THENEWYORKER,JANUARY31, 2022 49
anese subcompact established itself in the
U.S. market. In the eighties, with “boom-
ers getting married and having kids, they
flocked to the minivan,” which Chrysler
started producing in 1993. Ford came out
with the 1991 Ford Explorer S.U.V., which
“looked cool and the minivan didn’t,”
Merkle went on, adding, “The driver could
feel good about being an adventurous
person even while doing nine-to-five
jobs.” S.U.V.s grew steadily bigger with
boomer incomes and became Expeditions.
Then, “Ford thought, People are buying
these large S.U.V.s. What if we packaged
the best of an S.U.V. into a pickup? So
we moved people into these luxury crew-
cab pickup trucks in the late nineties, and
Ford hasn’t looked back since.”
Although I didn’t get to drive an F-150
Lightning, I did take one of its electric
rivals, Rivian’s R1T pickup, from a Rivian
service center in Bushwick to Far Rock-
away and back. The truck starts at $67,500,
but my ride, an Adventure Package model,
which advertises three hundred and four-
teen miles of range and comes with a
natural-grained ash-wood dashboard,
kicks off at $73,000—almost twice the
Lightning’s starting price. For an extra
five grand, there’s a two-burner induction
cooktop and a sink, for those lonesome
nights out on the range with the dogies.
Still, from my first glimpse of the
truck’s front end I was smitten. Instead
of the usual grille full of snarling chrome-
plated chompers, the R1T’s retro-futur-
istic front end seemed to smile, and say,
“You’re not buying this vehicle for work,
or at least not the kind of work people
used to do in pickups, are you, cowboy?”
That was true. According to a survey,
more than one in ten country songs re-
leased in 2019 mentioned pickup trucks,
but I still haven’t heard any lyrics about
truck-drivin’ me. With apologies to Glen
Campbell, that song would go: Like a
laptop cowboy/Sitting out here in my truck
with my M1 MacBook Pro/Like a laptop
cowboy/Tele-shrink sessions and watchin’
my favorite new shows/And then buyin’
more stuff on my phone.
The R1T is fifteen inches shorter than
my nineteen-foot-long F-150, which
means that it can fit into most garages.
It has a smaller bed, but it also has an
ingenious “gear tunnel”: a cuboid space
that runs through the middle of the truck.
Rivian’s founder, thirty-nine-year-old
RJ Scaringe, from Rockledge, Florida,
who wears horn-rimmed glasses and has
a wholesome demeanor, is often likened
to Clark Kent. But he struck me more
as Mozart to Jim Farley’s Salieri. Un-
burdened by incumbency, Scaringe can
freely “mess with the bed,” without alien-
ating an existing customer base.
Scaringe grew up next to the Indian
River from which the company derives its
name. His father founded a mechanical-
engineering firm, and a neighbor, who
restored vintage Porsches, allowed young
RJ to help out. He became so car-obsessed
that he would stash spare parts around
his bedroom. “But I had this realization
that these things that I was deeply in love
with were also the source of so many of
the world’s problems,” he told me. “There
are geopolitical challenges, air-quality is-
sues in most of the major cities through-
out the world, and we’re essentially re-
designing our atmosphere’s composition
at levels that are hard to imagine. It felt
like it was emotionally inconsistent to
love something so much that you knew
was bad.”
Scaringe received a master’s degree in
mechanical engineering from M.I.T. and
a doctorate from M.I.T.’s Sloan Auto-
motive Laboratory. On graduating, in
2009, he founded a company to build
hybrid sports cars and coupes. A couple
of years later, he renamed the company
Rivian, and, recognizing that sedans were
a shrinking category and that Tesla had
already launched one, he started work-
ing on an electric pickup and an S.U.V.
In 2017, Rivian’s workforce, which is non-
union, moved into a former Mitsubishi
factory in Normal, Illinois. Amazon in-
vested more than two billion dollars in
the company, and ordered a hundred
thousand vans. Ford invested $1.2 billion.
When Scaringe talks about vertical
integration, he’s referring not to raw ma-
terials but to the integration of software,
electronics, and hardware. “From the start
of building the company, software and
electronics stacks are core to what we
do,” he said. “So we’re building all the
computers in the car, the software stacks
that run those computers, and we inte-
grate that. Which is very different from
how the auto industry has evolved.” Scar-
inge was the only person I met in the
auto industry who talked about “soft-
ware stacks” with the kind of poetic in-
tensity that Charlie used to talk about
engine parts.By the time I returned the R1T to
Bushwick, this laptop cowboy had two
sweethearts. I went on the Rivian Web
site and, just for fun, configured an R1T
for myself. Then I forked over a thou-
sand refundable dollars to hold the res-
ervation on a vehicle that may take even
longer than my Lightning. At some point,
I’ll have to choose—the sensible, reli-
able, and more affordable Lightning (pro-
vided the Ford dealer doesn’t add a huge
markup, which seems possible, given de-
mand), made in a union shop, or the R1T,
an electric, digital vehicle designed from
scratch that is truly new but doesn’t ben-
efit from Ford’s manufacturing experi-
ence. Or I’ll keep my gas F-150, which I
recently made my last payment on, and
spare the world another truck.I
spoke to Bill Ford on November 10th,
the day that Rivian initiated an I.P.O.
on the Nasdaq. By the end of the trad-
ing day, Rivian had reached a market
cap of a hundred and one billion dol-
lars (Scaringe was suddenly worth two
billion), which made it for a time worth
more than Ford, despite having no prof-
its and little production history. (Ford’s
valuation has since risen.) Although
Ford’s investment in the startup paid
off handsomely, Rivian’s stock price also
showed that investors thought a startup
that had at that point made just north
of two hundred vehicles might have a
better chance of transitioning into the
age of digital cars than did Ford, one of
the world’s great industrial enterprises.
Bill Ford seemed unbothered, how-
ever. “This is a blast,” he said, of this piv-
otal moment in family and company
history. “I love this. All my career, I’ve
kind of been waiting for this.” When
he started calling for greener cars and
manufacturing practices, more than
twenty years ago, he has said, “the in-
dustry reacted like I was a Bolshevik.”
Now, he reflected, “it’s here. I only wish
I was thirty years younger.”
Last May, Ford’s daughter Alexan-
dra Ford English, who started working
for the company in 2017 as a manager
in the autonomous-vehicle sector, be-
came the first Ford woman to join the
board. She was thirty-three—the age of
her great-great-grandfather when he
met Thomas Edison.
“She will live what I hoped to live,” her
father said. “And that will be very cool.”