An Interview with Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe About Building a Car Company and Autonomy

Good morning,

Today’s Stratechery Interview is with Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe. Last week Rivian held their Autonomy and AI Day, where the company unveiled its plans for a fully integrated approach to self-driving. Rivian is building everything from its own chips to its own sensors — including video, LiDAR, and radar — and if all goes well, the company will supply a multitude of companies, particularly Volkswagen.

In this interview we cover all aspects of Rivian, including the long path to starting the company, production challenges, and why partnerships with Amazon and Volkswagen are so important, and point to relationships in the future. We also dive into autonomy, and why Rivian is taking a different path than Tesla, plus I ask why CarPlay isn’t available on Rivian vehicles, and what that reveals about their nature.

As an aside to podcast listeners: due to a mind-boggling mistake by me, the first 20 minutes of this podcast are considerably lower audio quality. I forgot to hit ‘Record’, so the segment that remains is what the Rivian PR represenative captured on her phone. I’m incredible grateful for the save.

As a reminder, all Stratechery content, including interviews, is available as a podcast; click the link at the top of this email to add Stratechery to your podcast player.

On to the Interview:

An Interview with Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe About Building a Car Company and Autonomy

This interview is lightly edited for content and clarity.

Car Company Dreams

RJ Scaringe, welcome to Stratechery.

RJS: Happy to be here.

We are here to talk about Rivian and your recent Autonomy and AI Day. Before we get to that, however, I want to learn more about you and your background, and how you ended up sitting with me today. You were, as I understand it, into cars at a very early age.

RJS: I’ve been around cars as long as I could remember. As a kid I was restoring and working on cars. I spent time in restoration shops helping and slowly learning how to do more than “help”, but actually really help. And then around the age of, I guess 10-ish, decided I wanted to start a car company.

Oh, okay. So there was no like, “Oh, I ...