How Rivian Is Pulling Off Its $45,000 R2 Electric SUV

Last week, the electric automaker Rivian unveiled the R2, its latest electric SUV. When the vehicle starts rolling off production lines—in the first half of 2026, Rivian says—the R2 will join the R1S SUV and the R1T pickup truck in the automaker’s lineup.

Critically, Rivian pledges its newest entry will be cheaper: At “around” $45,000, according Rivian’s press materials, the SUV will cost some $30,000 less than its bigger SUV cousin, and will still come with about 300 miles of range.

Pulling off the feat of making its new SUV more affordable without sacrificing range or style should not only prove critical in making Rivian’s latest ride stand out in an increasingly crowded field of electric vehicles—it also might save the company. How did Rivian make it work? “R1 was designed through addition. It’s our premium flagship. We got to say yes to a lot of things,” Jeff Hammoud, the automaker’s chief design officer, said at an R2 unveiling event in Laguna Beach, California, last week. “With R2, we’re really thinking about, to get the price point down, what do we need to say no to?”

It’s early, but the math seems to have worked: Rivian reported taking more than 68,000 reservations in the first 24 hours after the SUV’s unveiling.

For the electric automaker’s design team, the trick to creating what executives called the “more accessible” R2 was to maintain the original SUV’s design language—the elements that make it clearly a Rivian—while snipping manufacturing and materials costs wherever they could. So the R2 has Rivian’s signature front, complete with smile headlights, and looks like a shrunken version of the R1S. (The new vehicle seats five people instead of seven.) Cutting more costs came down to smart engineering.

After a long day of showing off the R2 and its surprise crossover counterpart, the R3, Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe sat down with WIRED to discuss his engineering and design teams’ little compromises that help make the new SUV work.

Suspension System

In a bid to make the R1 line into a sports car/off-roader hybrid, Rivian had to go all out with its suspension system. Because electric batteries are heavy, the vehicle needed air springs to ensure it could get the