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DATE

Thursday, July 30, 2026 at 5:00 p.m. ET

CALL PARTICIPANTS

• Investor Relations - Chip Newcom
• Chief Executive Officer and Founder - RJ Scaringe
• Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer - Claire McDonough
• Chief Operations Officer - Javier Varela

TAKEAWAYS

• Revenue -- $1.66 billion, an increase of 27% driven by vehicle delivery growth and software development services from the Volkswagen Group joint venture.
• Gross Profit -- $179 million, representing an 11% gross margin and including $138 million of depreciation and amortization.
• Adjusted EBITDA Loss -- $379 million, reflecting gross profit gains offset by increased operating expenses related to the R2 ramp and autonomy investments.
• Vehicle Production and Deliveries -- 12,613 vehicles produced and 12,194 vehicles delivered, exceeding the quarterly expectation of 9,000 to 11,000 units.
• Automotive Revenue -- $1.14 billion, a 23% increase resulting from higher delivery volumes and a $103 million increase in regulatory credit sales.
• Automotive Gross Loss -- $36 million, a $299 million improvement compared to the previous year due to higher volumes and tariff refund receivables.
• Software and Services Revenue -- $515 million, rising 37% primarily due to $308 million in revenue from the vehicle electrical architecture joint venture.
• Software and Services Gross Profit -- $215 million, representing a 42% segment margin.
• Total Vehicle Delivery Guidance -- 65,000 to 70,000 units for 2026, an increase of 3,000 units over previous guidance.
• Adjusted EBITDA Guidance -- a loss of $2 billion to $1.8 billion, a $50 million improvement at the midpoint due to higher volumes and regulatory credit revenue.
• Capital Expenditure Guidance -- $1.7 billion to $1.8 billion, a reduction of $250 million at the midpoint attributed to project efficiencies and spending timing.
• Liquidity Position -- $5.3 billion in cash and short-term investments as of the end of the second quarter.
• Total Targeted Capital -- over $14 billion, including existing liquidity, a $4.5 billion Department of Energy loan, and anticipated investments from Uber and Volkswagen Group.
• Equity Capital Raise -- $1.3 billion through a follow-on offering of 86.25 million Class A shares in July.
• R2 Ramp Costs -- $100 million in incremental cost of revenue recognized during the quarter due to initial production inefficiencies.
• R2 Vehicle Pricing -- $58,000 for the R2 Launch Edition, with standard and premium trims scheduled for early 2027.
• Amazon Fleet Expansion -- over 40,000 electric delivery vans (EDVs) active in Amazon's fleet across North America.
• Demo Drive Engagement -- 57,000 demo drives hosted during the quarter, a record for the company.
• Manufacturing Capacity -- 515,000 units of total annual capacity across existing facilities in Normal and the planned Georgia site.
• IEEPA Tariff Refund -- recorded as a receivable for roughly half of the tens of millions of dollars in total anticipated proceeds not subject to Department of Justice appeal.
• Autonomy+ Performance -- trending positively in take rates since monetization began in April.
• R&D Step-up -- expected in the second half of 2026 due to GPU sourcing for autonomy training.

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RISKS

• McDonough stated, "Current macro and geopolitical factors are creating added complexity, cost, and uncertainty," noting the impact on supply chain management and commodity costs.
• McDonough reported that EBITDA guidance improvements were "partially offset by raw material, memory, and logistic cost increases."
• McDonough warned that "the complexity of a new vehicle launch will negatively impact our automotive gross profit in the third quarter."

SUMMARY

Management focused on the execution of the R2 vehicle platform production ramp and the expansion of its technology ecosystem through partnerships. The company initiated external customer deliveries of the R2 while growing its Software and Services segment via its joint venture with Volkswagen Group. Strategic priorities include the development of in-house silicon and an autonomy roadmap targeting Level 4 capabilities. Operations in the second half of the year are centered on scaling manufacturing shifts and managing supply chain costs to achieve positive automotive gross profit by the end of 2026.

• CEO Scaringe reported that R2 Launch Edition reservation-to-order conversion rates were "meaningfully higher than what we expected."
• The company expects to scale R2 production from one shift to two shifts by the end of the third quarter.
• Management confirmed plans to launch point-to-point autonomy capabilities by the end of 2026, enabling hands-off driving between destinations.
• The autonomy roadmap targets Level 3 eyes-off capabilities in 2027 and Level 4 robotaxi functionality in 2028.
• Scaringe noted that the company's RAP1 in-house silicon is in final testing phases for the third-generation autonomy hardware launch scheduled for late 2026.
• Regarding Chinese competition, Scaringe noted that U.S. and Chinese cost structures differ significantly due to input costs, stating that "in many cases, the capital cost is zero, meaning it's being provided by the local government" in China.
• Rivian is developing new electric delivery van variants for Amazon featuring larger battery packs and all-wheel drive.

INDUSTRY GLOSSARY

• Autonomy+: Rivian's subscription-based suite of advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous driving features.
• EDV (Electric Delivery Van): Rivian's commercial vehicle platform developed for fleet customers like Amazon.
• IEEPA (International Emergency Economic Powers Act): A U.S. law used to regulate international commerce, under which Rivian is seeking tariff refunds.
• LDM (Large Driving Model): An end-to-end trained neural net model used for autonomous vehicle navigation.
• Level 3/4 Autonomy: SAE international standards where Level 3 allows eyes-off driving under certain conditions and Level 4 allows fully autonomous operation in defined areas.
• R1/R2: Rivian's first-generation (R1T, R1S) and second-generation (R2) consumer vehicle platforms.
• RAP1: Rivian's first internally designed silicon chip for its autonomous driving compute platform.
• ZEV (Zero-Emission Vehicle) Credits: Regulatory credits sold to other automakers to meet environmental compliance mandates.

Full Conference Call Transcript

Chip Newcom: Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us for Rivian's second quarter 2026 earnings call. Today, I'm joined by RJ Scaringe, our CEO and Founder, Claire McDonough, our Chief Financial Officer, and Javier Varela, our Chief Operations Officer. Before we begin, matters discussed on this call, including comments and responses to questions, reflects management's views as of today. We will also be making statements related to our business operations and financial performance that may be considered forward-looking statements under federal securities law. Such statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. These risks and uncertainties are described in our SEC filings and the earnings presentation we filed with the SEC today.

