All-electric SUV specialists Rivian have launched their all-important R2 model

We’re in a sylvan landscape, barely a few weeks after the winter snows have melted, complete with carefree chipmunks and gambolling baby racoons, with scattered stands of quaking aspen making white vertical slashes in against the green hillside. It’s the kind of accessible paradise that lures America’s sizeable community of off-road enthusiasts into nature, swapping suburbia for a bucolic weekend reset getting back to the earth.

This is the precise scenario embodied by SUV ownership, for too long the preserve of gas-guzzling 4x4s with an accompanying culture of old-school machismo and true grit. Except we’re in an all-electric SUV, the new Rivian R2. Is this a fork on the path to the American dream or a genuine culture shift?

The Rivian R2 is no secret – the car was originally announced back in 2024 – but it’s taken a couple of years for the production version to arrive. Debuting earlier this year in Texas, a smaller sibling to the flagship R1 (now in its second generation), it’s an important model that’ll bring Rivian to the masses. When production at the company’s Normal, Illinois, plant has been fully ramped up, Rivian hopes to sell an entry-level model for just $45,000. European sales are also on the roadmap, and maybe even UK ones too.

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It’s all part of an ambitious, tech-driven business plan mastered by Rivian’s charismatic CEO, Robert Joseph Scaringe. Scaringe – simply known as ‘RJ’ to his colleagues - founded Rivian the day after he graduated from MIT some 17 years ago; the company is just one of his portfolio of tech start-ups with lofty goals.

For now, Rivian is the most public facing, a company that spans the electric SUV market from the high-end, where customisation is an essential part of the customer’s wishlist to the everyday requirements of families and small businesses (an R2T pick-up is reportedly in the works). Next up will be the smaller R3 and R3X, already revealed but with no firm date for production set just yet. A ‘Rad’ performance sub-brand is also in the works, as well as an R1X.

Like other tech-first automakers born out of start-up culture, Rivian is very much in the aggressive investment phase, currently rolling fast down a runway of unknown but ultimate finite length. As Max Koff, Chief Engineer on the R2 programme admits, creating the R1 was akin to ‘building the plane as we were flying it’, along with all the outlay required to set Rivian up as a holistic lifestyle brand, complete with Concept Experience dealerships, its own charging network, a burgeoning line of lifestyle accessories and a strong community.

Now the brand is firmly entrenched and customers acquired, along with the familiar digital-era entourage of enthusiasts, fanboys, dedicated YouTube channels and the inevitable haters, the learnings from the R1 can be parlayed into R2.

From a strictly engineering point of view, R2 is also an exercise in clever cost-cutting, retaining all the desirable characteristics of the brand while value engineering the hell out of the platform and production process. As a result, it’s smaller, lighter, cheaper and therefore hugely more accessible. The company needs R2 to be a volume seller from the outset.

This approach hasn’t compromised quality of function. For example, we’re told how the R2’s streamlined processing power reduces the R1’s five individual processors down to one ultra-high-performance units, while simplified wiring looms saves some 2.3 miles of wiring over the R1. One area where simplification has enhanced function are the steering wheel-mounted Halo switches. These twin rocker units are truly multifunctional, combining context-aware switchgear with roller controls to provide fingertip physical access to a wide range of systems.

It neatly addresses the widespread customer call for more physical controls with the need to cut the Bill of Material (BOM) cost of the car as a whole. Buttons are expensive, screens are cheap. Halo is the best of both worlds, and certainly among the more intuitive systems we’ve tried.

A lot of thought has gone into the ‘digital handshake’ for new users, which akin to the set-up process when switching phones. A series of onboarding instructions and tutorials walks you through how to operate the Halo, setting up the driver profile as you do so.

Like all of Rivian’s HMI operations, it’s slickly rendered and animated, with a real attention to graphical detail and legibility. If we must have screen-based systems, Rivian’s is one of the best, an interface that tailors itself automatically to whether driver or passenger is doing the inputs.

