The Rivian R2 Is A Smaller Rivian SUV That Starts At $45,000 And Still Looks Like A Rivian

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Today was a big day for Rivian; we knew they were going to be showing their new, smaller SUV, the R2, and then the went ahead and went even smaller, showing their tall-hatchback R3 as a surprise treat. But the meat of today’s announcement-hoagie was the R2, and it’s a sleek-looking $45,000 electric SUV with a range of over 300 miles in its fastest (tri-motor) variants. It seem like an appealing machine, so let’s see what else we can find out about it.

Oh, and if you want to see the whole announcement event, who am I to stop you? In fact, I’ll enable you:

If you don’t want to sit through all that –you’re a busy go-getter, I know that – then don’t worry, we’ll go over the important bits here. First, what it looks like:

R2 3 4view

It looks like a Rivian. The distinctive grille-less Rivian face is there, with the vertical capsule-shaped lighting elements intersected by that full-width light bar. The overall proportions are similar to the larger R1S, but the five-seat R2 I think has more appealing proportions than its seven-seater sibling. Here’s a comparison of the size difference:

R2 Dimensions

The R1S is bigger in every dimension, and the R2 has shorter overhangs, with wheels pushed to the corners. The fundamental Rivian design language I think scales down quite nicely.

R2 Upperrear

Look at that athletic stance! It works.

R2 Blur

I also think I like the truncated C-pillar and the contrasting color roof.

One nice feature is that the R2 allows for a lot of air at the rear, with the rear side windows popping open, old-school vent window-style, and the rear window drops down into the tailgate:

R2 Rearwind

That’s nice! With the huge all-glass roof, you could have a really pleasant open-air experience back there. I bet dogs will love this.

R2 Rearwing

That roofline also incorporates as small wing that I suspect does all manner of complex aero work, and the third brake lamp is concealed up there, too. The rest of the rear lighting keeps the Rivian look with a full-width heckblende-style taillight setup. I also like the angled extrusion of the R I V I A N letters.

R2 Frunk

The R2 seems to have good cargo options, with a good-sized trunk under the front hood, weatherstripped and fully lined with plastic, and in an especially nice touch, all the seats fold flat including, unusually, the front seats:

R2 Folded

This could be a real boon for car camping or hauling really long things. I bet you could get like 85% of a canoe in there! The seatbacks all appear to be faced with some plastic-like material, which I hope is hard-wearing and able to withstand stuff being slid across it.

Some of you may recall that the Rivian R1S and R1T don’t have a traditional glove box, and that bothered many owners, understandably so. There’s lots of reasons to want a glove box in the dash! Where else do you keep all your legal documents and a few dried-out pens and some multi-year-old soy sauce packets and spare bulbs and maybe a spark plug? Rivian seems to have taken the glove boxless fretting to heart, because look what is in the R2:

R2 Gloveboxes

Two glove boxes! Hot damn! Think of all the gloves you can store! Way, way better, Rivian. Way to go above and beyond.

R2 Flashlight

This is also fun, and something of a Rivian hallmark: there’s a little flashlight that’s hidden in the door. I believe the flashlight gets charged while in there, too.

The interior materials look nice and varied, with some color as well, as we can see on this door card:

R2 Door

There’s tweedy fabrics and textured plastics and what’s likely some manner of vegan non-leather with stitching. It looks good, and there’s a nice deep pocket in the door for your novelty fake nuts cans with the spring-loaded snake thing and water bottles and gin bottles and whatever else people shove in there. Billiard balls, I guess?

R2 Int1

The dashboard has a nice slab of wood or bamboo and two LCD screens, a large, wide one for the infotainment screen and a smaller one for the instruments.

R2 Wheel

These twin scroll wheels I’m told are a big deal, full of haptic feedback and I suppose they’re very satisfying-feeling to play with and use to select items from menus. I’ll have to try them and see!

R2 Rearseat

At the rear, it seems like you can have a bench for a five-seater, or two seats if you’re okay with just four. Unless your fifth passenger is unusually small or comes in many small pieces, then it looks like there’s a number of places you could stick them in the center console between the two rear seats.

