Rivian

“We actually partnered up with this company called also, which is this micro mobility company that spun out of Rivian. [2316] Stanley Tang: So, [2317] Stanley Tang: RJ is actually the board of founder and chairman of the company. So if, you know, like, why do…”

“Rivian has announced that they've got their R-II coming to market, which will be a BDG AC architecture with an onboard inverter”

“That product Requires, we estimate on the order of about forty million different decisions to bring it to life. Forty million. Forty million. And there's millions of hours of engineering time necessary delivered. So the only way for this to work is you have to…”

“And so I think for any time an engineer is forming a business, there's a tendency to be really close to the product, which I think is fantastic. It's really a wonderful characteristic of technical founders, but you also need to recognize you can't be in every …”

“Rivian was highly undercapitalized in the early years. And the reason I say it's fortunate is allowed me to learn how to run a company. So my first time starting a business, my first time running a business, one of the things that was helpful for me is we were…”

“We did a 5.8 billion dollar software licensing deal with the second largest car company in the world with Volkswagen Group.”

“The first product launches next year. It's a product for Europe. It'll be the lowest cost EV in Europe. It's going to be very cool. It's called the ID one VW ID one.”

“One part of our vehicle is software and so that's what we've licensed to Volkswagen, but we didn't license to them our self-driving platform. We didn't license them, our vehicle designs”

“Later this year, we'll have a full supervised point to point, which is, which would be very similar to like Tesla's FSD. And that'll roll out to all of our gen two vehicles. And of course R two. Then next year we allow it to go unsupervised. So you can take yo…”

“We'll be deploying 50,000 robo-taxi versions of R-II. We start that in twenty-twenty-eight with, like, paid, you know, regular rides, but leading into that, we'll have vehicles on the platform with safety drivers, with people in the front seat”

“We've raised a lot of capital for it, and so we're moving very quickly to deploy our first robots into manufacturing applications with Rivian as a first customer, but ultimately with the goal of being in many manufacturing plants for many different types of pr…”

“To build, like, the goal is to build one of the largest robotics companies in the world, and to do that you need A lot of capital, more capital than Rivian was able to invest at this point. And then we also wanted to create like absolute clarity of focus withi…”

“One of the things we do now to help make those decisions thoughtfully is on the first six months of a program, we don't allow more than 50 people to be involved.”

“Every car company is, like, 10 years behind Tesla. It's crazy that no one, that they haven't been able to figure out how to just, like, clone FSD into Rivian, and GM has Super Cruise, which is nowhere near as effective, because it only works on certain roads.”

“So we say, look how amazing these Chinese EV companies are and look how bad the home team is. It's just because the home team is being assessed for being a business. It has to make profits. And because it doesn't, it gets hammered by public investors. The othe…”

“Autos are a bad business. It could be software autos, hardware autos. It is a bad business, and it's a really tough business to scale and very capital intensive.”

“So it was with our gen two vehicles, you know, not a single line of shared code, not a single piece of common hardware on the perception or on the compute side.”

“I think there's more than one, less than five companies outside of China that have The necessary ingredients to do this, the capital, the GPUs, the car park with, you know, enough vehicles generating enough data. I say more than one less than five. It's probab…”

“With the exception of Tesla and Rivian, every car on the road has what is called a domain-based architecture.”

“Our approach to this is we have a higher level of capability on our perception stacks. We have better cameras. We have radar. And of course, with R two, we'll have a lidar as well.”

“We're going to go, you know, not as heavy as let's say a Waymo on perception, but heavier than let's say Tesla to build a really robust data platform on a vehicle by vehicle basis.”

“On R one, the vast majority of our customers are first time ever owning an EV is a Rivian, which is really good.”

“However, still, they are depreciating faster than gas cars, and just unbelievably fast in general, except for Rivian, which has held its value relatively well, but still nowhere near something like a G-Wagon.”

“And the R one S is are the real success story in terms of holding their value. We sell them on cars and bids. They are still not coming under 60 grand, which is a Considering that's a three, four year old car, that's pretty good with the starting sticker of ar…”

“One of the things that makes starting a car company so difficult is you need, ah, you know, a lot of hard to obtain things all at the same time. So you need billions of dollars of capital, you need a team of thousands of engineers, you need hundreds of supplie…”

“Today they're our largest shareholder. But in addition to them, so they invested, I think, around two billion prior to our IPO.”

“It's about 10,000 or so a year. It's going to be growing.”

“And so, I probably would have inserted more sequencing between all those different products”

“And so at our first year of production with our first product we've ever produced, we came out by far number one on that, which was amazing. And in our second year, we came out by far number one. So like the closest we were beat the next closest by like 15 poi…”

“And so finally end of 24, beginning of 25, we started to hit positive gross margin. So, Q-four of 24, Q-one of 25, positive gross margin.”

