Rivian says that their R1T electric pickup is nearly complete and that it is currently awaiting government approval to begin deliveries.
The R1T was supposed to be delivered earlier this summer, but Rivian has run into some production challenges, which is to be expected when establishing a new car programmer, particularly from a startup that has never delivered a consumer vehicle.
Since then, the company has been planning for a September delivery start.
With September only a week away, the company sent out an update to reservation holders with some good news.
According to CEO RJ Scaringe, the latest R1T production units meet Rivian's quality criteria, and the company is currently awaiting regulatory approval to start deliveries:
“Over the last few months, we've been focusing on not just increasing our production pace, but also increasing our quality in each of our plant's five areas: stamping, body, paint, assembly, and propulsion (battery and drive units). Multiple build phases are involved in this difficult process, and many cars from these non-customer build phases have been seen out testing in a variety of environments over the previous year.These validation, tooling tryout, and pilot build vehicles are important for our ongoing mileage accumulation programme, which has helped us in driving product improvements. With all of this in mind, I'm pleased to say that we've begun mass-producing vehicles that incorporate all of our quality improvements and design modifications. We're working with several government organisations to get the final permissions we need to start shipping to presale consumers in September.”
It sounds that the company is mostly awaiting approval from the EPA and NTHSA.
Rivian needs to have some service capacity in place before deliveries can start, and Scaringe provided an update on that front.
He stated that the company is now operating five service locations, with more on the way:
Rivian Service Centers have opened in Brooklyn, New York, Bellevue, Washington, Normal, Illinois, San Francisco, and El Segundo, California. This is just the start of our rapidly expanding Service Center network, which also includes a huge fleet of mobile service vans for on-site car repairs. By the end of 2023, we expect to open over 100 Service Centers.”
Rivian's plan to create its own charging network was also updated by the CEO:
“We're also continuing to expand our charging network, which includes our fast DC chargers as part of our Rivian Adventure Network and our Level 2 AC chargers/connectors as part of our Rivian Waypoints network. Securing a portfolio of attractive locations for these chargers is necessary to meet our goal of more than 3,500 DC chargers (at 600 sites) and 10,000 Waypoints.
Over the next several months, you'll start to see more of these spring up, and by the end of the year, the outbuilding will be increasing rapidly.”
Reservation holders will be able to finish their orders next month, according to Scaringe, and a Rivian mobile app will be available in early September.
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