- For the first time, Rivian showed off its first body-in-white R2 built with production dies.
- The all-electric SUV is built atop the automaker’s new megacastings that eliminate about 50 stamped parts and 300 joints.
- Production simplicity will be the secret sauce to its target $45,000 price tag.
Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe just dropped a major update on its Tesla Model Y-fighter, the Rivian R2. After months of refining, reworking and retooling, the automaker has finally tweaked The R2’s metal underpinnings to its production-ready template and has now built an entire R2 body using actual production dies.
If you’re not an automotive production nerd, this might not sound like much. But make no mistake—this is an absolute milestone for the company. We aren’t looking at some hand-built prototype meant to show off what could be. It’s what will be: the soon-to-enter-production R2.
Scaringe’s post is one of the few times that Rivian has shown off the (nearly) production-ready body of the R2 in the raw. It’s also a great showcase of the simplification the automaker has taken to make R2 production significantly more affordable.
Namely, this is through the use of giant high-pressure die castings (also known throughout the industry as megacastings, gigacastings, hypercasting or other similar buzzwords). These large pieces of formed metal already resemble portions of a vehicle structure, enabling automakers to easily create complex parts from one production process instead of using techniques like riveting and welding to assemble smaller stampings. In Rivian’s case, three megacasted parts eliminated around 50 individually stamped parts and 300 joints.
In short: it cuts weight, production time and ultimately cost. That’s a huge deal if Rivian intends to honor its claimed $45,000 entry price for the R2.
And as an added plus, notice how Rivian even relocated the R2’s charging port as promised.
See, unlike the R1T and R1S (which were expensive, complex and tough to scale), the R2 needs to come out of the gate strong. Rivian is betting on the R2 being its Model Y moment: its mainstream, mass-market EV aimed at taking on Tesla. And let’s be real: with the way that the public is perceiving Tesla today, Rivian couldn’t have asked for a better time to prepare for the R2’s imminent launch.
The R2 needs to come off without a hitch to be successful. That means no production missteps or delays, and—perhaps most importantly—no unexpected price hikes. Rivian does have some other hurdles to overcome, like scaling its service network and hoping that these large castings won’t garner sky-high insurance prices due to complex repairs.
That’s why this first body-in-white is so important. It puts something tangible on the radar which transforms the R2 from an ambitious product to a very real thing. And it shows Rivian isn’t just talking about making its new platform more efficient to produce. The company is learning from the R1 and building cost savings into its new EVs from the ground up.
Don’t get it twisted, Rivian still has a lot to prove. But with the R2 now having a very real, near-production-ready body, it’s plausible that more prototypes could pop up over the next few months.
If all works out like Rivian plans, the R2 could very well be the EV that turns the brand into a household name—and not just in the sense that its EDVs are delivering Amazon packages to your porch. Those deliveries could be stacked next to a shiny new R2 parked in your driveway.