“And then with gen two, we went from 17 down to three. And so now we have a, what we call an east zone controller, a west zone controller, and a south zone controller.”

“So that's now in the car and it, the slope of the curve in terms of progress and additional features is going to be really steep. Your gen one won't have that. Gen two's will.”

“If you draw the boundary diagram around electric premium vehicles, so like premium SUVs that are over 70,000 dollars, we're by far the best-selling vehicle in that class of vehicles, so we have about 35% market share as we draw that boundary diagram”

“Interestingly, in California and the state of Washington, we have the best-selling SUV, electric or not electric, in California and the state of Washington.”

“This year we'll do, call it forty-ish.”

“The plant will be capable of 215,000 units with just our normal facility, Illinois facility, and then we add, in Georgia, across two phases, another 400,000 units of capacity.”

“When you're producing less than 50,000 units a year, the engineering fixed cost and the operational fixed cost to run that is very high, so it's a structural cost challenge. But you reach an inflection. Well, just to run an engineering team to engineer all tha…”

“In, like, 2013, 20 14, I would go meet with suppliers, you know, and CEOs of very large suppliers and say, we're working on an electric SUV and electric truck as a flagship product. Following that, we want to launch more affordable electric SUVs. And the lack …”

“Up until very, very late in R-One, we had We had two roof options. One's the glass roof, which is what you guys have in your car, and the other was this beautiful carbon fiber roof that, like, on, you could take it off the top, and it fit, like, perfectly puzz…”

“The new quad, we brought back this, we call kick steer feature, where we can use the fact that there's four motors in the quad, in the four motor version, to introduce, you know, torque vectoring to an extreme degree, where you can, like, pivot.”

“We have a bunch of Apple integrations that are yet to come, but a great relationship with the team at Apple.”

“We just felt and continue to feel very strongly around creating a consistent, fully integrated digital experience where you're not jumping between apps, let's say from like a CarPlay app back to the vehicle app, and it's quite jarring when you don't have, let'…”

“There's like a team that like, would like to do it with the mirror as a screen. And I've been against it in part because if you have good visibility, so if you can see out the back, It's a little disorienting, and so I, my concern is you make 50% of people hap…”

“And so for that reason, it's by far the biggest investment area for us in our business.”

“I think first is I'd say there's alignment amongst Rivian, Tesla, Waymo around the use of AI to train. And so the view that you're building a large scale foundation model, multi-billion parameter model, you're building that with the data flywheel of the vehicl…”

“Six, seven years ago a LiDAR was 20,000 dollars. 15 years ago LiDAR was 75,000 dollars. Today a LiDAR is like 200 bucks. So it's a very low cost sensor.”

“On R-II, On the drive unit that we call Maximus, which is my middle son's name, which is a great name for a motor, we have a continuous winding, so it's one long wire that we wind, it's sort of like woven into like a mat, and then we fold it on each other, and…”

“And so, with the exception of two companies, Rivian and Tesla, every car on the road has, depending on the amount of content, anywhere from 50 to maybe a 150 little computers that run the car.”

“Vehicle sales, let's say that comfortably sitting it when we get to the right steady state, the 20 to 25% gross margin.”

“With the exception of us and Tesla, every manufacturer today sells through distributors, and distributors then on to dealers, or in a few cases, direct to dealers. But nonetheless, there's a middle layer.”

“For every, every car that's sold, whatever its sale price is, the revenue over the life of the vehicle is generally around two to two and a half x the initial sale price. But that's over a 15 year time.”

“What's driven the cost down is that you have the compounding benefits of much lower cost of capital across not just this, the manufacturer, the vehicle manufacturer, but across their whole supply chain. So tier one, tier two, tier three, everyone's cost of cap…”

“I think that's a big part of what led to our deal with Volkswagen is, is we offered an ability to very quickly get to that, that state. I think every manufacturer should be thinking, how do we build a software to find architecture as quickly as possible? Becau…”

“You know, the best measure of, I think the under investment in this space and the lack of highly compelling product is that there's a single company, Tesla, that still has around 50% market share in the United States. The United States is at around eight perce…”

“So we have a very large operation here, around 8000 people that work out of this site.”

“In some of our systems, it goes back six tiers. So there's, you know, six companies behind the component that's coming in, you know, if you include the raw material sourcing.”

“Yeah, we did a, there's a 5.8 billion dollar software licensing deal, which is awesome, but it allows our software stack and our electronics that we've developed in-house to be deployed across a wide range of brands, wide range of products”

“If I was making what we first thought we were going to make, the company wouldn't be here.”

“And frankly, Tesla is the only one that has really done a great job at it, or sure, maybe Rivian as well. But there's been other plenty of examples on the legacy side that they simply have not been able to do it successfully with launching like a DTC or someth…”

“And now the sort of, you know, heads up displays that you see in, you know, Rivian is powered by unreal. BMWs is powered by unity.”