Amazon and Ford backed electric car start up Rivian has revealed that it is ready to mass produce its highly anticipated RIT pickup truck which was supposed to be delivered to many customers earlier this year. Rivian ran into some production issues earlier this year and hence had to delay the launch of the vehicle. It planned to start deliveries in September and now its CEO RJ Scaringe has revealed the latest production units of the R1T are to the satisfaction of the company and pending regulatory approval in the US, it is ready to start deliveries.
"Over the last several months we have been focused on not only ramping our production rate, but also dialing in our quality across each of the five areas of our plant: stamping, body, paint, assembly and propulsion (battery and drive units). This challenging process involves multiple build phases - many of the vehicles from these non-customer build phases have been seen out testing across a range of environments during the last year. These validation, tooling tryout and pilot build vehicles are critical for our ongoing mileage accumulation program that has helped us drive refinements to the product. With all of this, I am excited to report we have started producing vehicles that reflect all of our quality iterations and design refinements. We are currently working with various governing agencies on the final approvals needed for us to make the first deliveries to pre order customers in September," said Scaringe.
The R1T is one of the most anticipated pickup trucks in the world
The company mostly is waiting for a go ahead from the US EPA and NTHSA. If the deliveries start, Rivian already has some capacity in place and has five service centres already operational as well.
"Rivian Service Centers are now in operation in Brooklyn, NY; Bellevue, WA; Normal, IL; San Francisco and El Segundo, CA. This is just the beginning of our growing Service Center network, which also includes a large fleet of mobile service vans for performing onsite vehicle repairs. We are planning to open over 100 Service Centers by the end of 2023," Scaringe added.
Scaringe also issued an update on its plans of deploying its own charging network.
"We also remain focused on building out our charging network - this includes our fast DC chargers that are part of our Rivian Adventure Network as well as our Level 2 AC chargers/connectors that are part of our Rivian Waypoints network. Key to delivering on our goal of more than 3,500 DC chargers (at 600 sites) and 10,000 Waypoints is securing a portfolio of great locations for these chargers. You will start to see more of these pop up over the next few months, and by the end of the year the buildout will start expanding quite rapidly," he added.
