and SUVs appeal to buyers only for reasons
of sustainability. The lessons of the summer
of cold showers in Boston linger.
In Plymouth, Scaringe walked with me
out to the atrium, where the Rivian pickup
was parked, to make his point. “What do
you think?” he asked.
The question was expected. Scaringe goes
to just about every customer event the com-
pany holds around the country, hoping to
gauge people’s reactions. His truck looked
good—there was no way around that. It was
sleek, modest, inviting. If I lived out West, I
thought, I wouldn’t mind driving it through
by the machine in front of us. His intent
is that the truck of 10,000 decisions will
delight everyone and tread lightly on the
earth—but do so with a great deal of trac-
tion. The hope, in short, is that it might, as
it begins rolling off the factory lines in a few
months, do it all.JON GERTNER (@jongertner) is the
author, most recently, of The Ice at the
End of the World: An Epic Journey Into
Greenland’s Buried Past and Our Perilous
Future. He wrote about a melting Ant-
arctic glacier in issue 27.01.a babbling brook on the way to a campsite.
To Scaringe, this vehicle seemed less a
piece of electromechanical hardware than
the end product of 10,000 difficult deci-
sions that had to be made with consistency
and rigor. When you’re talking to custom-
ers, he said, you’ll find that one needs the
truck bed to be short, to fit in the garage,
and another needs it to be long, to haul
gear. (The R1T’s bed expands from 4'11" to
6'11".) The same goes for countless other
small matters—“and each person is sure
they’re 100 percent right,” Scaringe said.
He shook his head, as though still amazed_China’s new magnetic levitation train, the world’s fastest, will reach speeds of 373 mph, carrying passengers more than
600 miles in two hours while putting out less than half the emissions of a regional flight.