At 2:30 p.m. on South Congress Ave, the rooftop of Rivian’s Austin hub was all contrast: quiet up top, buzz below. Inside, people moved through the space with SXSW energy—half networking, half curious—stopping to check out the brand’s newest vehicles on display.
Outside, the sun snags on sharp glass points and thick walls of pale concrete, lighting up a skyline in transition. And overhead, Rivian is staking its claim—as the headlining sponsor of SXSW and as a company with something to say about the future of mobility, culture, and climate.
This year, Rivian isn’t one of five brands sharing the stage. It is the stage. The move feels deliberate: less about dominance, more about alignment. SXSW has long branded itself as a collision point for creativity and tech—exactly where Rivian wants to sit.
Over the last decade and a half, Rivian has scaled from stealth startup to serious contender, known for its sleek, rugged EVs built with adventure (and intention) in mind. The R1S is now one of the best-selling premium electric SUVs in the U.S., and the company is about to enter a new chapter with the launch of its more accessibly priced R2 model, set to begin deliveries in early 2026. But for founder and CEO, RJ Scaringe, this moment isn’t just about new vehicles—it’s about how a brand builds culture and how culture can push a category forward.
We sat down on the rooftop to talk about the thinking behind Rivian’s presence at SXSW and how its mission goes far beyond selling electric cars. We got into the weeds on AI integration, the policy levers that could actually push EV adoption, and what it takes to lead a company that’s grown from ten people to 15,000. We also talked about the long view—why electrification is just one piece of the sustainability puzzle and why RJ thinks we’re still not doing enough.
Crouse: Rivian is the headlining sponsor of South by Southwest. Typically, there are about five brands up there, but this year, it’s just Rivian. What impacted that decision, and what are you hoping attendees will take away from your activations here at SXSW?
Scaringe: It’s just the overlay of SXSW’s philosophy—what it represents—the intersection of creativity, innovation, technology, branding, and culture. It ties so nicely with what Rivian is as well.
As we’re starting to get ready to launch our two products or sale-priced products downstairs, finding ways to partner with groups or, in this case, the festival that fits so well, in our eyes, is the kind of thing we’re excited to do.
What are you hoping attendees will take away from all the activations you have set up around the event?
Obviously, the first is just [to build] awareness of Rivian. And, you know, the pile of dirt that we have downtown is fun. It gives people the chance to see how capable our vehicles are.
I think it will cause people to reflect on what electrification can be, in terms of excitement and the capabilities an electric vehicle can provide. We also hope the cultural philosophy of the business comes through. We’re trying very hard to be an inviting brand—one that invites people into this different type of vehicle experience and enables them to do lots of different things.
There are a lot of EVs out there for consumers to choose from. What sets Rivian apart?
I don’t think that there are enough. Actually, there are over 300 different types of vehicles you could buy. For vehicles under $50,000, there are maybe 10 or 15 options.
So, I think we need a lot more. That aside, we’ve really thought hard about why Rivian exists, and it led to what you see today. The product portfolio started with the flagship vehicles that are really capable of both on-road and off-road driving. You can fit your gear, your stuff, your pets, your kids, into the vehicles, and they become your partner for experiencing all of these different life experiences, whether that’s a camping experience, a biking experience, a beach experience, or just a picnic in the field. We want the brand to not just enable those from a practical point of view, but also inspire them from a more philosophical point of view.
And so we see it through all the ways that we create the physical touchpoints with the brand, the digital touchpoints with the brand, and then the vehicles themselves. While the price point may be similar to, say, a Tesla Model Y, for our vehicles, the product itself provides such a different experience than Tesla. Not to say that Tesla’s right or wrong, just that we want to offer a variety of choices, and in the same way, we did that in the premium segment.
So, the R1 vehicles, the R1S, are the best-selling large electric vehicle and premium electric vehicle in the U.S. It did that by just being very unique and really embracing this adventure side of transportation.
“Drill, baby, drill” is the official GOP platform, and that’s really upsetting for a lot of reasons. I was wondering if you could tell me—what’s one policy shift that would have the most significant impact on EV adoption? What would you like to see change?
Specifically for Rivian, allowing direct sales is really important, but more broadly, to drive electrification, there’s an approach of using carrots or sticks, and I think we need a little bit of both.
The requirement to hit certain levels of emission vehicles and the requirement to have a certain level of carbon emissions per mile creates a really healthy credit environment. The credits environment doesn’t cost the U.S. government anything; it simply has the manufacturers create excess credits. The manufacturers aren’t building enough, but it creates a market-forcing mechanism to drive investment into electrification for the existing players.
Most importantly, it becomes a carrot for us, but a stick for the folks who are making the changes. I think California has a requirement to reach 100% EVs by 2035, and I think that’s great. I’d love to see that across the whole U.S. I know that’s not going to happen, but I think, at a minimum, if we could at least maintain the carbon emission credits.
You’ve said that sustainability isn’t all about EVs; it’s about rethinking the entire system. What do you think the biggest barrier is to rejigging that system to be more adaptable to EVs?