During this call, we will discuss both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of historical non-GAAP to GAAP financial measures is provided in our earnings presentation and press release. Just before the earnings call, we posted our earnings presentation, which includes an overview of our progress over the recent months. I encourage you to read it for additional details around some of the items we will cover on today's call. Following our prepared remarks, we will be taking questions from sell-side analysts. In the interest of keeping the call to one hour, we would ask these analysts to limit any follow-on questions to one. With that, I'll turn the call over to RJ.

RJ Scaringe: Thanks, Chip. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us for today's call. In the second quarter, we began deliveries of R2 vehicles to external customers. We expect R2 to be a game changer for our customers and a driver of Rivian's long-term growth and profitability. Importantly, in the U.S. automotive marketplace, starved for high-quality EV choice, I strongly believe R2 is an attractively priced option for everyday adventurers that will resonate with a broad set of consumers. Many reviews of R2 are outstanding. One journalist wrote, quote, "R2 is one of the best new cars I've driven in years." Another praised R2 as among the finest vehicle designs in the world.

Early customer feedback of R2 is positive, and I have to say, I love it as my daily driver. Strong R2 reviews and increasing brand awareness are directly translating into accelerating customer touchpoints with our products. In the second quarter, we hosted over 57,000 demo drives, a Rivian record. While it's early in our ramp, we are pleased with the reservation conversion we've seen to date for Launch Edition R2s. Turning to our manufacturing footprint, our team in Normal is focused on the production ramp of R2. As a reminder, R2 production started with a single shift, and we expect to scale to two shifts by the end of the third quarter.

We are seeing good progress in new team member training and process improvements for the ramp of the first R2 shift. Additionally, members of our supply chain team are spending time on-site with suppliers as we look towards supporting the ramp in the back half of the year and into next year. In Georgia, construction of our next manufacturing site is progressing well. The combination of our Normal and Georgia facilities provides Rivian the path to scale to 515,000 units of annual capacity, with plenty of room for future expansion. As an update on our Amazon partnership, Amazon now has over 40,000 Rivian electric delivery vans active in its fleet, delivering packages across thousands of cities in North America.

In addition to the EDV Standard pack variant already on the road, we're developing new variants with a larger battery pack and all-wheel drive to support Amazon's needs. In the second quarter, we surpassed 1 billion miles driven on the Rivian commercial van platform. Turning to our technology roadmap, autonomy remains one of the most important areas of investment at Rivian. In the not-too-distant future, we believe advanced assisted driving capabilities will be a key differentiator for customers and a substantial driver of market share. Our autonomy development is on track, and we expect to begin rolling out point-to-point capabilities by the end of this year.

We believe our rapidly expanding car park with R2 will accelerate our data flywheel to enable delivering hands-off, eyes-off capabilities in 2027, and ultimately Level 4 capabilities in consumer and robotaxi variants of R2. Since we began monetizing Autonomy+ in April, take rates are trending positively for the service, and we believe further feature releases will drive continued increased uptake of Autonomy+. Later this year, we will host another Autonomy & AI Day, where we'll provide more updates around our exciting autonomy and AI progress. At the end of 2026, we are targeting the launch of our third-generation autonomy hardware. This includes RAP1, our first in-house design silicon, and the addition of lidar.

The development of our RAP1 chip is on track, and we've begun final testing phases of production silicon. Finally, in May, we rolled out our Rivian Assistant on all R1 vehicles and plan to launch the feature on R2 with an over-the-air update later this year. Rivian Assistant is our new AI-powered voice assistant that is built to be a digital co-pilot, with integration into the vehicle ecosystem and other external apps. Customers love this new feature and its intuitive functionality across applications like Spotify and Google. In closing, I want to thank our team for their continued execution this quarter. We are laying the foundations for a future that we believe will be fully electric, autonomous, and AI defined.

The reviews for R2 affirm that our category-defining brand and vertically integrated and extensible technology resonates deeply with customers. I couldn't be more excited about the opportunity ahead. With that, I'll pass the call over to Claire to discuss our financial results.

Claire McDonough: Thank you, RJ, and good afternoon, everyone. As RJ shared, we started external customer deliveries of R2 in June. My family took a road trip in our R2 earlier this summer, and we put the storage capacity to the test by piling in four large suitcases, backpacks, golf clubs, tennis rackets, and groceries. Road tripping with Universal Hands-Free is outstanding, making long car rides relaxing. I'm looking forward to the launch of point-to-point capabilities later this year. As I discussed previously, delivering a strong 2026 exit rate for R2 production and deliveries is a key focus for our team, as we believe it will directly translate into positive automotive gross profit for the business.

Turning to the results for the second quarter, our consolidated revenue was $1.66 billion, a 27% increase over the same quarter last year. Consolidated gross profit was $179 million, and our gross margin was 11%. Gross profit included $138 million of depreciation and amortization and $31 million of stock-based compensation expense. Adjusted EBITDA losses for the quarter were $379 million, driven by our $179 million of gross profit and increased adjusted operating expenses as we prepare to scale R2 and invest in our autonomy roadmap. In the second quarter, we produced 12,613 vehicles at our plant in Normal, Illinois, and delivered 12,194 vehicles.

Delivery results topped our 9,000-11,000 vehicle expectations due to robust growth quarter-over-quarter in EDV and R1, coupled with the introduction of R2 deliveries. Our $1.14 billion of automotive revenue, a 23% increase over the same quarter last year, were primarily driven by a 14% increase in vehicle deliveries and a $103 million increase in revenues related to automotive regulatory credits, partially offset by a decline in average selling prices from a higher mix of commercial van and R2 deliveries.

Automotive gross profit loss was $36 million, compared to a gross profit loss of $335 million for the same quarter last year, a $299 million improvement, primarily due to increases in delivery and production volumes, an increase in revenues related to automotive regulatory credits, and an IEEPA tariff refund receivable, partially offset by the ramp of R2 production. In the quarter, we recognized approximately $100 million in incremental cost of revenue due to the ramp of R2 production as compared to the production at more normalized levels. Current macro and geopolitical factors are creating added complexity, cost, and uncertainty, our team continues to work hard to manage supply chain risks and increasing commodity and memory costs.

