Rivian CEO Talks Battery Tech, Supply Chain Issues

Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt, Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe said his company is looking beyond the electric trucks it currently produces to other products in the electric and autonomous vehicle market, including micromobility devices and battery technology.

Rebecca Bellan summarizes Scaringe’s points, writing that “Scaringe wouldn’t commit to saying explicitly that Rivian is planning on making an e-bike, even though the company did file a trademark for an e-bike earlier this year.” Scaringe did hint at the company shifting to smaller mobility devices, particularly for deliveries in urban areas.

Scaringe expressed concern that society seems to have lumped together all different types of autonomy, so he broke it down into two systems — hardware-heavy systems, which involve spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on perception and compute in a vehicle to achieve a very high level of autonomy where the vehicle drives itself and often eliminates the need for even a steering wheel; and hardware-constrained systems, or advanced driver assistance systems, where automakers only need to spend thousands of dollars on sensors and compute to achieve a lower level of autonomy.

Scaringe says his company is working to develop autonomous technology that can be applied across a variety of vehicles, as well as developing a sustainable supply chain for batteries that will be able to accommodate growing future demand.