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Pickup trucks are huge. A lot of them won’t even fit in a modern garage at this point. This is especially true for electric trucks. While the Rivian R1T is smaller than most full-size trucks, gas and electric, it’s still not small.
In Park City, Utah, during an exclusive one-on-one interview on The Drivecast Rivian Founder and CEO RJ Scaringe barely let me finish my question asking if he saw a market, a viable market, for a smaller than R1 electric pickup. “Yeah,” the CEO said emphatically.
Listen to the entire conversation starting at the moment Scaringe says yes about a market for a smaller electric truck below.
“Oh, I think there’s a, I mean, you’ve heard me talking about this before. I think in the world of electrified products, there’s a lot of different segments that just have not been addressed yet. The first, that really hasn’t been addressed is the true midsize SUV, we don’t have a great midsize SUV that consumers can buy today. There’s midsize crossovers, but not true SUVs. The smaller trucks space, I think there’s a big opportunity, the idea of adventure-oriented crossovers. I think there’s a big opportunity, hence R3. There’s R4. So we we also have to recognize on the platform there’s going to be things that come beyond R2 and R3 that we also have to make a tradeoff against in terms of what’s the next set of things that we do,” Scaringe said.
Just before this Scaringe said, “We’ve thought about R2Ts and even things beyond that. I would just say the platform’s capable of doing a lot. The real challenge we have is deciding what to do. And so there’s so many different cool things we can create. And so we as a company need to be focused on what’s the the next product we do or the next set of products we do that creates the most value, generates the most excitement around around the company. And that led to the portfolio that we’ve talked about publicly, so R2 and R3. I think the R3X was a really good, it was intended to be, and probably was picked up less, but it was intended to be a signal of the types of things that could come. To say, off the R2 platform there could—or off the R3 platform there is a—there’s a unique variant, and off the R2 platform there could be unique variants. There’s a lot of things you could do. And so in the fullness of time, I wouldn’t rule anything out. But in the immediate future, I wouldn’t hold out, you know, I wouldn’t hold out for any of those very different variants. It’ll stay R2.”
Whether R4 is a pickup form factor or something else entirely is unknown. Scaringe would only reveal, “it’s very cool, but not yet not ready to talk about it yet.” When pushed if it could be a pickup Scaringe would only say, “It could be a lot of things.”
Anything our mind wants, for now. But Scaringe didn’t say a small electric pickup truck isn’t coming someday.
Got a tip about future product? Send us a line at tips@thedrive.com
As Director of Content and Product, Joel draws on over 15 years of newsroom experience and inability to actually stop working to help ensure The Drive shapes the future of automotive media. He’s also a World Car Award juror.