At time of writing, the voice-activated Rivian Assistant wasn’t available to test. In common with almost all car voice-based control systems, RA is powered by AI. According to Chief Software Officer Wassym Bensaid, this ‘agentic’ system (meaning it can hop between different apps in order to complete chains of commands) will continue to evolve through OTA updates. Ultimately, you’ll be able ask the car to book, say, a work meeting and it’ll find a slot in your calendar and send out the necessary invites. Something to do whilst driving along hands-free, perhaps.

The fairest 4x4 by far

Visually, the R2 cops some justified criticism for being a scaled-down R1. At just under 40cm shorter, R2 can’t fit R1’s 7-seat set up. The interior is still spacious and flexible, with optional rear mattresses, the optional Rivian-branded cooler and travel kitchen, and power take-off points.

Next year you’ll be able to buy the Treehouse, Rivian’s much-vaunted rooftop tent set up (it’ll also be compatible with the R1 and other SUVs). With a panoramic window, inbuilt lighting and cooling (powered by the car) and an integral step ladder, it’s an open invitation to sample a night or two under canvas, even if the R2 doesn’t have the R1’s trick self-levelling suspension to create a flat pitch.

At the front, the friendly Rivian face cements the comparison with its larger sibling; you’ll see the same graphic treatment on the R3 and R3X when they eventually appear. Buyers for the ‘basic’ R2, the Standard edition, will have to make do with slightly less – no ventilated front seats or heated rears, five speakers not nine and an absence of rear USB sockets, for example – all in the quest to keep costs below the magic $45,000 figure. The launch edition, as well as the Premium and Performance specs, are generously specified in comparison.

So is the car any good? First impressions behind the wheel are very favourable. The R2 is planted and responsive, with direct steering, excellent visibility and the benefit of instant electric pick-up. It makes light work of Utah’s busy highways but really comes into its own on the twisty back roads that take us to an off-road course.

Despite aggressive regenerative braking, the R2 showcases how effective a well-engineered EV can be at fulfilling a variety of roles – spacious family car, fine-handling sports wagon and, as we soon discover, more than capable off road.

The tracks and trails around Park City, Utah, are a popular spot with the state’s off-road community. Through wooded glades and across open hillsides, the R2 handles the often deeply rutted tracks with aplomb. Rivian has done away with fully automated systems like hill descent control, often found in luxury 4x4s with low rates of engagement with the muddy stuff.

The reasoning is that an EV powertrain is inherently better at managing the car’s mass through a mix of braking and regenerative deacceleration. A particularly tricky downhill section sees the car tripoding as we inch across canyon-like furrows. Rivian’s own stats show that 35% of R1 owners regularly give their cars a proper work-out like this, perhaps three times as many as typical Range Rover driver.

An AI-powered vehicle or a vehicle to power AI?

Rivian’s team stresses that the goal was to build the best car for the price and the sector; the fact that it’s electric is neither here nor there. In the US as in Europe, EV take-up is on the wane, so the intention is to win over customers through quality and features, rather than initiate another skirmish in the tiresome culture wars. Yet the R2 presents us with a paradox.

On the one hand, this excellent machine is the embodiment of old-fashioned American values; visit a national park, drive a trail, do a hike and ride your bikes (preferably a model from the Scaringe-owned ALSO), pitch your roof tent and spark up the travel kitchen. This frontier utopianism is deeply enmeshed in the American dream.

On the other hand, Rivian is also a gateway to AI-powered autonomy with wide-ranging social impacts. Scaringe is a vocal cheerleader for AI’s benefits, explaining how the advances LLMs have created in generated imagery, words and video is now moving swiftly into autonomous driving and robotics. Information on his own robotics start-up, Mind Robotics, is still deliberately scarce, but as he confirms, it has big plans in the offing for AI-driven industrial robots, starting with Rivian’s own factories.

‘It’s an exciting time in human history,’ Scaringe tells a roundtable deep in the Utah wilderness, ‘I think we’re so lucky that get to be alive at the birth of AI.’ He does concede that AI is ‘moving faster than the average person understands – I do think that’s going to be a problem.’ But he is also of the belief that robotics can solve all underlying issues.

‘I know this first hand – there’s an extreme lack of labour [in the US]. We don’t have enough people if we want to bring manufacturing back to the USA,' Scaringe says, 'All jobs are going to change fundamentally because of these incredibly powerful tools… We can’t just ignore the fact that AI is coming - it’s going to have enormous impacts on the way the fabric of society works, and we need to prep our kids, we need to prep our existing workforce.’

