YouSaid · the spoken record

RJ Scaringe

lines on the record: 82
first: 2022-09-12
most recent: 2022-09-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I don't really think that will ever be the case. It's sort of the journey that you hope never ends. So have we launched a vehicle? Yes. Do we have excited customers? Yes. Have we raised a lot of capital? Yes. Are we profitable? No. When we achieve profitability, would I say we've made it? I would say no. We'll continue to be pushing. But if I were to say, have we made an impact, I would say with absolute confidence, yes.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think they're equal parts. I don't know some days I might say more luck and some days I might say less luck. I mean them. I think every situation creates opportunities to learn. So if you ask me, do I wish we were launching into a different environment that didn't have semiconductor shortages and a pandemic? And with the supply chain challenge, you could say, boy, this is pretty unlucky. But it also is creating skills and organizational knowledge around how to operate in these extreme circumstances that's really great. But then we've also had really fortunate connections with investors and connections with the right people in terms of the team that we built. But those days that are really luckier, those days that may be seeming really unlucky, all of it benefits from working and grinding away really hard.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Buy a pickup, right? And so I think that's That reframing of electrification is also going to help in a big way where people are going to be excited about the products regardless of whether they're buying it for sustainability reasons or not. They're just fundamentally more exciting, more desirable to drive products.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As we go to Electrify, I think we're going to have the need for lots of choice and the driving experience helps get people excited. I mean, one of the things that is interesting with electrification is it completely changes performance boundaries that we previously accepted. So our pickup is faster than most hypercars. I was on the PCH, the Pacific Coast Highway in California. This was maybe three, four weeks ago. I pulled up to a light. It was early morning. And a brand new Ferrari pulled up right next to me. And the guy looks over me. I look over him and says, hey, you want to see what we can do here. And so we both accelerate quickly off the line. And I'd out accelerate by quite a margin. Oh, yeah. Get to the next light, and he says to me, I can't believe my Ferrari just got roasted.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't make a huge deal out of it. We could choose to make a big deal about the headliners made from recycled soda bottles, those kinds of things. But ultimately, there shouldn't be the reason you buy the vehicle. The vehicle should just be fundamentally better. And we feel it's just responsible of us to make decisions that are lower carbon and utilize materials more efficiently. I do think your point, though, on unfortunately sustainability becoming somehow politicized for reasons I have no idea why, but it's become, unfortunately, a bit of a political. Topic, we just don't view it like that. So we try really hard to not make Rivian politicized or the idea of sustainability politicized. So that's also part of how we present the vehicle.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it will be. New car sales today are a teeny fraction of total vehicle sales. So first, we have to get the world to 100% of new car sales being electric. And even if we were to do that at the flick of a switch right now, it would still take us the next. 10 to 15 years to replace the full global car park. So call it in the next 15 to 20 years. We'll see the fleet of vehicles in the world essentially shift almost entirely towards electric. But within, I'd say 25 years, it would be fairly rare to see a gasoline-powered car on the road. It would be like seeing an antique. And the role that we play there is an important one, we believe”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you see it all the time. You see this kind of thing all the time, and it is probably one of the biggest challenges of building a company around technology is just competing for the best talent to go develop that technology.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not something I spend a lot of time worried about. Say we've got about 13,000 employees. A lot of our employees formerly worked at Tesla, so probably like five, six hundred. So that inherently, I think, caused some frustration. At Tesla, and so they, of course, filed a lawsuit because of it, but we're very confident in our position there. And I'd also just say that I think that's just an artifact of some of the talent battles that technology companies have to deal with. You see the same between...”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm excited about it. If I were to look at the risk of Rivian success today versus the risk a year ago versus the risk five years ago, I would say at this moment, this is the lowest risk we've ever had in terms of success. $17 billion in cash. We have incredible demand on the consumer products. We have an amazing partnership with Amazon. And we have a plant that's now producing faster than our supply chain can keep up. But the plant is running. The number of things left to solve is much smaller than it was a year ago.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's right. It's really frustrating when if you have to wait two years to get the vehicle, it is just challenging.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the plant has a capacity of 150,000 units. Year, the challenge we have coming back to the supply chain point is we're not able to use the plant fully. So the lines are running at essentially 25 to 30 hours a week because we don't have enough parts. A good automotive plant is running 110 to 120 hours workable hours a week. Should only be using 30 hours out of 168. It's really painful.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where we've had challenges is the supply chain has been in a very weakened state given the combination of the pandemic and then really the unexpected constraints that have happened in the last one and a half years with semiconductors. And what I think is often not fully appreciated is turning a supply chain on is not like a light switch. Each one of those suppliers has to ramp. So it's a very, very complex orchestra. But the good news is it is now ramping. As of our last earnings call, We built over 5,000 vehicles that is now ramping. So we are seeing the light, so to speak, at the end of the tunnel, but it has been a challenging ramp up over the last six months.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, which we really haven't talked about the commercial side of the business, but that's another whole side of what we're building.