Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe confirmed what the company’s cheaper future looks like, even if he’s not attaching numbers to it yet. The R3 hatchback’s cost will be “materially lower” than the R2, and the R4 waiting behind it will drop the price further still.
“The next product, which we creatively call R3, is going to take the price point down. We haven’t announced pricing yet, but it will move materially lower,” Scaringe told The New York Times. “There’s a product beyond that, called R4, which again moves that further.”
No pricing, then. But the math isn’t hard. The R2 currently starts near $60,000 for the debut Performance trim with the Launch Package. By late 2027, Rivian says a rear-wheel-drive R2 Standard will arrive at $45,000 with a Rivian-estimated “275+” miles of range. “Materially lower” than a $45,000 floor implies an R3 starting somewhere below $40,000.
That would land Rivian in a segment that’s finally getting crowded. The freshly price-cut Ioniq 5 from Hyundai, Subaru’s Uncharted and Toyota’s bZ are all chasing the same buyer. Most EVs on sale still cost more than that, which is the whole problem Rivian is trying to solve.
Beyond price direction, Rivian has said little about the R3. It’ll be built at the company’s upcoming Georgia factory, where production is slated to begin in 2028. Scaringe has said sales will lead with the high-performance, off-road R3X.
The R4 is even murkier. Scaringe called it cheaper than the R3, which points toward a genuine budget EV, though its shape remains unknown. On the Plugged-In Podcast in 2025 he described the R4 and R5 as “a sibling set, where you have two very different vehicles that share the same platform.”
The caveat runs through all of it. The R2 is the priority, deliveries started in June, and Rivian expects to sell up to 70,000 EVs this year. Everything downstream depends on that launch. As Scaringe put it: “It must go well.”
[Images: Rivian]
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