Advocates of all these technologies expect them to be seamlessly integrated and adopted into all aspects of everyday life, from automobiles to workplaces and homes, a process that is very much happening right now. Against the backdrop of this mix of caution, boosterism, and grand robotic plans, the Rivian R2 feels rather humble and off message. Is this very likeable car nothing more than a Trojan horse for big tech’s obsession with robotics, automation and AI?

Rivian is certainly explicit about the R2 being an AI- and software-defined vehicle, a machine that will live and die on the quality of future over-the-air (OTA) updates and the incremental additions to its skill set. The hardware for autonomy is baked in, albeit only to the much-vaunted ‘Level 2+’ stage.

If you’re not familiar with the five levels of autonomous driving, one through five, don’t worry. It’s an industry-managed set of goalposts that has been known to move ever-so-subtly as the scale of the challenge is realised, refined and then re-attempted.

In short, Level 0 is the car as well all knew it, fully manually operated. Level 1 includes tech like adaptive cruise control, whereas Level 2 incorporates several systems to make up the now familiar (and mandatory) ADAS package - Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. Level 2 cars can apparently ‘drive themselves’ with the car self-steering and operating the throttle and brake depending on the road conditions and surrounding traffic, but the driver is expected to be able to take back control instantly.

Level 3 is a big step forwards, handing over near complete environmental awareness to the vehicle, although the driver still needs to be present and alert. Level 4, as seen in Waymos and other robotaxis, don’t need a driver at all but are generally geofenced to certain areas with granular levels of mapping.

Level 5 is the still theoretical future, wherein cars exist as fully autonomous machines that will potter about the road network with no human oversight. This utopian premise posits the car as an agentic assistant in physical form, apparently unlocking a myriad of social and economic benefits.

Hence Level 2+, a newly inserted stepping stone between two existing but rather widely spaced footholds. Rivian calls its system ‘Universal Hands-Free’, UHF, and it splices the sensor data collected from the car with a growing database of information captured by its user base. Think of it as an LLM for driving, with real-world info feeding back into the AI to constantly improve car’s abilities. To date, 20% of customers – R1 owners – use UHF for up to 40% of their driving and early R2 adopters will be rewarded with a lifetime subscription to Rivian’s Autonomy+ package.

UHF works great on the highway and the introduction of eye tracking instead of steering wheel sensors creates a more authentic hands-free experience. Some capabilities still lag behind the promise. The much vaunted ‘Point-to-Point’ driving is not ready just yet, nor is auto parking or traffic light recognition.

UHF ‘will not stop or slow down for traffic lights or stop signs’, as we discovered almost a little bit too late. The ‘full’ service will be a subscription package (or a one-off payment), and although the R2 is stuffed with sensors, it’s not hardware-ready for Level 3 and above. Stepping stones yet again.

Unless you’re Rivian’s investors, autonomy is still something of a sideshow for many customers. Aside from Mind Robotics and its commercial van division, another cornerstone of the Rivian business model is a new robotaxi, based on the R2 and being developed with Uber, presumably as a direct competitor to Waymo.

Will the association dent the friendly image of these SUVs? Interestingly, Rivian baulked at selling the R2 to American law enforcement, mindful of the downside of having the car associated with the police. Might a robotaxi variant also damage the individualist image of these cars?

AI and autonomy are actually Rivian’s big bet for the business, although you wouldn’t necessarily know it to look at the cars and the culture they’ve engendered to date. Out here amongst the aspens, surrounded by a friendly corral of R2s with delicious food cooked on a tailgate kitchen, debates about the impact of artificial intelligence and autonomy feel very distant. The analogue granularity and practical features of the R2 are at odds with the glassy, detached and inherently inhuman, if not actually anti-human, qualities of AI.

Cars are an expression of the cultural milieu of their place of origin. With California shifting from its role as an epicentre of free-thinking creativity and tolerance towards being the global HQ of the increasingly dystopic tech sector, Rivian embodies the social changes that are facing us all.

Rivian R2 Performance with Launch Package, from $57,990, Rivian.com, @RivianOfficial