growing up seeing like BMW’s M division or Mercedes AMG or, you know, the GT side of Porsche like GT2s, GT3s, you see these things and they’ve evolved and turned into things, and it’s fun to read the stories of like, how did M start or how did AMG start?” Scaringe said.

Scaringe continued, “They’re like, you can see a lot of those authentically were born out of that. And RAD is really that. It like the combination of a few people within the team, myself, authentically recognized a desire to make the vehicles even more capable, and as I said, in some ways imbalanced where you you weight put more weight on performance and capability. And I think that’s really cool. And so to now see it, to have a way to describe it with RAD, to have a product portfolio that we’re thinking about that’s going to capture that, assigning a skunkworks team whose objective is to make these cars more extreme is really cool. And the people that are going to be involved in the program, many of them you know. So you’ve already mentioned a few names, but… there’s people you can probably imagine from the the cross-section of folks you’ve met at Rivian who will be on the, who’s part of the skunkworks team.”

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