Listening to Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe talk about it, you could be forgiven for thinking his company’s US$5 billion deal with Volkswagen will result in a quantum leap for both carmakers.
In Rivian’s case, the investment – which comes in the form of a joint-venture business – will give it the cash needed for the recently unveiled R2 and R3 models to have their best chance at launching on time and in volumes great enough to meet demand.
That, in turn, could at last make the company profitable – and, if we’re lucky, it could finally lead to Rivian launching in Australia as promised way back in 2019.
For Volkswagen, it means access to a software stack that could rapidly resolve its long-running issues with the user interface in its latest models, which has disappointed customers and delayed launches.
Speaking with The Verge editor Nilay Patel this week on the Decoder podcast (below), Scaringe talked at length about the advantages of Rivian’s approach to the computing and software aspects of its vehicles – namely that just about all of it is designed in-house, just as Tesla does.
Or, for that matter, Apple, whose internally designed ‘M’ chips and related hardware have given the tech giant some clear performance advantages over Microsoft’s Windows platform, where well-known brands like HP, Dell and Lenovo must all combine pieces from other suppliers to develop their computers.
🔽 Listen to the episode below
Scaringe described the various electronic and electrical features of traditional cars, each needing its own dedicated ECU. With the complexity of modern cars, that could mean upwards of 70 ECUs in a ‘regular’ consumer car and around 150 in feature-rich luxury models.
“So, you end up with this massive proliferation of complexity of lots of little computers or microcontrollers that are built by a range of suppliers and tier ones, which makes it really difficult to not only control software within the vehicle to make updates to the software,”
Apart from the sheer cost and time of designing an architecture for all of those ECUs to work together in an upcoming new model, the complexity of that system can result in painfully long development periods for correcting or enhancing a car’s features as needed in the event of a recall or at a model’s ‘midlife’ update stage.
In providing an example of this, Scaringe talked about updating the sounds and functions a vehicle might perform as the driver approaches and enters. “You’d be coordinating between 10 to 15 different ECU suppliers. That process — to make an update to that feature — could take months”. (It’s difficult to know if Scaringe might be exaggerating the numbers and timelines here.)
“Within Rivian, it takes minutes. I mean, it’s all our stack; it’s all our software. In that scenario, we would be using one ECU to do everything I just described.
“In this case, it’s a much larger computer, but one computer. It’s a massive simplification for how we think about software development and also drives a lot of cost out of the vehicle because instead of 70 to 80 little boxes — little computer boxes with wiring and connectors and everything else — we have, in our case, seven,” he said.
For Volkswagen, Rivian will provide what Scaringe called the “topology of the ECUs” and Rivian’s core operating systems for driving and infotainment, with VW’s own tweaks to suit the vehicle’s purpose and the number of displays in the cabin.
“We’ll see it across a host of different products: Porsche, Audi, Lamborghini, Bentley — of course the full portfolio of Volkswagen-branded products,” Scaringe said.
But, if you read about the joint-venture announcement and immediately concluded that all VW group models will simply be a Rivian underneath, it’s now clear that won’t be the case: this deal is about ECUs and software. Those are very big pieces of the EV puzzle, but not so much the big parts of an EV.
“Things like drive units, battery systems, vehicle platforms, our autonomy system, our perception stack, steering systems, braking systems — all those systems stay fully within Rivian,” Scaringe confirmed.
But, even as a computing-only deal, it’s difficult to understate how valuable this partnership is to Volkswagen.
It will now benefit from an Apple-like advantage in computing and the silicon it happens on: it’s all designed by Rivian, meaning changes and upgrades can be developed and introduced quickly.
It’s no small thing for Rivian, either, because it means its own suppliers – now aware of how big their supply deal could now become – will be sharpening their pencils.
“I had a handful of phone calls from CEOs of big semiconductor suppliers, and they’re like, ‘Hey, we can work harder on pricing.’ So, that was awesome,” Scaringe said. “I mean, it goes from Rivian being a small customer today to then, “Oh wow, Rivian is going to drive a huge amount of volume through [its] partnership with Volkswagen.”
In the end, it may be that the biggest losers here will be the likes of GM, Mercedes-Benz and Ford, who have all had talks with Rivian about far deeper platform sharing. Indeed, Ford had bought a share in Rivian that it then went on to sell entirely, and yet it also has an extensive relationship of its own with Rivian’s new partner for platform and technology sharing. The tangled web of the automotive industry only ever tangles further.
It’s a long episode, but these Decoder interviews are quickly becoming my favourite way to learn more about a carmaker’s internal workings than we’re usually able to get through our own automotive media channels. (It’s not often a global CEO will sit with one motoring journalist for over an hour, let alone face these sorts of tech- and business-heavy questions.)
🔽 Listen to the episode below, or head to The Verge to read the transcript.
Mike Stevens
Founder
Mike is a designer and journalist with nearly 20 years’ experience in automotive and consumer technology, editing and leading titles like The Motor Report, CarAdvice, Drive, and WhichCar. He is the co-founder of The Motor Report, and the founder of DadBase.
He’s also a photographer, gadgethead and erstwhile cyclist, and the proud ADHD dad to two ADHD kiddos.
Born and raised in Melbourne, Australia, Mike relocated to Berlin in 2024 with his wife and kids for travel and culture adventures.
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