'Zero Debate': Why Rivian's CEO Is Sure The Future Will Be Electric

🌟 Editor's Note

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This Week’s Big Charge

🛻 Rivian’s CEO Weighs In On The Future Of EVs And Autonomy

Greetings from London! I’m here in the United Kingdom (for the first time ever, actually), covering an event with Polestar and then taking some time off to explore one of the world’s greatest cities for a couple of days.

With that and a tough travel schedule, this week’s Route Zero will be a bit abbreviated—but still with all the must-read links you expect.

However! I’m highlighting something pretty special. Over at InsideEVs, my colleague Tim Levin and I sat down for a lengthy interview with Rivian CEO and Founder RJ Scaringe on this week’s Plugged-In Podcast.

I’m certainly biased, but I think we had a great, wide-ranging discussion about where EVs, autonomous vehicles and software are headed next.

To quickly recap where Rivian is at in mid-Q3 2025:

• The automaker is America’s most successful EV startup after Tesla, with 51,579 car sales in 2024. Its R1S is one of the best-selling electric SUVs in America, and has been the best-selling premium SUV of any kind in California.

• Yet headwinds remain. Sales have been down year-to-date, thanks in part to supply chain disruptions. It’s trying to ramp up a Georgia factory to make its $45,000 Rivian R2, crucial to the company’s broader appeal beyond its expensive current cars.

• Now Rivian faces tariff costs, an end to EV tax credits and a loss of regulatory credit revenue. It may still achieve a full-year gross profit in 2025, however.

• Still, with new electric models coming and a $6 billion deal to develop the Volkswagen Group’s future software and EV architectures, Scaringe said he’s confident about Rivian’s long game.

If you care about the future of the auto industry, electric mobility, software and autonomy, then Scaringe is worth listening to. Listen here, or watch it on YouTube. (And huge kudos to Tim for spearheading so much of this coverage while I was on the road!)

Some highlights:

⚡️ On energy:

• EVs and clean energy may be highly politicized in America, but they are inevitable in Scaringe’s mind.

• “Imagine the history books 1,000 years from now … where we talk about how we industrialized the world” using fossil-fuel power. “We exhausted about half of it in a 100-year period, but then ultimately transitioned off.”

• He added, “It's a finite supply. This is not a statement of opinion. This is a statement of fact. In a few hundred years, it just simply can't be unless our standard of living dramatically degrades.”

• “That requires us to shift to energy systems that we can sustain beyond pumping oil out of Iran and digging coal out of the earth.”