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14 Oct 2025 Cheeky Pint How to build a $16B car company with RJ Scaringe, founder of Rivian
“We use AI to analyze the customer and the context they're in, and then we dynamically surface the payment methods—over 75 different options—most likely to convert for that specific customer.”
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- 14 Oct 2025
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- Cheeky Pint
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…y, “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. Okay. Next question. California mandates booster seats up to the age of eight. And I've always found it funny that we are boosting the child as opposed to moving the third point up and down on the seatbelt, where you could just have an adjustable seatbelt and then ensure that the child is correctly configured where you move the third point down and now the seatbelt is appropriately across their lap. And it would just be much less stuff to be carved around. You're not requiring boosters, you just adjust the seat to be correctly configured to the child size. And Volvo kind of does this with the XC90 where they have an integrated booster seat in the middle seat, but it's only one seat, and it's actually still a booster and everything. Why not do adjustable seatbelt points as a child restraining device? So we do have the adjustability of the third point. We can adjust it. It just only goes down to 5th percentile female. So it doesn't cover the kid range. And the reason for that is, it's classic unintended consequences. So when we have to test at different settings, and so we test across from 5th percentile female to 95th percentile male. That's so interesting. And so we also plan for unbelted in a way that, I think, other countries don't contemplate that. Sorry. And that is when you say “we” you mean the United States as a certification. Yeah, United States, yeah. I didn't know the United States was an outlier there. Are there places where if you could change the certification and safety rules around cars, you would make changes? It'd be really nice if the United States and Europe had one set of standards. The biggest difference, in terms of safety, between the US and Europe is in pedestrian protection. So when you think about, if you hit somebody on the road, what you want is you want to have them go up over the car, but they're likely going to have a hard impact with the hood. And so in Europe, there's very tight pedestrian protection standards. And so, the shape of the bumpers have been designed to make sure they get brought over the top of the car and then the hood needs to have some give to it. And so we've designed our hoods… a big part of the hood design is to contemplate a human head hitting the hood. There's certain cars that you see here in the United States that could never pass a pedestrian protection. In Europe, for example, a Cybertruck could not work in Europe. a human head hitting the hood. There's certain cars that you see here in the United States that could never pass a pedestrian protection. In Europe, for example, a Cybertruck could not work in Europe. Interesting. You wouldn't expect a car maker like Rivian to use Stripe. But one reason they do is they need to accept a huge range of payment values. So when you're putting down a thousand dollars deposit on the car, you probably want to use your credit card. But when you're actually ready to buy and you're spending $90,000, you might run into a few issues with that. So Rivian uses Stripe to securely accept bank payments using ACH. The right payment method for the situation, it just depends. For Rivian, they want bank payments and many businesses on Stripe, they want to accept the blossoming variety of international payment methods. If you're expanding to Brazil for example, you need Pix, which is now how most people pay online there, In Poland, offering the local option, Blik, can lift conversion by over 40%. And globally, customers increasingly expect point of sale credit using services like Klarna. Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite handles all these payment methods and their differences for you. We use AI to analyze the customer and the context they're in, and then we dynamically surface the payment methods—over 75 different options—most likely to convert for that specific customer. Learn more at stripe.com/payments. Yeah, for sure. But countering that is, as the vehicle increasingly drives itself— That's where I was going to go. There's a battle between, people are becoming worse drivers, which is kind of bad and scary but true because they're just increasingly on their phone. And we were walking through the city at one point recently, and a car kind of blew past the pedestrian crossing right as people were kind of in the process of crossing. And just like this old guy next to us said, “You have to be on your phone to be driving like that.” I thought that was an apt description of much driving these days. But how much are the improvements in semi-autonomy, like the fender bender detection and stuff like this helping? I have a 9-year-old, a 7-year-old, and 6-year-old, and I truly think that by the time my oldest is able to drive, the environment's going to be so different than what we see today. The next five years, we're going to see autonomy features where the idea of hands-free or hands-free, eyes off go from being something that a very small percentage of customers are looking for or using to something that's essentially expected. Could you just have cars going around in the parking lot? Well, not your Gen 1, but all the Gen 2 vehicles. They're gathering training data for this. or using to something that's essentially expected. Could you just have cars going around in the parking lot? Well, not your Gen 1, but all the Gen 2 vehicles. They're gathering training data for this. So the obvious ones are if you're in self-driving mode, if you're on the highway, for example, in our vehicle, and it disengages, that's a piece of information, we train off that. More interesting is when you're driving, you as the human, the model's running in parallel and when you do something different than the model predicts, that's interesting. It's like if you change lanes and the model predicted you would not change lanes. Or vice versa, if the model predicts we should change lanes now and you don't change lanes. On a singular basis it’s sort of interesting, but you multiply that across thousands and thousands of vehicles, it becomes a really powerful method for teaching a digital driver how to drive. Yes. I feel like the big debate that plays out in the public realm on this stuff is basically the Waymo versus Tesla approaches of more sensors on Waymo's versus fewer sensors on Tesla. And Elon's being quite dismissive of LiDAR. Where do you stand on this sensor debate? I think first is I'd say there's alignment amongst Rivian, Tesla, Waymo around the use of AI to train. And so, the view that you're building a large scale foundation model, multi-billion parameter model, you're building that with the data flywheel of the vehicles that are deployed. There's consistency there. I think, for some reason this has been a lightning rod issue in ways that I wouldn't have expected. If you look at sensor theory, and even if you have noisy sensors, it just mathematically proves that having more sensors is a better approach. It’s always seemed nonsensical to me. Yeah, more sensors obviously better and we know how to— So that's the reason you have more than one camera. So even moving beyond more than one camera, we have many cameras around the vehicle, but then saying we want additional modalities that have a non-overlapping set of strengths and weaknesses with a camera. And it's, there's no arbitration of the camera versus a radar or camera versus a LiDAR, because it's just not how the models are built anymore. They have a worldview and then the addition of different modalities. It actually helps balance out some of the noise and the signals. Because every signal's going to have noise, every camera has noise, every LiDAR has noise, every radar. So you just want as many sensors as you can afford in the car, then combined—…
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