Image: Caruso
Rivian laid off hundreds of workers on Tuesday, or less than 2% of its workforce, just one week after it began deliveries of its all-important R2 SUV.
The electric automaker confirmed the cuts hit its service and customer teams, which include sales and marketing, as it tries to claw its way to a profit it has yet to ever post.
A fourth round of cuts since 2024
The Wall Street Journal first reported the layoffs on Tuesday, and Rivian confirmed them to multiple outlets. It’s at least the fourth round of cuts Rivian has made since the start of 2024.
“We recently restructured a handful of teams within Rivian as we work to profitably scale our business,” the company said in a statement.
Rivian employed roughly 15,200 people across North America and Europe at the end of last year. Less than 2% of that base puts the cuts at up to around 300 positions, concentrated in customer-facing roles rather than R2 production.
The move follows the roughly 600 layoffs Rivian made in October 2025, about 4.5% of its workforce at the time, which CEO RJ Scaringe tied to slowing EV demand after the federal tax credit expired and to leaning down ahead of the R2 launch.
The timing is the story
Rivian started R2 deliveries just one week ago. The R2 Performance with the Launch Package opened at $57,990, with a Premium trim at $53,990 and a Standard version at $48,490 due in 2027. A $45,000 base model is slated to follow.
The R2 is the vehicle Rivian’s entire financial story rests on. It’s the cheaper, higher-volume SUV meant to take Rivian from a niche premium player burning cash to a mainstream automaker with the scale to make money.
Cutting service, sales, and marketing staff in the same week you launch your highest-volume product to date is an unusual sequence. Rivian frames it as efficiency. The reality is a company under intense pressure to narrow losses while ramping its most important launch ever.
The profit Rivian keeps pushing back
The bigger context: Rivian has accumulated more than $27 billion in losses to date — its accumulated deficit hit $27.0 billion at the end of 2025 — and has never turned a profit.
The company had been targeting its first profit in 2027, but pushed that goal back in March as it spends heavily to develop autonomous driving technology. That delay was disclosed alongside news that Uber plans to invest up to $1.25 billion in Rivian and buy as many as 50,000 R2 SUVs for use as robotaxis.
There’s a catch: Rivian has not yet shown it can deliver autonomy. It currently offers a hands-off, eyes-on-the-road driver assist feature — a long way from the driverless capability a robotaxi fleet would require.
Electrek’s Take
This is a company trying to do two expensive things at once: ramp its make-or-break mass-market vehicle and fund an autonomy program ambitious enough to underpin a 50,000-unit Uber robotaxi deal. Layoffs of customer-facing staff in launch week are how you signal to investors that cost discipline is real, even as R&D spending climbs.
The worry is what’s being cut. Service and customer teams are exactly the functions a company needs to scale up, not down, when it’s about to put far more vehicles on the road with the R2. Trimming them right as deliveries begin risks a worse ownership experience at the precise moment Rivian is courting a broader, less forgiving mainstream audience.
The strategic logic of pushing the profitability target to chase autonomy is defensible — that’s where Tesla, Waymo, and the rest of the industry are pointing. But Rivian is spending against a capability it hasn’t demonstrated, while burning cash on a vehicle it still has to prove it can build at volume and margin. The R2 ramp over the next two quarters will tell us whether this is disciplined scaling or a company stretched too thin. Which is it?
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