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, if you look at the number of discrete components in the car, like individual mechanical components, there's around 25,000 components in any single one of those could disrupt production. So it's made this difficult for us is we're not just launching one vehicle, we're launching four at the same time. We have our truck, the R1T, our SUV, our R1S. And then we have a commercial van. There's two different sizes of the van.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, sure. When you look at a vehicle, take our truck, our R1T, what we build in our plant, we're assembling roughly 2,000 different components or subassemblies that come from around four hundred different suppliers. So some of the components we make ourselves, we make our battery pack, we build our battery modules, we build all the sand panels we build in-house, but there are other things we don't make. So semiconductors are not made in our plant. Tires are not made in our plant. Headlights are not made in our plant. So those 400 suppliers make a lot of the components that come in. And that supply chain to get that spooled up is not just those suppliers. They have suppliers to them and those suppliers in turn have suppliers. So pick a simple part that we buy like a headlight. That part has over 100 individual components that are in it. Just the light, just the projector.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Aspect of solving problems because you think more clearly and there's a storm of activity and a storm of challenges, being able to make the right decisions as to how to navigate that, whether it's a supply chain challenge or a ramp-up challenge. These are all solvable items, but they sometimes take a lot of effort. They take the right team. They take coordination within the team. But I'm incredibly confident in our ability to go solve all those.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. I mean, it's funny, guy. Even talking about here, it's hard to believe it was years of time iterating and grinding away without enough capital. But some of those constraints led to some of the best innovations, like the decisions to build electronics and software in-house were both strategic but also practical. We couldn't get suppliers to work with us. So we built with the benefit of time a lot. The scale of challenges can sometimes be overwhelming, but being calm is actually a really important”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We explain, well, we have a team of about 600 people, and they're like, Well, where did a 600 person team come from? And so I think that was what surprised the world. And it was. Wasn't as if, like, we thought of this concept a year ago. Had it gone through so many iterations, but that was the overall tone in LA. It was just like curiosity around the origin, curiosity around what's next, those kinds of things.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So Amazon is now our largest shareholder. They messed it a lot through multiple rounds. But when we showed the vehicle LA, we hadn't yet announced them as an investor. Now, we knew that that was going to happen, but it was actually really helpful going into the LA Auto show with a level of confidence around. We knew, but the world didn't know was going to come over the coming six months in terms of partnership announcements and investment. And that was sort of the moment when we went from a company with no website, no background to a company that was out of stealth. And essentially from that point forward, we were then very much followed publicly and we knew that that would happen.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So we had built some very solid technologies, some solid platforms. We were engaged in a variety of different strategic discussions with big partners. So we went into the LA Auto show and we'd already built a very deep relationship with Amazon. We hadn't yet announced our deal with them, but we knew it was coming”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Needed awareness. And so whether it's investors or suppliers or recruiting, it just became really problematic. And so we took the decision to say, let's come out of stealth and we decide to show the R1T and the R1S. That's our truck and our SUV. At the LA Auto Show at the end of 2018.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It became easier, but not it was not a there was no binary step. The core decision we had, this was back in like 2017, was when and how do we come out of stealth? Because being in stealth at that point. It went from a, I would call it like an asset. It was helpful that we were in stealth to becoming actually a painful liability where.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We would be rooting against them or something like that. That it's just not the truth. I think their success is good for the world. I think it's good for the space. We've designed products and a brand that feel and look very different than theirs. So their success and our success collectively help each other.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We definitely looked at it as great for the industry, great for electrification. I think today there's around one and a half billion cars on the planet. And even today, this is now relative to 2017, 2018. This is a lot further along. But of those 1.5 billion cars, less than 2% of those are electric. We are so early. We're unimaginably early in this transition. And so the fact that Tesla was out earlier than us and building what I think of as a very strong brand, we saw that as a good thing. But the world needs more than just Tesla to convert those one and a half billion cars to electric and to completely remap the industry. So I think the world often believes that”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we're looking at all different types of things and ultimately arrived on this idea of let's buy find a facility that is in place that we can buy and repurpose. And in the world of used automotive plants, it's not an overly liquid market. There's not a lot of used plants that are in a viable condition. This is a unique setup though. This plant we purchased started production in 1989. So it's a relatively new plant and very good access to the supply chain. And so we ultimately, as you said, we bought it for $16 million, which was just an incredible deal. Closed in beginning of 2017. Now we didn't have at that point the money to actually turn it into a plant for ourselves. So we sort of bought it and then said, okay, now we got to secure all the capital to convert this into a Rivian plant.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh yeah, I mean, in the automotive space, there's been a lot of new companies over the last 50 years. And one of the biggest challenges is to go from the concept or the prototype to mass manufacturing. And that step causes one to think about what are all the ways you can get there? Can we use a contract manufacturer? Can we, do we build a greenfield site? Do we find an existing site? So we were looking at every possible combination.