Rivian's RAD division is set to redefine performance vehicles with substantial upgrades, blending motorsport inspiration and adventure-ready capabilities. Rivian's skunkworks performance division, named RAD, which is short for Rivian Adventure Department, won't be slinging sticker jobs. In Park City, Utah, Rivian Founder and CEO RJ Scaringe sat down in an exclusive one-on-one interview on The Drivecast and said RAD products are “not just like new badging on them. They’ll going to be fundamentally improved under the skin.” This will translate to meaningful hardware changes to enhance the performance of RAD models.
The RAD department was formally announced in February. The department’s mantra? Ask “Should we push this further?” and the answer is always “Yes!” Scaringe said, “RAD is, it’s a one of the most enjoyable parts of developing a car, especially something like the R2, is you have all these tradeoffs and compromises you have to make. And I think the magic is when you can balance those tradeoffs really beautifully such that the vehicle feels really cohesive.
But what that means is there’s certain parts of the vehicle where, for it to hit a price point, you have to decide, you can only spend so many dollars. And so where do you allocate the bill of materials? Do you put it into, you know, if you put it all into the chassis, that means you’re going to suffer in other areas. If you put all into the interior, you’re going to suffer in other areas. So we’ve tried to really evenly and thoughtfully deploy dollars across the vehicle to create the best possible combination of things. But inherently with that, we make decisions around certain aspects of performance that we think satisfy the most people. But we know that we could turn the dial up further.
Scaringe continued by saying, “And so what that means is thinking about it on-road, off-road dynamically, thinking about it in terms of, even some of the things in how it aesthetically appears—so some of the visual imagery around the vehicle. And so we launched RAD really recognizing that we create this really balanced set of vehicles, but we actually want to have some vehicles that are a little less balanced, if that makes sense, where we really go a little further on excitement, performance, and adventure. And, so that’s what you’ll see from us.
The R3X wasn’t in any way associated with RAD when it debuted. Scaringe addressed this and noted, “We showed R3X, and at that time, we hadn’t announced RAD. But when you think of RAD and what it embodies, and R3X was spiritually representative of the types of things we’ll do with RAD. And we just hadn’t, when we launched, when we showed R3X, we actually hadn’t arrived at and realized we wanted to create a performance sub-brand as a way to categorize these vehicles. But you know, if we were launching or were showing R3X today, we would have called that a RAD vehicle.
Source: thedrive.com