Our software and services segment reported another strong quarter. During the second quarter, the segment generated $515 million of revenue, a 37% year-over-year increase, primarily due to an increase in vehicle electrical architecture and software development services by the joint venture, repairs and maintenance, and Autonomy+, offset by lower remarketing sales. $308 million or 60% of software and services revenue was attributable to our joint venture with Volkswagen Group. Software and services gross profit was $215 million, a 42% margin due to higher vehicle electrical architecture and software development services by the joint venture. Looking at our balance sheet, we ended the quarter with approximately $5.3 billion of cash equivalents, and short-term investments.

In July, we sold 86.25 million Class A shares in a follow-on equity offering to raise approximately $1.3 billion for general corporate purposes, including the funding of equity commitments and reserves for our $4.5 billion Department of Energy loan associated with the construction of our Georgia plant. Additionally, later this year, we expect to receive $1 billion in non-recourse debt from Volkswagen Group and an additional $250 million equity investment from Uber, both subject to the completion of certain conditions. Our total available liquidity and targeted future capital is over $14 billion to support Rivian's investments in growth initiatives.

This includes current liquidity, the Department of Energy loan, and additional targeted equity investments from Uber and Volkswagen Group, which are all subject to certain conditions. Finally, for our 2026 guidance, in early July, we announced we expect to deliver 65,000-70,000 total vehicles across R1, R2, and our commercial van, a 3,000-unit increase as compared to our prior guidance. This implies approximately 42,400-47,400 deliveries in the second half of the year. We expect deliveries will be weighted towards the fourth quarter as we ramp R2.

While we continue to believe our gross profit will increase year-over-year, we expect the complexity of a new vehicle launch will negatively impact our automotive gross profit in the third quarter, as it did in the second quarter, before becoming a benefit for our overall operations in the fourth quarter as we ramp production and deliveries. As a reminder, we believe this is a transition year for the automotive segment's path towards long-term profitability as we scale R2.

For 2026, we expect an adjusted EBITDA loss of between $2 billion-$1.8 billion, a $50 million improvement at the midpoint, due to better-than-expected revenue related to regulatory credits in the second quarter and increased delivery volumes, which were partially offset by raw material, memory, and logistic cost increases. While economic and geopolitical conditions, including international conflicts, pose risks, we remain steadfast in our plans to invest behind key growth drivers. We continue to progress our autonomy roadmap and the expansion of our sales and service footprint as we scale with R2. We believe these strategic investments will deliver long-term value to our shareholders and customers.

Finally, for 2026, we are reducing our capital expenditure guidance by $250 million at the midpoint to $1.7 billion-$1.8 billion, benefiting from project efficiencies and timing of spend. Our CapEx spend primarily relates to finalizing construction and tooling for R2 and Normal, the continued build-out of our sales, service, and charging infrastructure, and construction for our greenfield plant in Georgia. In closing, I'd like to congratulate our team again for the start of external R2 sales in June and the continued strong execution in the second quarter. We continue to believe that R2 and our technology roadmap will be truly transformative for the growth and profitability of our business.

I'd like to turn the call back over to the operator to open the line for Q and A.

Operator: If you would like to ask a question, click on the raise hand button at the bottom of the screen. Once prompted, please unmute yourself and begin your question. We will now pause a moment to assemble the queue. Thank you. Our first question comes from Mark Delaney with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. Please unmute and ask your question.

Mark Delaney: Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the questions. Congratulations on the R2 launch. Very exciting to see. I was hoping to start there on the R2. Can you share more on how the production ramp is progressing and any examples or metrics maybe you can share on that front to illustrate how the ramp is going? As you think about R2 over the next year, do you think the pace of deliveries is going to be gated more by supply or demand?

RJ Scaringe: Well, thanks, Mark, for the question. We're also very excited about R2. Well, I guess first on the production ramp. Of course, ramping production of a vehicle, especially where it's a first-time launch of a new vehicle, is complex. It's an orchestration of ramping hundreds of suppliers. The suppliers all need to ramp at the same rate. Of course, our overall production output is throttled by or gated by the slowest moving supplier.

The coordination to make sure everything's ramping consistently and in an organized fashion across all the different suppliers is really a key focus for us, and it's the reason we start on a single shift and get everything moving efficiently and effectively before we bring on a second shift. Saying that, this is a complex effort. There's lots of moving parts. We went into it fully recognizing the complexity and having been through this with R1 and iterations on R1, with a lot of learnings and knowledge as a business that we certainly didn't have to this level with the launch of R1. Where it stands today is we're ramping. We're continuing to make progress week over week.

As you saw, we've updated our guidance to reflect the progress we're making. The biggest category of focus for us has been supply base and making sure that all of our suppliers are ready to continue ramping to much higher levels as we look at the back half of the year, and in particular, as we start to plan for running, fully utilizing the plant and running across two shifts. Now, on the demand side, there's enormous excitement around the product. We've been really encouraged by the conversion of reservations to orders on our Launch Edition.

We, of course, had our own internal projections as to what that would be, recognizing that we're launching with the Launch Edition, which is a $58,000 version of the vehicle, a most expensive version of R2. That conversion rate from reservation to orders has been meaningfully higher than what we expected, which is a great signal. Now, of course, with that said, we are looking forward to introducing the other trims, our mid-spec and our base or standard spec, as we look at the early part of 2027. The excitement even for the Launch Edition and the higher price point Launch Edition has been very, very high.

Mark Delaney: Appreciate all those details. My other question was trying to understand what the R2 ramp might mean for the financials and putting that into context with some of your other comments around the input cost environment. As you look out through the end of the year and start ramping R2, does Rivian still expect to reach a positive gross margin exiting 2026? Thank you.

Claire McDonough: Thanks, Mark. As I mentioned in my prepared remarks, we continue to expect that R2 will achieve a positive gross profit as part of our exit rate for 2026. That's enabled, as RJ mentioned, by the ongoing efficiencies of being able to produce R2 at much higher volumes and the fixed cost leverage that will enable within the business.

