Rivian’s R2 just helped it set a new sales record

Rivian said Friday that it produced 19,751 electric vehicles and delivered 19,248 in the third quarter, marking the company's largest quarterly delivery total to date. Those delivery figures are about 45% higher than the same quarter a year earlier, and the company linked the improvement largely to the introduction of its new, lower-priced R2 SUV.

The R2 entered the market in June, so the third quarter represented the model's first full quarter of sales. Rivian did not disclose how many of the quarter's builds or deliveries were R2 units, but the company is publicly targeting sales of 20,000 to 25,000 R2 vehicles by year-end. Achieving that range would rank the R2 among the fastest-selling EVs in U.S. history, second only to Tesla's Model Y according to Rivian's own framing.

If Rivian reaches its R2 target, the company expects total vehicle sales for the year of between 65,000 and 70,000 units, combining R2 volumes with its R1 lineup and its commercial electric van. That projection would surpass recent annual results; Rivian has spent the past few years near about 50,000 vehicles sold per year.

Rivian is currently manufacturing the R2 at its Normal, Illinois plant after expanding production space there, and it is building a new factory outside Atlanta, Georgia, designed to reach as many as 300,000 vehicles per year in the near term with potential for further expansion. The company has said the R2 is critical to narrowing multi-year losses tied to the expensive infrastructure required to support higher-volume models, and it has also signed a deal with Uber to develop robotaxi versions of the R2 as part of a broader autonomy investment that led Rivian to postpone its previously stated path to profitability.