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then the second objective we had is we, and this was one that I was even more focused on, is we were trying to target customers that were not electric vehicle customers, meaning it doesn't have impact if we're just moving a customer from a Tesla into Arivian. We want to be moving a customer from a combustion-powered vehicle in Trivian. And again, we now have data on this. We're less than 20% of our customers have owned EVs before, meaning more than 80% have ever owned an EV.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this idea of adventure is really a deeper reflection of what we think about when we think about what is humanity. Humans are innately curious. And so that curiosity leads to us as consumers wanting to accumulate new experiences. So we actually had a few objectives when we were designing the vehicle in the form you see today. We said number one, we actually don't want this to be something that's heavily cross-shopped with existing trucks, meaning we actually want to be drawing in customers that are coming out of everything, not just trucks or SUVs, but passenger cars, sports cars, coup, hatchbacks. And what's amazing is we now have the data to show it. And it's exactly that. So people who've previously owned a pickup truck represent just over 10% of our customers, meaning 90% have never owned a pickup before, which is awesome.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like in some of the darkest moments, you know, it'd be the page of ideas on what we could turn the company into if it doesn't work. But I never found those to be particularly useful because they didn't drive actions. I wasn't going to go work on plan. The moment you start working on plan B or plan C, the likelihood of plan A working goes to 0%.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't think about that a lot. I mean, it was something I thought about at least every week, but I didn't allow myself to go there. It's a, you know, because you can quickly start to get into the realm of, well, what's plan B and what's plan C? If we can't raise money, how do we take some of the things we develop and turn those into smaller businesses, like all that, but it's really. Really distracting to focus on failing, you know, to focus on how this is going to go wrong. And if it goes wrong, how you make it less bad for everybody.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Test the components on the vehicle. So these big iterations were at the end of each one. We said, oh, this isn't it. This isn't right. We don't have it yet.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we realized that conceptually wasn't right. We didn't really get the branding on it right. And we were trying to make it really low cost. So then we built another version, which we called Alpha. And this was looked like it was from a 1960s science fiction movie where it was looked futuristic, but looked like it was trying to look futuristic, if that makes sense. And then we iterated again and really by that point had started to deeply understand the brand we were trying to build in terms of both enabling and inspiring adventure. But this idea of like a product designed to take kids to the beach and families mountain biking and that kind of thing. But each of those iterations, you can imagine, spooled up like there was clay models and there were teams of people doing research and we would build not just the vehicle but then mules or like test vehicles.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it also created its own challenges. Recruiting was a challenge because people would joke with me, so I'm going to go home and tell my spouse, I'm going to join this company that doesn't have a website, that doesn't appear to have a lot of money and intends to launch vehicles sometime in the future. I was like. Yeah, some version of that, yes. So it was challenging to say the least.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. When I first started, we had targets, and as you would expect, the targets were not realistic. And you can find things where we said, we're going to launch this thing by 2012 or 2013. And I realized that the number of unknowns was so significant as we were beginning this sort of second part of this new part of the journey, that it would just be silly to talk at all about what we're doing externally. I mean, we didn't even have a website at this point. We just went completely dark. And it was actually really helpful because it avoided us getting overly married to any specific aspect of the strategy.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and that's one of the hardest things, not necessarily raising capital. That was hard. You're being told no, way more often than you're being told yes. The ratio is crazy. You're probably getting 150 no's for maybe one partial maybe yes but that was fine i knew that going in the hardest part was maintaining the morale of the team I knew all these folks really well. I knew their families well. I knew the names of their kids. And sort of knowing that their livelihood, the livelihood of their families is dependent on us being successful, but also knowing that I needed to keep their state of mind focused on solving technical problems and not stressing about the fact that we have a half a week of cash. And we haven't paid any of our suppliers in two months. And it's a very emotionally challenging state.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I really have always thought it my job as my role needs to be constantly looking for what's the most important problem to solve at the company. And at that period of time, it was very important that we solved. Solved how we were going to capitalize the business. I mean, that was existential.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we would then add to that more capital, but it was like less than a million dollars to a million dollars to slightly to $5 million to $10 million. So it was a very gradual growth because the risks were so high”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember I went out and met with him. And, uh, Was just a great meeting because we ended up having a conversation around the future of transportation and at the end of it I had a hunch that they would be willing to support us and ultimately that played out so yeah it wasn't as if they walked in and said RJ here is $50 million. They walked in and said, here's a very small amount of money. Let's see You can do, and let's build a business plan. And that, once that was completed, they said, okay, this makes sense. Now let's build. A more sophisticated prototype, built that okay, that seems to be working. Let's engage with more suppliers.