Operator: Your next question will come from George Gianarikas with Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead.

George Gianarikas: Hi, everyone. Thank you for taking my questions. I wanted to focus a little bit on the EDV. Can you provide an update maybe on commercial adoption beyond Amazon? As you expand pilot programs for non-Amazon fleets, what's the current primary governor on deployment pace? Is it TCO parity, upfront capital outlay, charging density? Anything you could share there? Thank you.

RJ Scaringe: Thanks, George. I think a first point to just to call out is the ramp-up that we're seeing within Amazon. You're seeing this already in the numbers of the first two quarters this year, that Amazon is purchasing more vans. We're ramping up meaningfully from where we were in previous years, and that's absolutely a reflection of the TCO advantages that our EDV platform represents and enables.

We think that those cost benefits that are being so clearly realized by Amazon and so clearly evidenced by their ramping up of volume, we think that's going to translate to other commercial operators ultimately seeing those cost benefits and recognizing both to remain competitive, but also to address their own cost structures, that they're going to be pursuing opportunities with EDV. Now, that has taken longer than we would have expected, or we would have hoped for in terms of other fleets adopting a strategy towards electrification and a strategy of adopting not just an electric vehicle, but a highly connected and intelligent vehicle.

The signal that's being sent through Amazon's significant ramping of this is really outstanding in terms of a billboard for the capability and a billboard for what the EDV is possible delivering from a business point of view.

George Gianarikas: Thank you. Maybe more of a long-term question. As you continue to benchmark other global EV platforms, particularly from Chinese OEMs, what structural or operational lessons can you apply to the R3 and other future vehicles as you spec those out and try to build them? Thank you.

RJ Scaringe: Of course, the auto industry's a business where every manufacturer is very aware of what other manufacturers are doing. Rivians are purchased by probably every car company in the world and taken apart, and similarly, the Chinese vehicles are purchased by many different, both OEMs, but also benchmarking companies. As a result, there's not a magic difference in terms of how a Chinese vehicle is built relative to a vehicle built in the West in terms of the manufacturing approaches, the adjoining technologies, the use of high-pressure die castings, consolidation of stampings. Those methods are being deployed across all, call it, best-in-class vehicles from a manufacturability point of view and a vehicle architecture point of view.

We see that, of course, evidenced in how we're building the R2. Use of high-pressure die casting is an extreme focus on part consolidation and part elimination. I think the big difference that exists between U.S. cost structure and Chinese cost structure is the input cost. You have a much, much lower labor cost in China, much, much, much lower capital cost structure, where in many cases, the capital cost is zero, meaning it's being provided by the local government. That compounds across the supply chain and all the way up through the OEM, and it results in a materially lower cost than what it would take to produce in the Western world.

That naturally opens the question around trade policy, and importantly, it opens very complex questions around supply chain strategy. We're navigating a lot of those complexities around sourcing our components and not just our tier one, but even down to the raw materials where those are coming from, recognizing the frameworks that have been established around trade. In a world of completely open trade, our supply chains would look very different, because we'd be optimizing purely around cost, which would be, of course, optimizing around countries that have the lowest input cost structure, the lowest labor cost, lowest energy cost, lowest land cost, lowest cost of capital. Of course, that's not the world we work in.

We work in a world where there's very intentional industrial policies that exist that change the way we might be able to look at this. In many cases, there's implications around certain components where we believe it's very helpful to make sure those are sourced from the United States.

George Gianarikas: Thanks.

Operator: Your next question comes from Shreyas Patil with Wolfe Research. Your line is open. Please unmute and ask your question.

Shreyas Patil: Hey. Thanks so much for taking the question. I was curious if you could maybe unpack the $50 million increase in adjusted EBITDA for the year. How much of that is tied to the better regulatory credit sales, how should we think about input cost inflation?

Claire McDonough: Sure, Shreyas. As you look at the evolution of our EBITDA guidance, we were able to improve the bottom end of the range by $100 million. That moves the midpoint $50 million, as you stated. We had higher than anticipated regulatory credits in the first half of this year. As we look ahead, we have the added benefit of the incremental delivery volumes with the increase of 3,000 units in our outlook. Offsetting that, we have headwinds associated with increases in raw material cost, increases in memory cost, as well as increases in logistics cost that had us arrive at this specific EBITDA range and outcome.

As we look at the second half performance relative to the first half, what you can anticipate seeing is on the gross profit side, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, we'll continue to see some of the inefficiencies and complexities associated with the R2 ramp impact Q3 automotive gross profit. We'll start to see some of the tailwinds of the scale and volumes kick in the fourth quarter. Beyond that, we'll see just the ongoing investments that we're continuing to make across R&D, and specifically the growth in our autonomy spend, and the continued fixed cost leverage that we'll see as we're growing our sales and service footprint, but certainly growing sales much more rapidly as well.

Shreyas Patil: Okay, thanks. Maybe just on the Autonomy+. You're going to be launching the point-to-point solution later this year. I'm curious where things stand today with Autonomy+, just if there's a way you can give us a sense of take rates or kind of adoption trends. How do you see point-to-point driving both demand, but also those take rates, ultimately, the subscription revenue opportunity. Thanks.

RJ Scaringe: We've been really encouraged by the take rates on Autonomy+ to date. I think, in particular, what's really encouraging is to see the status that we're at today in terms of customer engagement, customer usage of the feature, then, of course, related to that, the take rate around paying for Autonomy+. We have very clear line of sight and visibility into what's coming. As encouraged as we are with the take rates today, we're quite confident that will expand meaningfully as we add in additional capabilities and features. There's going to be a whole, you think of it as like a staircase of features that ultimately leads us to very high levels of autonomy.

A really important step that's happening in the very near future is the capability of point to point. Just to restate what that entails, that means you can get into the car, type the address into the vehicle, and the vehicle will completely drive itself to that address. Initially, that will be a feature in which it's like Level 2++, where your hands are off the wheel, but your eyes are still primarily on the road, meaning you can look away for short extended moments of time, but you're not in a position to officially be reading a book or be responding to emails. The step in 2027 is going further where we go not only hands-off, but also eyes-off.

That's really important because then not only is the vehicle fully driving itself and navigating to the address, but importantly, you're able to truly get your time back without the vehicle dinging at you, say, to keep your eyes on the road, but actually be able to read a book, be on an iPad. That's really into the true, as per the definition, Level 3 capability. Of course, into 2028, that's when we bring on Level 4, and that's where the vehicle's capable of operating as a robotaxi, meaning there's no one even needed to be in the driver's seat for any operation of the vehicle. You can put occupants in the back.

You can use that capability for robotaxi applications. You can also have that, which is one of the things we've been very excited about, have that as a really nice feature on an owned vehicle. We think of this as personal Level 4, where your own personal vehicle can drop you at the airport, it can pick your kids up from school, it can go to the grocery store and grab things for you. That roadmap is something we're not only very excited about, but we think will fundamentally drive increasing levels of adoption on Autonomy+ and its future variants as we've just described.

With all that said, we also think we're at an inflection point from a consumer behavior and consumer mindset where historically, autonomous features were not the primary purchase criteria for most customers. Of course, there's technology early adopters for which this has been top of mind for them for some time. For the vast majority of customers, this wasn't the driving purchase criteria. We think this starts to emerge to be much more of a primary purchase criteria, and it's one of the reasons we've made the decision to invest so heavily here.

We think ultimately market share is going to be driven by the capability of the vehicle to drive itself and, of course, linked to that, the vehicle being software and AI-defined. Those are two very critical pillars of our technology roadmap and technology strategy.

Operator: Your next question will come from Rajat Gupta with JPMorgan. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Rajat Gupta: Great. Thanks for taking the question. I had a question on the R2 customer profile. Any early reads on what that customer is proving to be, existing electric vehicle owners, first-time electric vehicle buyers, Tesla cross-shoppers? Just curious if you have any read on the customer profile of the early R2 orders. I have a quick follow-up. Thanks.

RJ Scaringe: Thanks, Rajat. The goal in developing and designing R2 is to have a very diverse set of customer profiles, meaning customers that were coming out of a wide variety of form factors, coming out of a wide range of brands, and from a broad spectrum of demographics. That was the intent, that was the target. We now have the benefit of being able to see the data to see who is actually buying R2s. The great news here is that it is exactly that.

We have a very diverse customer set coming out of a broad range of vehicles, which I guess perhaps shouldn't be too big of a surprise that the mid-size SUV segment, the two-row five-passenger segment is the largest segment by far in the U.S. market. It's generally the largest segment globally as well. The way that we've been able to really thoughtfully execute this vehicle in terms of packaging, storage capacity, performance, range, efficiency, driving dynamics, both on-road and off-road, has created a very wide net for attracting this very diverse set of buyers. Maybe one of the most exciting metrics here is we have a significant number of first-time EV owners. That's really powerful.

For someone to have their first time owning an EV be a Rivian, for that bond with the brand, so to speak, to be created through that first-time ownership is powerful. It also illustrates the strength of what we've created in terms of the product, and the product market fit, that this is mobilizing demand for EVs that's been latent, that's been sitting on the sideline because the product that sort of would motivate someone to move from an ICE to an EV hasn't existed until R2. This is a great metric. Now, of course, there are EV buyers that are in the mix. You have folks coming out of Teslas or folks coming out of Rivian R1s.

The most important metric here is the very significant number of folks that have not owned EVs before.

Rajat Gupta: That's great color. Just to follow up, for Claire, maybe. I noticed in the second quarter gross profit commentary, you mentioned an IEEPA tariff refund benefit. I'm curious how much that was because I didn't see it in the full-year outlook. Just relatedly, it looks like the guidance implies a steeper EBITDA loss in the second half versus first half, despite the positive gross margin exit rate commentary. Just trying to bridge those two aspects. Thank you.

Claire McDonough: Sure. On the IEEPA tariff refund piece, as we mentioned in our earnings call, last quarter, we sized the IEEPA tariffs in the tens of millions of dollars. The receivable that we booked this quarter is roughly half of the total. The receivable is related to the refund of the amount of anticipated proceeds that are not subject to the existing DOJ appeal. As we think about the second question on the EBITDA loss being steeper in the second half of the year, one of the big differences there is we did have $164 million of regulatory credits that benefited our gross profit outlook in the first half.

As we look at the second half of the year, we'll see, again, some of the complexity associated with the R2 ramp impacting automotive gross profit in the third quarter before showing progress in the fourth quarter. The bigger driver is really the absence of regulatory credits in second half versus first half, and then the ongoing investments in R&D and SG&A.

Rajat Gupta: Understood. No, that's helpful. Thanks to you the question and good luck.

Operator: Your next question comes from Itay Michaeli from TD Cowen. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Itay Michaeli: Great. Thank you, everybody. First, a couple questions on the R2. RJ, 57,000 demo drives, it's a big jump sequentially. Hoping you could talk a little bit what you're seeing in terms of conversions of those drives into orders. How many people are actually experiencing Autonomy+? Secondly, curious whether you do expect to deliver a material amount of the premium trims this year, or will R2 sales predominantly be the performance trim this year?

RJ Scaringe: We're really excited. As I said in my opening remarks, the 57,000 drives this past quarter is a record for Rivian. The delivery of that, enabling that number of drives, as you said, roughly doubling where we've been in the past. The team has had to really come together, we did a lot of prep knowing that the amount of excitement around R2 was going to drive a significant increase in both exposure to the brand, touchpoints to the brand. Of course, that's manifested through these test drives. With that, we're not providing specifics around conversion, but that's a really important metric we look at internally. That actually links pretty heavily to the availability of the other variants.

To start, as you said, we have our performance variant, the most expensive variant of R2 that we've launched with. We'll be introducing the premium and our standard trims, as we look at early 2027. We are witnessing a higher level of conversion than we expected, meaningfully higher than we expected into the Launch Edition package, which was great. It's super encouraging. I think reflects the amount of excitement around the product. Saying that, we fully recognize are excited to also be launching the other trims know that those will be coming, as I said, at the early part of 2027.

Itay Michaeli: That's great to hear. Claire, maybe a quick follow-up. R&D, I think, was flat sequentially. I know you're making a lot of investments in autonomy. Curious how would you think about R&D kind of trending in the second half of the year. Thank you.

Claire McDonough: Sure. As we look at the second half of the year, we do anticipate seeing a step-up that's predominantly related to GPU sourcing for our autonomy training that will continue to ratchet up over the course of the second half of the year. In the second quarter, there we saw some level of reduction as we're now in production, so there was a decrease in our engineering design and development spend. We did, underneath the R&D spend, still see significant increase in terms of our overall autonomy spend.

Itay Michaeli: That's very helpful. Thank you.

Operator: Your next question will come from Joseph Spak with UBS. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Joseph Spak: Thanks, everyone. Just maybe, the comment about the $100 million in incremental cost of revenues because of ramp of R2 compared to normalized levels. Just maybe some context, what are you classifying as normalized? Is that one shift, two shifts, and are you also assuming a more normalized mix in that analysis?

Claire McDonough: Joe, the way to think about it is the $100 million reflects a combination of ramp-related inefficiencies such as expedited freight cost out of the gates or short-term premiums with suppliers that we anticipate coming off as we increase our production volumes over the course of the next couple of quarters. It's also cost that we expensed in period that would have naturally been absorbed into inventory, for example, if we were at more of a Q4 run rate of production volume. That's a little bit of the way to think about how we've sized the $100 million of estimated ramp cost.

Joseph Spak: Okay. Yeah. A good portion of that is just, you don't have the scale and leverage over the asset. If you're saying, second shift comes on at some point later in the year and you're exiting gross profit positive, then that could help us sort of triangulate the units you think you need to be close to break even. That's a fair way to think about it?

Claire McDonough: That's generally a fair way to think about it. As we talked about it being really at sort of Q4 normalized levels, that's not the full extent of R2 fully ramped up.

Joseph Spak: Right.

Claire McDonough: Is, in the near term, a more normalized production environment that we can compare our standard cost to.

Joseph Spak: Okay. Then, RJ, appreciate the Autonomy+ commentary earlier. Was wondering if you'd also give us the latest update on just RAP1 and Gen 3 hardware and any progress. Is that still on track for SOP later this year?

RJ Scaringe: Yeah, our in-house silicon RAP1 is on track. As you know, that underpins what we call our Gen 3 autonomous hardware platform. Yeah, both the RAP1 along with the rest of the upgrades to the system are on track for later this year.

Joseph Spak: Thank you.

Operator: Your next question will come from Dan Levy with Barclays. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Dan Levy: Okay, great. Thank you. I just wanted to start with a question for you, Claire, on just unpacking the COGS per unit, on Joe's question there. To only see COGS per unit up a few thousand dollars quarter-over-quarter, despite that incremental $100 million, says that there's probably something incrementally that's going on quarter-over-quarter on the cost side, whether it's within EDV or R1. Maybe you can just help unpack if there's other underlying cost improvements and why we're not seeing maybe what should've been maybe a step up in raw material pressure in that cost per unit.

Claire McDonough: Sure. As you look at the quarter, we had a $96,700 a unit of COGS. If you were to back out the $100 million on a per-unit basis, that's about $8,200 a unit. That would've gotten us to $88,400. That's about a $5,000 per unit improvement on a quarter-sequential basis relative to where we were in Q1. One of the biggest drivers of that improvement is through the volume that we saw in the quarter as well. That's going to continue to be a key theme as we'll see our COGS per unit continue to come down over the corresponding quarters of this year. Beyond that, we did also have the IEEPA receivable that was also benefiting this quarter.

Dan Levy: That would've been revenue. Was that booked in COGS?

Claire McDonough: Booked in COGS.

Dan Levy: Okay. Thank you. As a follow-up, RJ, I want to ask something that I know you've addressed in the past, but I think it's important just in the early days of the R2 ramp. If we look back to R1, the days of R1, and the early ramp, you probably bit off a bit more than you could chew, which is something I think you've acknowledged. There was a lot going on, a lot of different configurations. If we look now, I know you talked about focusing on just the Launch Edition, but broadly within Rivian, there are a lot of different initiatives between in a wrap, I'm sure there's multiple other future iterations planned.

Your autonomy roadmap, what's going on with network architecture, then also just mind, also just a number of different initiatives here. Maybe you can just talk us through how this time is a bit different versus R1, how you're approaching R2 execution, given that you still a lot of things on your plate, and how you're looking at resource allocation in this environment.

RJ Scaringe: It does seem, in some ways, like yesterday we were launching R1, then it also seems like it was a very long time ago. With that said, the company that's launching R2 today is a very different business than what launched R1. I say that with regards to the maturity of our processes, the maturity of the team, the maturity of the development sequencing. When we look at the launch and what we're going through today in terms of ramping production, ramping suppliers, what we're experiencing today is actually an artifact of what we did in the two or three years leading up to it.

A big difference between R1 and R2 is the structured approach we took to what we call design validation builds. Those are vehicles that were to production spec but built on our pilot line. We went through multiple iterations of that. Then subsequent to that are manufacturing validation builds, where it was, of course, the production spec, but built in the manufacturing plant. The MVB builds, those manufacturing validation builds, started at the very beginning of this year, at the beginning of 2026. That gave us time to work through issues around ramp, work through issues around design elements, of course, supplier-related issues as we were doing those validation builds.

The number of unexpected surprises in now the production ramp-up of R2 is far lower. It's an incredibly different situation than what we had in R1. Now, that's not to say there aren't surprises. As I said at the start, building and launching a new car is just an inherently very complex activity. It's complex if you're a company that's been building cars for 100 years, or it's complex if you're Rivian. We've done everything we can to prepare.

As we now are going through the ramp, we're still being very thoughtful around how rapidly we ramp up our supply chain, making sure that all of our suppliers can ramp consistently, planning that very thoughtfully before we bring on the second shift. A big enabler to help make that ramp process more seamless and more straightforward was the simplification of the product relative, certainly to what we did before. As you said, in R1, we didn't just launch R1, we launched R1T, R1S, and a commercial van all within the same three-month window. We had a very complex set of build variations, essentially, thousands of different possible build combinations for the R1T and the R1S.

In sharp contrast to that in R2, we have a very limited set of build combinations that we're building today, which is all embedded in the Launch Edition. Even within that, we've limited the number of color combinations. That was not an accident. That was highly intentional to facilitate a smoother and faster ramp. The decisions that we took around what combination of features we would have in this Launch Edition was also something we thought about a lot. As I said before, we had a whole bunch of our own expectations around what take rate would be to convert a reservation into an order for the Launch Edition.

We've been pleasantly surprised that conversion from reservation to order has been notably higher than what we expected, which is great news. That doesn't, of course, mean we're not going to launch those other variants. For any customers that are waiting for a standard trim or a premium trim, don't worry. We're on it. Those will be coming in the early part of 2027.

Dan Levy: Great. Thank you.

Operator: Your next question will come from Andrew Percoco with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Andrew Percoco: Great. Thanks so much. Can you guys hear me?

Operator: Yes.

Andrew Percoco: Awesome. I guess before I get to my question, I do want to say I was three out of the 57,000 demo drives that you guys talked about. As a potential future customer, I just have to give you guys some kudos here on what you've done with the R2, and just recognize that up front. I guess just to get to my question, we talked a lot about autonomy already, but I'm just curious how you're thinking about the pricing side and potential uplifts to ARPU as you go to point to point, and then eyes off in 2027, and how you're thinking about enacting those pricing changes over time.

RJ Scaringe: Yeah. We certainly believe there's opportunity to grow pricing for our autonomous capabilities as we add those capabilities. We believe very deeply that needs to be earned through the expansion of the feature set and expansion of the capability. I'd say the other element here, which we have to be cognizant of, is just the market dynamics around this. I think it's going to be quite fluid around how some of these features get priced. As I said, we're going through an inflection point where customers are going from this being a nice-to-have feature in terms of advanced autonomous capabilities to a must-have feature.

There's a growing awareness around that capability set, and I really believe the transition to Level 3 capabilities where you can go hands off, eyes off, makes it much easier to implement or to use the feature. It's much easier to understand. Early adopters, it's fine to say you have to be hands-on or eyes on the road, but you can be hands off. For the broad, full spectrum of customers, it'd be much easier to just say, "The car will drive itself. You don't have to look at the road.

You don't have to touch the wheel." We think when that happens, it'll make it far easier to explain, far easier to see mass scale adoption well beyond just early adopters. With that, the desire and the expectation for these features to be in technology-forward vehicles. Ultimately, what the pricing potential is there is something that we're actively spending a lot of time ourselves thinking about. Ultimately, we believe it represents an opportunity to expand pricing beyond where we are today.

Andrew Percoco: Got it. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. I was just hoping you can talk a little bit about this new California rebate program. In my understanding, it does require some level of OEM buy-in. I'm just curious if that's something you're planning on participating in and whether or not you've started to see some incremental demand from that program.

Claire McDonough: Sure. We're really happy with the California EV incentive program. Consistent with our mission, we're really excited about the opportunity to attract new first-time EV owners into the Rivian community. For the program, it's $3,500 for new vehicles and $1,750 for used vehicles, with the OEM and the state of California splitting the share of those incentives. There are caps by OEM. There will be limitations in terms of the full population set that can take advantage of some of these incentives.

Andrew Percoco: Understood. Thanks so much for the questions.

Operator: Your next question will come from Chris Pierce with Needham. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Chris Pierce: Oh, hey. Good afternoon. You've talked a lot about conversion. I guess I'd love to hear the flip side of that. What are customers that aren't converting telling you? Are they put in a reservation a long time ago? They're waiting for a different variant? I guess I'd just like to hear about people maybe falling out.

RJ Scaringe: Well, thanks, Chris. Yeah, of course, there's a long list of reasons that someone may decide not to convert. The biggest is they're waiting for a different build combination than what we have in the Launch Edition package. That's by far and away the most common reason for someone to not convert a reservation into an order. As I said, recognizing that conversion rates are higher, that's been something we've had to dynamically really watch super carefully because we're providing delivery windows to our Launch Edition customers. That requires us to make projections around what the conversion rates will be, ultimately, when you think about working through the backlog of reservations.

The way that we've tried to provide guidance on this is representative of thinking about those conversions, but ultimately beginning the delivery of those different trims in 2027.

Chris Pierce: Okay. I think you mentioned you might have another Autonomy & AI Day this year. It's been a while since the IPO and long-term financial targets were put out. Could this be something where things have changed for better or for worse, for the better now? Could we see updated long-term targets for people to anchor around?

Claire McDonough: For the Autonomy & AI Day, it will be more focused on the technology roadmap. We're working over the coming quarters to think about the right time to set up a broader-based Investor Day as well, that would be more focused on longer-term financial targets. This one, RJ, I don't know if you want to provide a little bit of context of some of the updates or plans for the day itself.

RJ Scaringe: Yeah. We had our first Autonomy & AI Day last year. In it, we pulled the curtain back on a lot of the technology development that had been underway for quite some time within Rivian. That was our in-house silicon program, the roadmap to Level 4 capabilities. Subsequent to that, we've now announced a few important things, one of which is the deal that we've done with Uber for our robotaxi program, which as I said earlier, is going to be available, and we're targeting for that to be available in 2028. There's a lot of other details that we'd like to provide around what that roadmap looks like.

We'd like to show the progress that's happened on the vehicle, beyond what's in customer vehicles today, but actually from a technical point of view, on the path to Level 4. Of course, our objective is to provide better visibility and therefore rethink higher level of confidence around achieving those targets.

Chris Pierce: Okay. Thank you and good luck.

Operator: Your next question will come from Philippe Houchois with Jefferies. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Philippe Houchois: Yes. Thank you and good evening. My first question is on the relationship with Uber. We've seen some tension between Uber and Waymo and their cooperation. Of course, there's a bit of uncertainty about the financial stability of Lucid and the fact that Lucid worked with Nuro, so it's not as integrated a solution as what you offer in the partnership with Uber. I'm just wondering how much of a upside to your relationship there is, maybe not in the timing, but in the magnitude of what you could be working with Uber in terms of offering robotaxis.

RJ Scaringe: Well, a core element of our approach is a strongly held belief that vertically integrating the vehicle and the technology stack together allows for meaningful, both cost advantages and technical simplifications in terms of the vehicle architecture and autonomy hardware architecture. That means how sensors are integrated into the vehicle, the redundancies built around the controls, the way that we've architected the compute platform and the inference. In our case, because we've brought silicon in-house, we have a very low-cost way to achieve very high levels of inference within the vehicle. We believe that the technical approach that we've taken from a hardware point of view, creates a cost structure, I should say, that's highly advantaged for delivering Level 4.

Along with that, we believe that the fact that we're building a neural net-based approach, an approach that's an end-to-end trained model with what we call LDM, or large driving model, means that the progress that we make on the consumer platform, so that's point-to-point, hands-off, eyes-off, Level 3, ultimately getting into Level 4. That LDM workflow is identical across all those different steps. That staircase up to Level 4 is one work stream. It's not multiple work streams where we have Level 4 platform and a Level 2 platform, but rather, there's one LDM, one end-to-end trained model.

The vehicles will have slightly different sensor topologies to cover corner cases differently between, let's say, Level 3 and Level 4 vehicle, along with that slightly different inference capabilities built around RAP1. From a platform, from a model point of view, it's the same. That was a key shift for us, and I think it's a key shift for the industry in terms of how we approach autonomy, that historically prior to, let's say, 2022, 2023, the technology topologies used for Level 4 were very different than the topologies used for Level 2.

We've seen that merge with the approach of using transformer-based encoding and these end-to-end models that is really to the advantage of our architecture and to the advantage of the data flywheel that exists through the deployed fleet that we have.

Philippe Houchois: Specifically on Uber, do you think there's a big opportunity for you? Because when you announced the partnership, you were one of several partners that Uber was working with. Is there an opportunity for Rivian to be actually a much bigger partner of Uber in autonomy?

RJ Scaringe: Well, I'd say the working relationship with Uber has been fantastic. From the top of the organization, through the working levels of the organization. The engagement from Dara in terms of the importance of this relationship, along with the working-level teams, it's been very positive. We're working towards our next milestone at the end of this year and deploying in a couple of cities in 2028 and then rapidly growing, following that to a large number of cities. We're quite encouraged by the relationship and the partnership. Ultimately, I do believe that the focus we have and the focus, I think, appropriately, where we're placing our energy is making sure that the technology is ready.

The vehicle's capable of Level 4 performance and doing it in a thoughtful way in terms of really clean execution at the vehicle level and really cost-effective ways of delivering that capability.

Philippe Houchois: Right. Then maybe more for Claire about the ramp and the-- I think you still haven't told us exactly how many R2s you delivered. It's just maybe a handful. You had warned us about the risk to gross margin as you ramp up. In fact, I know there was a bit of outside help in Q2 from IEEPA, from ZEV income. The dip in the gross margin has actually not really happened. Now you're warning us that it could be in Q3. I'm just wondering, is it because the ramp really hasn't happened that much on R2 in the second quarter, or has it actually happened in a smoother manner than you feared?

Of course, you're cautious about Q3, but we could have a positive surprise in the Q3 gross margin as well.

Claire McDonough: As we think about the second quarter, you can think about us converting from a pre-production environment to our start of production then start of our cost structure, hitting our cost of goods sold for roughly 2/3 of the quarter. It was not a full quarter's impact. As we look ahead to the third quarter, we'll have a full quarter's impact of the ramp. We'll also, as RJ noted, have the introduction of a second shift of operation, some additional labor cost associated with the ramp as well. In the fourth quarter, that's where you'll start to see the benefits of scaling production, the fixed cost leverage, both across R2 as well as the broader plant.

With that, maybe I'll also invite Javier to jump in as well, just as we think about driving towards manufacturing efficiencies and executing the ramp in the second half.

Javier Varela: Yeah. Thank you, Claire. Indeed, there's a big focus, laser focus of the teams in Normal to ramp up this first shift, that's what we started in quarter two, we continue in quarter three with the preparation of the R2. We are not expecting any material contribution to volumes with the second shift in this quarter, but we will see it in quarter four. The capability of the teams has very much increased compared to the launch of R1, that's a big advantage. The winning teams are the ones that are capable to solve problems at the speed.

That's what we are doing now, focusing on training of the members in the assembly lines, training the team, the automation, getting the output higher and higher as we ramp. Of course, focusing on the supply chain. That is always not a surprise. I've lived many launches in my life, always the supply chain is a part that requires special attention. We are focusing on a handful of suppliers with boots on the ground and with a great example of collaboration where, the suppliers are really willing to get our support and we are willing to give them. That's the focus in Normal today.

Operator: This concludes the Q and A section of the call. I would now like to turn the call back over to RJ Scaringe for closing remarks.

RJ Scaringe: Thanks, everybody, for joining us on today's call. Hopefully, you're observing a lot of excitement from the team here around R2. That excitement's echoing the excitement that we're seeing from consumers, it's ultimately been something that we as a business have been building towards for a while. The ramp that we're going to see in the second half of the year, Q3 into Q4, as Javier just described, with Q4 being a really important element where we start to see the benefits of our second shift to online. That's a major focus for us and our operational teams, our engineering teams, our customer-facing teams are all very much aligned to be focused on delivering on that ramp.

As you also heard, we're continuing to focus on our technology roadmap. That's continued progress on our software-defined architecture and as we really think of it, as our AI-defined architecture, vehicles that have a growing set of features and capabilities. That growing set of features and capabilities allows not only the vehicle to create a better customer experience, but exist within our ecosystem more efficiently. Then, of course, the enormous emphasis that we have on our self-driving platforms, or self-driving platform, growing capability over the course of this year with the introduction of point-to-point late this year, then ultimately expanding that in 2027 and 2028, to ultimately get to Level 4.

This is an exciting time for us as a business. We see it as an inflection point for us as a business as well, both in terms of our path to profitability, but also in terms of the scale and scope of the business, given the mass market nature of R2. Once again, thanks, everybody, for joining today's call, and look forward to future discussions.