In a wide-ranging interview, the electric carmaker’s founder and CEO tells From the Ground Up why he’s confident that American-made electrification is on the right track.

BY DIANA RANSOM, EXECUTIVE EDITOR, INC. @DIANARANSOM

RJ Scaringe. Photo: Courtesy Subject

What do you know about electric cars?

Me being an automobile unenthusiast—I live in New York City and rarely need to drive—I don’t claim to be much of an expert. But my colleague Christine Lagorio-Chafkin reminded me that, in fact, I do know a lot more than I might initially let on. I mean, how can I—or anyone for that matter—not? You’d have to truly be living under a rock to avoid Elon Musk.

And this is where I give the controversial entrepreneur credit: He has led the popularization of the electric car. Before Teslas started popping off the line in 2011, few EVs were on roads. Hybrids, if you recall, were the green car wave of the time. Since, Musk and his companies have also helped fuel the spread of electric charging stations across the United States.

Since then, the terrain has become far more crowded. Teslas not only share the road with major automotive companies that make their own EVs, but smaller operators are gaining ground. Christine reminded me of a new company called Slate, led by Chris Barman, who, like me, also clocks in at 5 feet, 2 inches. But unlike me, Barman is a car industry veteran—and one to watch.

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And then there’s Rivian, the Irvine, California, electric vehicle maker that’s ascended in America’s consciousness—particularly in the wake of Musk’s efforts at the Department of Government Efficiency and its work to dismantle the federal government. Amid the Tesla Takedown—in which some Tesla EV owners, are reportedly trading in their electric cars for Rivians—the latter car company is having a moment.

Still, electric vehicles are expensive. And the price for consumers has been a key barrier to the proliferation of EVs. “The biggest limiting factor today is lack of choice,” R.J. Scaringe, Rivian’s CEO and founder told me on the latest episode of From the Ground Up.

But that’s starting to change. Scaringe says his electric car company is gearing up for the launch of not just one but two new EV models, the R2 and the R3. (And yes, dependably, I made an R2D2 joke.) He also mentioned the about-face among suppliers. Rather than being laughed out of meetings—which he says actually happened early on with investors—Scaringe, today, says he’s able to negotiate better terms with suppliers. And with that, Scaringe says he’s able to bring the R2 to market with a price tag of $45,000. The R3 should be even less expensive.

The jury is still out about how tariffs will affect Rivian and its broader industry. For the time being, at least, the sun appears to be shining on at least one EV carmaker.

For the rest of my interview with Scaringe, give a listen here and check out the full rough transcript below.

Ransom: Christine.

Lagorio-Chafkin: Diana.

Ransom: So tell me about your first car. Was it a beater? Was it a hand-me-down? Was it something new?

Lagorio-Chafkin: I would call it a beater, but it was a red ’91, I believe, Saab 900.

Ransom: That’s impressive.

Lagorio-Chafkin: Oh, four door. Yeah. It was not new.

Ransom: Yeah.

Lagorio-Chafkin: But it was a beautiful vehicle.

Ransom: That’s great. That’s a great car. My first car was a Geo Storm.

Lagorio-Chafkin: Yes.

Ransom: Two-door. It was, I think, a 1990.

Lagorio-Chafkin: Amazing. So sort of similar era going on.

Ransom: It had seen better days, this car, and then I put it through hell.

Lagorio-Chafkin: How many people could you fit in that?

Ransom: I fit eight people in that car. And it was a two-door.

Lagorio-Chafkin: Yeah.

Ransom: So not legally eight people, but that’s how many people could fit in a Geo Storm. This is From the Ground up. I’m Diana Ransom.

Lagorio-Chafkin: And I’m Christine Lagorio-Chafkin. Today’s episode, American-Made Electrification.

Ransom: So Christine, what are your thoughts about electric cars?

Lagorio-Chafkin: Ooh, I like them conceptually a lot. I’ve pondered buying one in the past. And I find it absolutely fascinating to watch what’s going on with Tesla right now, with the share price just dropping precipitously and so much tumult the government and in the press over Elon Musk.

Ransom: Right.

Lagorio-Chafkin: So what a fascinating market and moment in time right now.

Ransom: I’m intrigued by the whole Tesla takedown right now too.

Lagorio-Chafkin: Mm-hmm. Have you been watching the protests and everything?

Ransom: Yeah, the protests. And people basically setting Teslas ablaze. And trying to resell their Teslas or trade them in with funny bumper stickers.

Lagorio-Chafkin: Mm-hmm. A lot of logos popping off Teslas lately. I see that.

Ransom: Yeah.

Lagorio-Chafkin: Yeah. My kids call them garbage trucks.

Ransom: Oh. Because of the Cybertruck?

Lagorio-Chafkin: The Cybertruck, when you see it parked on a New York City street, it looks like a dumpster. The back is so square, that’s just visually what it reads.

Ransom: Oh, interesting. Yeah. I’ve never seen that, or I’ve never gotten the dumpster vibe from that. But yeah, no, they’re definitely odd-looking. But I sort of respect that it’s different, the company’s trying to do something different. What’s an electric car maker that you know of besides Tesla?

Lagorio-Chafkin: They’ve been in the news this week. I’ve read of two different electric car companies that I believe are owned by women.

Ransom: Nice.

Lagorio-Chafkin: One makes a $20,000 really bare bones truck. I think it’s called Slate. Slate, yes.

Ransom: Yeah.

Lagorio-Chafkin: I have been hearing about that one.

Ransom: And then I certainly have heard of Rivian.

Lagorio-Chafkin: Yeah. Well, to some degree. So we live in New York City, and it’s rare to even have a car in the city. So it’s funny to actually realize that you step back and realize that much of the population is considering purchasing an electric car. And so it actually is a significant and growing industry for our audience and for people generally, so.

Ransom: Oh, yeah. And the charging networks for EVs are hugely growing businesses as well, and just infrastructure across the country.

Lagorio-Chafkin: Absolutely.

Ransom: I’ve been following that a bit.

Lagorio-Chafkin: And entrepreneurs are heavily in on that too.

Ransom: Yeah. So it’s definitely great. So I wanted to sit down with RJ Scaringe. He’s the founder and CEO of a company called Rivian. Rivian is also an EV maker, which you’re aware of. So RJ is one of these rare entrepreneurs, who at the young age of six, I want to say, knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life, and what he wanted to do one day. And he wanted to make cars.

RJ Scaringe: Since I was a kid, I knew I wanted to start a car company.

Ransom: That’s wild.

RJ Scaringe: Yeah.

Ransom: What inspired you to actually… I mean, when you’re thinking, “I’m a six-year-old, I want to play with Spider-Man,” you’re like, “I want to start a car company.”

RJ Scaringe: Yeah. I don’t even know the exact age, but just as long as I can remember, I know I wanted to do this. And equally, as long as I can remember, I was always really fascinated by and just incredibly enthusiastic about cars. And everything about them, the way they looked, the way they were designed, all [inaudible] details.

Ransom: What kind of car did your parents have or did your dad-

RJ Scaringe: I didn’t really grow up… My parents didn’t really have anything cool.

Ransom: Okay.

RJ Scaringe: My mom had a Pinto.

Ransom: Oh, wow.

RJ Scaringe: Yeah. My dad had a pickup truck, so.

Ransom: Wow. No offense, but the Pinto is decidedly not cool.

RJ Scaringe: But it had a sunroof, which made it cool. But yes, we didn’t really have anything extraordinary, to say the least. But I just grew up so into cars.

And as I started to get older, I realized that they were causing a lot of issues in terms of local air quality issues, a lot of disputes we have across the planet around access to liquid fuel.

And of course, as I really started to look at it, as I got older, realizing the impacts things were having on our climate systems. And so decided I want to start a car company, I had no idea what that meant or what it would involve. And started sort of just thinking about that again from some of my earliest memories.

Ransom: But every decision you made, I mean, I’ve heard past interviews with you, every decision you made has been to help better position you to be a leader of a car company.

RJ Scaringe: Yes, essentially. Yeah.

Ransom: So you went to RPI for… You got your engineering degree.

RJ Scaringe: Yeah.

Ransom: And then you went and got a PhD at MIT, also in engineering?

RJ Scaringe: Yeah, a mechanical engineer, but in the automotive lab. So I was in the Sloan Automotive Lab. Since I was a kid I was working on cars, restoring cars. I worked in a restoration shop and then worked as an apprentice machinist to learn how to make things from nothing, from scratch.

And then from there, I went to school, as you said, and all the while knew that I was going to start this company. I didn’t really know how or exactly when. For a while I thought I’d go work at a car company for a few years before I started Rivian. But while I was doing my PhD, I realized both the opportunity was so significant, but importantly that the things I was going to learn by working in a car company didn’t overlap really with the things I would need to be able to do in starting a car company. So when you think about starting a car company, if you’re being intellectually honest, you need a lot of really hard-to-get things. And at the beginning you have none of them. So you need many billions of dollars of capital. You need thousands of engineers. You need hundreds of suppliers to provide all the components that go into the vehicle. You need a manufacturing plant that’s enormous in scale. You need a design that people are going to want to buy, and technology that’s compelling and robust. And you have none of those.

And so at the beginning, you need those things to get capital. You need capital to develop those things. So it’s a really interesting chicken or the egg problem, where it’s like, how do you start? And if you overthink it, you can almost convince yourself to never start.

Ransom: I was going to say, if I knew all those things were standing before me, I don’t think I’d want to do it. So maybe you don’t know.

RJ Scaringe: I think most know business are probably like that. If you focus on the things you don’t have, you can quickly convince yourself not to do something.

Ransom: Mm-hmm.

RJ Scaringe: So I started a company right out of grad school, right out of my PhD program. It was like in the early days I was doing everything. I was designing parts in CAD, out trying to raise capital. And I had no experience raising capital, no experience running a company. So it was very much a steep learning curve.

Lots of meetings would end in, “This is crazy.” You imagine you go to an investor meeting, if you can get the meeting, which is a big step in the first place. But you start to describe it and you say, “I’m starting a car company.” The person looks at you as if you have three heads. And then they say, “Well, you must have some technology.” And you say, “Well, not yet. I will.” “Okay, well, you must have some great supply chain access.” “No, not yet, but I will.” “Well, what does it look like?” Well, I don’t know yet. We still have to figure that out.”

And so you go through this series of questions. And by the end, both you haven’t convinced the person to invest, but also you’ve partially challenged yourself to say, “Boy, I do have a lot of work to do.”

So that was was the nature of how it started. And I look back now, and those were some of my favorite moments in building the company, because it was so fluid, the learning velocity was so high, the level of adjustments to the plan. So every day there would be like, okay, if they tweak this or think differently about this, the strategy needs to look a little different. So the fluidity through which we could adjust and pivot the overall strategy and technology roadmap and product plan was really lightweight. It was very nice in those early days.

And of course now the company’s much bigger, we have just under 17,000 employees. We’ve got obviously products in the market. We’re about to launch a much lower priced product we’re super excited about, which we call R2. But all that scale is great for getting things done, but it also means that things are less loose. And so those early years were really fun.

Ransom: Yeah. So part of what you, I think, determined in the early years was to actually make an electric vehicle. I think the initial model started out as a hybrid.

RJ Scaringe: That’s right, yeah.

Ransom: Right. So why electric?

RJ Scaringe: It was always clear that that was the end state. And when I first started, the question was, could we jump straight to that? And a lot of things were different when I first started, the thought was build an extremely efficient hybrid with a sports car form factor. And it’s a sort of obvious place to start as a car enthusiast to say, let’s use a sports car, build the brand, and........

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