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And ultimately, the approach that actually worked the best was I went back to MIT and I met with some of the senior leaders there who I who I had and I still have a great relationship with. And I said, I need some help. I've started this company. We need a lot of capital and I need to connect with people that might be able to help me in that way.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, no. I wish we started with that. So the way it played out is we as we were pivoting into this new space. Sort of zoomed out and said, we're really far away from raising the amount of capital we need. Again, if you're being honest with yourself, you look in the bank and it has more than a million dollars. If you're like, oh, this is great. And then you're like, but wait a second, we need more than a billion dollars to actually ramp. So I started thinking about well, how do I meet the people or the person that's going to help take this to the next level?”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a way, it was. We were able to show as a very small team highly undercapitalized that we could build something. And so if the risk was extremely high before that, it was now very, very high. So it allowed us to start having different types of discussions with investors. But I think the other thing you have to remember at this time is it wasn't at all clear that electrification was going to happen yet. And so that was something we also had to overcome was to convince people that there was actually going to be a big market for electrified products. And now, of course, it's a very different world. It's universally accepted that 100% of the world's vehicle production in the very near future will be electric. But that wasn't the case seven, eight years ago.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We took the first three letters of the word river and the last three letters of the word Indian and merged those two together into Rivian. Wanted something that was phonetically easy to say. We loved the basis of it coming from the word river. It sounds like a word that's flowing and moving. We wanted something that didn't mean anything in any language around the world, which this satisfies. So for a bunch of engineers thinking about how to name a car company, that was what we came up with.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's essentially part of the intercoastal waterways It's a path for large ships to move if there's large storms that come in, they come inland through this waterway. Yeah. But anyway, so”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a pretty good name. This must have been 2010. We were sued by Hyundai. So Hyundai had a product at the time called the Azera. AZERA and they were concerned that the name was too similar to our name. So they basically said, you need to change your name. And we said, okay, we're not going to fight Hyundai And use the very small number of dollars we have to fight over a name that very, very few people around the world had ever even heard of. So we had lots and lots of different sessions and ultimately arrived at Rivian, which I'm so glad all that happened because I can't imagine the company with a different name. I love the name. It's something that just works so well.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I guess it was probably about 12 people. Half of us all moved into a single house in a place called Ypsilanti. But yeah, it was a very interesting time. My now wife, we were dating at the time and she moved with us and none of us had any money. The company had no money, of course. So we were really running lean and hard to try to come up with and scale some of these ideas that we were thinking about.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would be a success from the measure of reducing the amount of carbon emitted into the world. So this is one of my, in the moment, most perplexing and challenging times, but looking back, it was actually one of my favorite times in Rivian's history because it was so freeing to say we're trying to solve for impact. Now let's go iterate through lots of different concepts and ideas and strategies that can do that. And you know, the freedom we had at that point was so unique. We could pivot wildly. Like on Monday, we think we're doing this. And by Wednesday, we're 180 degrees different from that thinking. And so the fluidity of concepts that we wanted to focus on was just, I mean, it was extraordinary. It was awesome.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I mean, we were very much analyzing the different segments you can go into, analyzing the size of the segments. Efficiency of those segments, but what was incredibly clarifying as we thought about what to do was we knew the right question to answer. And it was a single question. And the question was, whatever we do, it needs to have the most positive impact. And that even if the company wasn't successful, if we were working on problems that were big enough and hard enough that inspired competition, that inspired existing OEMs to change the way they looked at things.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Obviously, it's a very popular segment. But we also saw it was a segment that perhaps more than any other has been characterized by compromises. So a truck drives like a truck. It can be capable and robust, but it's not going to ride as smooth as a car. A truck is going to be inefficient. A truck is not going to have a lot of trunk space. Like a truck cannot be sporty. And all these really wonderfully interesting opportunities to demonstrate how technology can eliminate a compromise. And so when we thought about the role of technology and the role of driving electrification, we said we need to not just make a truck that's electric. It needs to be something that's totally different and turns things that are today weaknesses into strengths.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course. But Tesla launched its roadster in like the 2006, two thousand seven time frame. And the thought of going out and building what Tesla had already done. 10 years later, just it felt like that wasn't a problem that the world needed worked on.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which was sort of the craziest thing back in like 2013 to even talk about electrifying. You can imagine if people thought I was... It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say we'd get laughed out of the room. But we said, this is actually a really good thing. If people are laughing us out of the room, we need to. We have an opportunity to demonstrate that this is a segment that's the least efficient vehicles on the road. It's among the most profitable segments. So it's the type of vehicle that actually the world needs to see. There's demand for electric and the world needs to see that it's possible to electrify.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT