Forbes - USA (2020-03)

It’s 8 o’clock on a January morning, and the

temperature in Normal, Illinois, just a few hours

south of Chicago, is well below freezing. The

small pond in front of Rivian Automotive’s as-

sembly plant has turned to ice, the grass is cov-

ered with frost and there is snow in the forecast.

It’s not much warmer inside the plant. Near-

ly the entire 2.6 million-square-foot facility is a

construction zone, undergoing a massive $750

million renovation to prepare for the end of the

year, when it expects to start rolling out battery-

powered trucks, vans and SUVs. So minor details

like heat are not exactly a top priority.

The only finished area—a second floor at the

front of the building that overlooks the factory—

is where the plant’s previous owner, Mitsubishi,

had its executive offices. Back then, access to this

floor was restricted to the suits. Now it’s a giant

open workspace, accessible to all, with a cafete-

ria, polished concrete floors and lots of natural

light, just like the floor plan at Rivian’s research

and design center in Plymouth, Michigan. The

concept for both offices was to merge industri-

al and outdoor aesthetics that mirror the com-

pany’s brand—an automaker that builds sustain-

able vehicles usable in off-road settings. Rivian,

which was founded in 2009 but is finally releas-

ing its first vehicle this year, also has operations

in San Jose and Irvine, California, where it devel-

ops its technology and batteries.

“When we’re done cleaning, painting and in-

stalling the equipment,” says Rivian’s 37-year-

old founder and CEO, Robert Joseph Scaringe

(better known as just R.J.), “we will eventually

be able to produce 250,000 vehicles per year by

mid-decade.”

Starting an independent car company is not

easy. Among the roadkill in automotive history

are Preston Tucker, who challenged Detroit in

the late 1940s, and John DeLorean, who failed to

take the Motor City back to the future in the early

1980s. Producing a line of mass-market vehicles

in the 21st century is even more difficult than it

was for Tucker and DeLorean, and considerably

more perilous in the EV category.

With the emergence of Rivian, the electric ve-

hicle market is no longer a one horseless carriage

race. Indeed, the 2020s are gearing up to be the

decade of the EV. According to research at Op-

penheimer, EVs and plug-in electric hybrids ac-

counted for a mere 2.2 percent of all U.S. vehicles

sold in the last quarter of 2019. And only a third

of those were purely electric. But that is changing

rapidly. While only 5.1 million electric cars were

sold worldwide in 2018, that figure is expected

to surge throughout the decade—21 million units

are projected to be sold in 2020, 98 million in

2025 and 253 million in 2030.

Building a new EV, however, requires investing

in cutting-edge research into components like

battery packs and powertrains. The only compa-

ny that has been remotely successful is, of course,

Tesla—and even it has had a rough go of it.

“We spent a lot of time looking at and un-

derstanding how different [automakers] were

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2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010

DRIVE

TIME

A BRIEF HISTORY OF

TESLA AND RIVIAN

Elon Musk joins

as chairman

after investing

in its $ 7 .5 million

Series A.

Musk becomes

CEO; first

Roadsters

delivered.

Model S

debuts.

R.J. Scaringe

launches

Mainstream Motors.

Tesla goes

public with

$ 1 .7 billion

market

cap.

Company

founded

by Martin

Eberhard

and Marc

Tappenning.

TESLA

RIVIAN

Roadster

prototype

unveiled.