We anticipated Rivian’s Investor Day occasion to be a reasonably sedate one, filled with the standard monetary steering and perhaps some updates on new autos just like the Rivian R2, R3 and R3X. Clearly, we thought fallacious. Rivian as a substitute shocked the enterprise world by saying a three way partnership with Volkswagen that will lend the European big its software program experience in alternate for an enormous funding of as much as $5 billion.
However issues go even deeper than that. In Rivian’s newest shareholder letter—and first noticed by BloombergNEF’s Corey Cantor on Threads in the present day—we see a picture with a number of potential new Rivian fashions beneath a sheet that we hadn’t seen earlier than in the present day. See under for extra:
A slide from Rivian’s launch.
On the left aspect, we see the primary era of Rivian EVs: the unique R1S, R1T and the vans utilized by Amazon. Then we’ve the second era R1 autos, which InsideEVs drove just lately. However there’s one other car beneath a sheet above these; is it the R1X? The true mysteries might be discovered within the subsequent columns, with SUV-like shapes that appear separate from even the R2 and R3 revealed earlier this 12 months.
However two of the lined shapes appear to repeat, suggesting both that Rivian is individually itemizing a number of variants of the identical car or, probably, that the shapes are inventory “TBD” photos that don’t symbolize the ultimate sizes and styles of the deliberate autos. I might keep away from inferring an excessive amount of till we get extra readability.
A Rivian spokesperson declined to touch upon our report. Presumably, these may then be future merchandise, as automaker spokespeople hardly ever touch upon what’s coming subsequent.
Sadly, we discovered little else about particular upcoming merchandise from Rivian’s investor name. However now we all know there’s some type of roadmap for the corporate’s subsequent crop of SUVs and vehicles, past even those which have already taken the web by storm.
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