The scale of it is huge. We have one and a half billion vehicles on the planet, the vast majority of which are combustion. We have many thousands of natural gas and coal power plants, all of which need to be turned off and replaced with renewables and nuclear. Provided you’re focused on climate, we believe it’s a part of the fabric of energy. And that’s hard. It’s hard because when you need to have enough vehicles to drive demand to go from the United States, 8% to 100%—if you could do that overnight, it would still take us as a planet 15 years to replace all the combustion vehicles with electric ones.
So, it’s going to take my lifetime to see our whole state transition. But while that transition is happening, we also need to clean up our grid. And we’re on our way. The United States is 40% non-carbon-based; only 60% of our grid is powered by fossil fuels. But there are other places in the world that are 80, 90, or even 100%, meaning they have so much renewable energy that they produce excess and export that to other countries.
So, we need to find the right balance of making all those changes and turning off these existing asset vehicles for energy infrastructure. Our view is, the faster we do it, the better—it’s going to create new businesses. For us to be competitive on a daily basis, we need to be leaders in this area. So, like, I’m a huge advocate, obviously, of accelerating electrification as much as possible, and accelerating the decarbonization of our grid.
Rivian has grown very rapidly as you guys have transitioned from startup to major automaker. How has your leadership style adjusted to handle that shift?
Well, in the beginning, it was a small team—like 10 people. There weren’t couches with communication or politics. It was just everything. Then, you get to a point where you’re maybe too big for a single building. You’re in two buildings. It gets more complex. All-hands meetings can no longer just be everybody crowding into one room. Then, you find yourself in a spot where you can’t fit in two buildings, or even one city, but multiple cities. Before you know it, we’ve got more than 15,000 people across many locations.
Did the growth sneak up on you?
It snuck up, but it didn’t. Fifteen years went by, and it feels like it was yesterday. But then it also feels like it has been a journey.
The way that you manage communication and promotion and finding great leaders in the business changes so dramatically as you go through these different levels of scaling. It’s different at 500 people than it is at 100 people. It’s different at 5,000 people than it is at 1,000 people. And so the organization, as it grows, certain leaders can grow with the business, but more often than not, there’s also a need to bring in new leaders as the company scales. You need people who have experience across that scale.
Was that your approach?
Idealistically, everyone—the first 10 people who all reported to me—would always be the 10 people to report to me. But it’s not realistic. Of the first 10 employees, eight still work here and report directly to me.
That’s a pretty good retention rate.
Yeah. But then there’s the fact that you go from doing the work directly, to managing people who are doing the work, to managing people who are managing people who are doing the work. So, it just takes a lot of thinking about how you design it. It’s not static. It’s constantly evolving—sometimes you get it right, and sometimes you have to reset.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but you used to restore cars, right? How did that experience influence the design of Rivian when you first started?
I’m very into the details of how the products are made, especially details you may not see. So, the backside, the back side of panels… It’s all those little details across the whole vehicle, like the underside of the car. If you look under a Rivian, it’s beautiful, which is unique to most of the bottoms of cars. So, we really think thoughtfully about all the little details across the whole vehicle. And that was just born out of my love of cars and the project.
How do you stay connected to the front line of your company? How are you operating within this organization you’ve built from the ground up?
I’m still very hands-on, especially when it comes to products and operations. I’m in the plant usually every other week. I run the weekly product meetings and engineering meetings. While the organization does have layers, especially on things that have to do with the product or the customer experience, I am very involved.
I’d be remiss not to ask you about AI at a conference like this. This is a broad question, but where are you integrating AI, if at all, whether that’s into manufacturing, design, or marketing?
Yeah, so in all of those. It’s just the fundamental way we run the business. Everything is changing dramatically in terms of how we structure the teams on the engineering side.
Everything from writing code to a lot of AI support in our software. As you move from there into things like diagnostics and how we look at issues in the vehicle, that’s all being transitioned to AI. Then, when we look for quality issues in the plant, we have a whole series of cameras we’ve installed around the plant that look for quality issues. And this is just the very beginning of what that looks like. So, over the next five years, let’s say, the whole business community is going to evolve pretty dramatically to see AI be an integral part of how organizations are run.
There are a lot of EV startups emerging; what do you think differentiates those who struggle versus those who succeed in this market?
There’s really no way around it. You need a tremendous amount of capital. So, if you think you can start a car company for half a million dollars, you just don’t understand what goes into it.
Maybe you could have before, but you’re no longer competing in a vacuum. If you’re trying to sell vehicles to consumers who have a choice, you’re competing with a company like Tesla, a company that has large teams and significant resources. So, I actually don’t think there are going to be a lot of new EV companies that emerge in the West. In China, it’s a different story than in the U.S., simply because the capital markets aren’t as open to it as they were before. If I were trying to raise $14 billion, I would have raised it worth their money. So, just the amount of capital and infrastructure, like what you see here—retail networks, service networks—if you want to be competitive with a company like Rivian, or a company like Tesla, you have to vertically integrate a lot of technologies. You need many thousands of engineers developing the tech stack. And it’s not clear whether the markets would fund that the way they did before. So, that’s the biggest challenge.
