RJ Scaringe sits across from you and talks about cars like someone who actually understands what goes wrong when you build them. That makes sense. He has a PhD from MIT in internal combustion engines. Then he spent the last 15 years building a company specifically designed to kill internal combustion engines.

Rivian lost $3.6 billion last year. In eight years, it's burned through nearly $25 billion — more than almost every other pure EV maker on Earth. The stock went from $130 to $16. The company has sold 175,000 cars since 2021. Tesla sold 8 million in the same window.

And yet Volkswagen just committed up to $5.8 billion to partner with Rivian on software and electrical architecture. Uber is investing $1.25 billion to deploy 50,000 Rivian robotaxis. These aren't the moves of a company about to vanish.

When we talked, Scaringe was candid about the Cybertruck's mess, why the R1 launched with dead-end technology, and what happens if the R2 doesn't sell. But he started with something else entirely: why he actually respects Ferrari's new Luce, the polarizing EV that nobody asked for.

"The way Jony and Marc approach design is incredibly intentional," he said. "There's not a decision on that car that's unintentional." He paused. "Would I buy it? I don't own a Ferrari. But there are things about it I really like. The interior — the haptics, the switches, the buttons — they're just phenomenal. You can see Jony's fingerprints all over it."

This matters because Scaringe sees something in the Luce that most people miss. It's not about the car itself. It's about choice. "About 50 or 60 percent of the US market is just two vehicles: the Model 3 and Model Y," he said. "They've been on the road for a while, yet they outsell everything else. If we want to electrify, we need a lot more choice than just those two." The Luce, weird as it is, proves someone else can build an EV that doesn't copy Tesla's playbook.

That's exactly what the Cybertruck didn't do. Scaringe was blunt about it. "You sometimes take big swings with something that's wild, and they definitely took a very big swing. It turned out it's not a mass-market product. But it was pretty clear from the beginning it wasn't going to be." He ticked off the reasons: niche design decisions, product trade-offs that made it impractical for most people. "Cybertruck is the exact opposite of the Model 3 and Model Y." Those cars won because they solved actual problems people had. The Cybertruck solved nothing except maybe a design fantasy.

Rivian's bet is different. The R2 has to be what the Cybertruck wasn't: something normal people actually want. Scaringe knows the stakes. "The company needs its new R2 SUV to work. Not just sell, but sell in large numbers." If it doesn't, none of the VW partnership or Uber money matters. The runway ends. The story changes from "comeback" to "cautionary tale."

What makes this moment strange is that Scaringe doesn't seem panicked about it. He talks about the R1's mistakes — launching with an infotainment system that was already obsolete — not as failures but as learning. "We knew we had to get to market," he explained. The company couldn't wait for perfect tech. It had to move. Now it knows better.

The R2 is supposed to start around $35,000. That's the price point where EVs actually compete with gas cars in the market that matters most. Tesla's cheapest new car right now costs more. Ford's cheaper. But Rivian's needs to actually exist in showrooms at that price, with enough margin to keep the company alive, and with technology that won't be obsolete in three years. That's not impossible. It's just incredibly hard.

Scaringe also mentioned something that caught attention: his frustration with touchscreen-only controls in cars. "The haptics, the switches, the buttons" in the Luce impressed him because they work. You don't have to look at them. Your muscle memory finds them. In a car doing 70 miles per hour, that matters. It's a small thing. It's also the kind of detail that separates cars people love from cars people tolerate.

The Rivian story right now is binary. Either the R2 works and the company becomes a legitimate second player in American EVs. Or it doesn't, and Rivian becomes a very expensive lesson in how hard it is to build cars at scale. The Volkswagen money and Uber deal buy time, but they don't change the math. The R2 has to sell. Not to enthusiasts. To regular people who walk into a dealership and choose it over a Model 3 because it's better, cheaper, or both.

Scaringe seems to understand that pressure exactly. He's the guy who studied how to make engines work, then decided to make them irrelevant. He knows what happens when you're right. He also knows what happens when you're wrong. The R2 will tell you which one this is.