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Speaker unverified: belief

14 Oct 2025 Cheeky Pint How to build a $16B car company with RJ Scaringe, founder of Rivian

“I think that's going to become even more important and more true in a world of integrated AI.”

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Speaker unverified
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Not verified from this transcript
Claim type
belief
Recorded
14 Oct 2025
Publisher
Cheeky Pint

Transcript context

…features really carefully. What are fun features that you left in the cutting room floor, that you would love to have put in or maybe you'll do in a future car, but— On R1? Like Jeep Wrangler kind of. Yeah, that was really nice, especially in a car like this, to have that capability. Future R1 someday we'll bring that back. That was really cool. We all lamented losing that, but it was just a lot. Again, back to complexity and launching, we decided just to manage our own complexity in that, but that was one. Now R1 has just about everything. We wanted the new quad, we brought back this, we call kick steer feature, where we can use the fact that there's four motors in the quad and the four motor version to introduce torque vectoring to an extreme degree where you can pivot— Like an F 22 Raptor. You’re cross vectoring. Yeah, you can pivot it on its access. So it's really fun off-road. It's not an on-road feature. You're not going to use it on the highway and it's quite useful. Not with that attitude! Not with that attitude. But we brought that back. I think as I look at R2, there's some features on it that we didn't put in R1, but that really make R2 special. So R2 still has a flashlight, but the rear glass on the lift gate now drops. And I've been using an R2 with the kids to do school dropoffs, and it is so cool to come up with the back glass open and the kids just throw their backpacks in through the back of the car. So I love that. And then we've added a few other really thoughtful features around… All the storage compartments are thought about from the perspective of, do you have kids? Do you have pets? Do you have a backpack, do you have a handbag? Do you have something that you need to put somewhere and where does it go? And increasingly, I’ve found in a lot of modern cars, you just don't have places for all this gear. And so we like, do personas. So imagine you're a backpacker, where does all your gear go? Imagine you're commuting to the office. Where does your gear go? Imagine you've got two kids and a diaper bag, where does that go? The last time I saw you, I was asking you about CarPlay and I was saying how you guys needed that. But then I realized afterwards that I think when people say they want CarPlay or when I said I want CarPlay, what I actually want is navigational and traffic data from a source that I trust.And the inbuilt navigation system in a car from a Mercedes or BMW, or something like that, no one thinks that they have the best traffic data and then you guys launch Google Maps and it's awesome. It's great. How did that come about? in a car from a Mercedes or BMW, or something like that, no one thinks that they have the best traffic data and then you guys launch Google Maps and it's awesome. It's great. How did that come about? Well, you just nailed it. This is a decision. It's generated, I said there's many millions of decisions, many of them will never get noticed and they're just under the surface. One of those decisions that's been noticed quite a bit is the fact that we've intentionally not included CarPlay in the vehicle. And that's not to say we don't think a close partnership with Apple is important. So we have Apple Music integration, we have a bunch of Apple integrations that are yet to come, we have a great relationship with the team at Apple. But it was more to say, we just felt and continue to feel very strongly about creating a consistent, fully integrated digital experience where you're not jumping between apps, let's say from a CarPlay app back to the vehicle app. And it's quite jarring when you don't have, let's say vehicle level controls when you're in the CarPlay environment. That view we've had since the early, early days. I think that's going to become even more important and more true in a world of integrated AI. So suddenly when you can talk to your vehicle and say, “Please open the front trunk, please unlock the doors, lower the windows, set the temperature, take me to this place. I'm hungry,I feel like tacos… find something along the way to the charger.” All those immersive experiences really need the full breadth of context from your mobile device, from your vehicle, from the vehicle back to you. Like, what's the state of the charge? I don't even know if it's irrational for me to not trust it, but I just noticed that I don't. Yeah, it's better. It's a big step forward with Google, how we've done it. So that I'd say fully eliminated the concern on mapping. And then the next is text, and voice to text, and being able to interact with your device, that's equally important for Android and for Apple customers. And so that's coming very soon. Oh, that's cool. And then there's really no gap. And what we found is working directly with Apple on the applications that folks care about, like Apple Music, these are the kinds of things we'd rather do and give customers this more highly curated choice of different platforms, but within the Rivian ecosystem. Again, I was struck by, after we discussed it, that again, I don't actually want CarPlay. It's kind of funny when you think about it. There's the screen with all the icons and the Audible app, and no one wants to go browse through their audiobook library on the car screen. What they want is navigation data from a source they trust and to play audio from their phone—those things they actually want. Can I give you my pitches for my suggested Rivian features? Bring it on. Have you seen that episode of The Simpsons, where Homer gets to design his own car? Somebody gave me a picture of that car. t. Can I give you my pitches for my suggested Rivian features? Bring it on. Have you seen that episode of The Simpsons, where Homer gets to design his own car? Somebody gave me a picture of that car. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, the Homer car. But I feel like it's a classic bikeshed issue where, I dunno, no one's that familiar with what Stripe does at the innards level, and so they just assume that Stripe is doing all the sensible things. Whereas everyone drives a car, and so everyone could be like, “Here's what you guys should do.” Family members, friends. Totally. Exactly. Why do all cars offer memory of the driver, either the old fashioned way that other cars do it—where you press the position one or two for the seat—you guys do, it connects to the phone. It's really nice. That moves the seat that moves the side mirrors. No car moves the rear view mirror. Why is that the final frontier of adjustability? Well, there's no actuator on the mirror. Sure, but that's your choice. It's definitely our choice. We could, it's a cost trade off. Yeah, you’ve got actuators on the side mirrors. Yeah, they're harder to reach though. The rear view mirror is harder to reach? The side mirrors, if you go back in time, if you go back 25 years— Oh, they're harder for the driver to reach. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They used to be manually adjusted And then— The little knobs. And then way, way back you'd have to push on the glass to move it around. And then we had little knobs. The advanced knob technology— And then we moved to electric-controlled. And in those cases we moved to electric-controlled because it's hard to reach out the window or reach across the car. In this case it's just there. But you guys are the surprise and delight company. So here's the question. We always have to ask ourselves, if we have a certain pool of dollars we can spend on the car. Essentially we're the arbiters of how those dollars get spent and we can't make everyone happy. Somebody maybe wants that, but to do that,something else either has to fall out or the price has to go up. Okay. If you're worried about the bond— So we end up taking, those are the kinds of things— You could also do it like when you see the really big SUVs, they actually just have a video feed projected up there. You could also do the video feed, which then would not require any adjustment Completely. Yes. So we’ve actually had a lot of debate around this. This is very actively debated. Where you see the mirror, it's not actually a mirror, it's just a screen. And we've not done that yet. If I'm honest it’s partially because of me. I've not loved— Oh, the team's coming and pitching you on the video. There's a team that would like to do it with the mirror as a screen. And I've been against it. In part, because if you have good visibility— so if you can see out the back—it's a little disorienting. And so my concern is, you make 50% of people happier with it, but a lot of people would say, “Just give me a mirror.” And so we've just made the trade to say we're going to take those dollars and spend them elsewhere. There's not anything wrong with those as products. It's just a decision.…

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