Rivian is coming to the UK, and here's how it could topple Tesla

Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe has confirmed that Europe will be the next frontier for the EV start-up, with the hugely important UK market very much part of its plan to conquer the continent. 

Auto Express sat down for an exclusive interview with Scaringe to find out more about what his company has in store for us, with the first model it plans to launch here being the Rivian R2 – an all-new mid-size SUV that’s aimed squarely at the Tesla Model Y. 

It will also be competing with many other massively popular electric cars and, the boss reveals to us, the R2 was designed with European customers in mind, in anticipation of the brand launching on our side of the pond in the next few years. 

Engineered to handle well on- and off-road, while offering tech and practicality in equal measures (a torch hidden in the driver’s door will certainly appeal to Rivian’s outdoorsy target audience) the R2 blends the best qualities of a Dacia, Skoda and Volvo into one sleek package. That might be a more apt comparison than some would think, because Scaringe jokes that a lot of American customers think Rivian is a European car company.

The brand is even working on a crossover hatchback that it’ll bring here, the Rivian R3, which has more than a whiff of Lancia Delta Integrale about it, and there’s going to be a highly potent tri-motor rally-inspired R3X version, created by RAD – the Rivian Adventure Department. What could be more European than a hot hatch? 

Both of these cars will lead Rivian's charge into Europe, with other models, such as a more entry-level 'R4' Scaringe hints at, coming further down the line. But all of that rests on the success of the R2.

In the US, the R2 starts from a little less than $45,000 (about £33,300), putting it in the firing line for about a dozen other electric SUVs. But the barrage will be more fierce in the competitive EV-friendly European theatre, if prices start from around £40,000 as we suspect they will, which would put it within spitting distance of the Model Y. We ask whether Rivian is ready to face much stronger competition over here, to which Scaringe calmly replies: “We’d better be”.

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The boss seems confident that the R2 and its other adventure-chasing cars will resonate with European customers and stand out from the homogenised models he sees about. “There's a lot of cars that they're different brands, maybe slightly different styling, but they're sort of the same and they don't feel that different,” he explains.

“As a car enthusiast, I sort of lament that because I really loved the period of time where different brands had wildly different takes on a segment. And you could see the personality, you could see the teams that had different perspectives. The colloquial way to say it is like cars look like jelly beans, they're just all sort of the same. And so we try not to be like that.”

Rivian is also going to be facing off against Chinese car makers for the first time when it finally arrives in Europe, which doesn’t seem to faze Scaringe, either. He praises the quality of the Xiaomi SU7’s execution and admires the wide-reaching appeal of BYD’s portfolio, even if they do “blend in with one another often”.

Scaringe believes that many Chinese cars simply try to do too much and, as a result, don’t have the kind of simple or seamless user experience that their much more established rivals do. Rivian tries to do this by offering a user experience that’s supposed to feel consistent throughout, hence why it chooses not to offer Apple CarPlay. 

The future of Rivian rests on this one car

Rivian has built itself up to be a big company, not a small-time player, burning through cash to build its infrastructure and vertically integrate everything that it felt was important, from the electric motors and gearboxes to software. In effect, “anything that has to do with the high-voltage or the low-voltage system, we brought in-house,” says Scaringe. “We even developed our own silicon chips for self-driving.”

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The company also recently broke ground on a new factory in the southern state of Georgia that’s due to open in 2028; it will have an initial production capacity of 300,000 units per year, and will be a key part of supporting European sales. But in time, Scaringe wants Rivian to be producing millions of cars a year, hoping to catch up with Tesla, which churned out more than 1.6 million EVs in 2025. 

“The ‘bet the company’ element of this is that we're building this large engineering capability to support becoming a much larger business,” Scaringe says.  “And the only way we become a much larger business is if we have a product like R2. And therefore, the R2 must be successful to support the way Rivian’s been designed.”

Fortunately for Rivian, demand has been strong out of the gate and the brand is now projecting it will deliver up to 70,000 cars this year – almost 70 per cent more than it shifted in 2025. 

That’s going to consume all of the company’s production capacity for quite a while, according to Scaringe, which is part of the reason why the CEO wouldn’t commit to a solid timeline of when it will come to Europe. However, 2028 or 2029 would be our guess. 

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