R2 Chassis

The  R2 uses larger 4695 cylindrical battery cells in its battery pack, which appears to contain around 275 individual cells, in three long packs. The pack is structural, with the top of the pack forming the floor of the car. I’m not sure what this means for serviceability other than I would suspect that major surgery is required to change any or all of those battery modules. Those larger cells should offer some advantages for charging, regen, and power delivery, but until we get some actual numbers, I can’t really say more.

Charging-wise, like almost every other EV coming out now, the R2 should be able to go from 10 to 80% in 30 minutes, and will have the Tesla-standard NACS port built-into the vehicle, with CCS DC fast charging dongles and adapters available.

R2 Dust

So, we have an electric SUV that starts at $45,000 (single rear motor, there’s dual- and tri-motor options, and I suspect the price ramps up quickly for those), seats five, has some excellent cargo-hauling features, is a reasonable size, over 300 miles of range per full charge, can get to 60 mph in under three seconds if you have three motors and I suppose are in a huge hurry, and looks good. So far, I think Rivian will do okay with this. I just hope these are more forgiving to fix if you back into something than the R1 is.

The one big drawback? It won’t be here until 2026. We barely started 2024! Nobody likes to wait, especially for nearly two years.

 

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48 thoughts on “The Rivian R2 Is A Smaller Rivian SUV That Starts At $45,000 And Still Looks Like A Rivian

  1. “At the rear, it seems like you can have a bench for a five-seater, or two seats if you’re okay with just four. Unless your fifth passenger is unusually small or comes in many small pieces, then it looks like there’s a number of places you could stick them in the center console between the two rear seats.”

    Umm, Mr Torchinsky, these are the front seats… That’s the center console…

  2. Woah hold on, the front seats fold flat? Honestly, this will appeal to overlanders/car campers for sleeping. I wish that more SUVs/Crossovers/Vans/Minivans did this.

  3. I skipped through the whole article as soon as I saw “starts at $45k” bullshit. That will never happen, when are auto writers going to stop falling for this bait?

    1. It probably will but the one you want with at least dual motors will be 55+.
      Currently, the Model Y is far from perfect but I can go down and buy one right now for $35k ($46k price – $7,500 – $3,500 MA EV credit).
      I really like the layout of the Kia/Hyundai EV models and the passenger space more, plus lack of AA/CP, satellite radio and only one-pedal driving in the Tesla are major turn offs. But, I might end up in one because I can buy it new, and it has a longer battery warranty than the others which I also would have to buy used to get the same price. It will do the job and be a quirky car to own for 4-5 years before I move onto the next one at 80-100k miles driven.

  4. I’m really liking the styling of Rivians, definitely “modern” – but in a whimsical Honda e kind of way. Plus the EDV looks like a shuttlecraft. If it’s between this or CYBRTRUK aggro for American EV trucks – I’ll take the happy frog.

    1. I saw a Cybertruck in traffic last night. My immediate reaction was “why the hell would they build that stupid thing?”. It looks uglier than a Nissan Juke.
      And that brings up a very important question: why would anyone buy that thing? It isn’t better than anything else on the road, not cheaper either, and has some serious drawbacks. If Tesla had built an electric mid-sized, normally functioning pickup truck, it would sell like ice cream in July.

  5. It looks just as Playmobil’y as the original Land Rover Discovery 3!

    Which is nice.

    So I like it! The overall shape at least. Not so much the silly signature headlights.

  6. Just like the R3, this one also looks great, it’s more handsome and grown-up, instead of a cyber-rally-fighter. I see a lot of circa 2008 Land Rover LR3 in it, which is a very good thing IMO. This thing will likely sell incredibly well if they can bring it to market.

  7. Anyone else contemplating ordering a silver one with a blue interior? And playing a graphics program to see what it looks like with a specific blue vinyl applique arrangement to emulate a certain famous droid?

  8. This looks really good, and the R3 looks even better. That two year wait is pretty brutal. I wish they could get one of these to market in the next year, I’d be more confident that they will continue to exist if they could expand their lineup sooner.

    1. People either seem to love or hate Rivian styling. I love it. Looks like a Bronco Sport or Land Rover Discovery, both of which are great looking.

  9. For weekend warriors, I can’t see a reason to want a 4Runner when a mid-size SUV with a roll-down rear window comes along! I’m sure hard-core wheelers will disagree, but for the vast majority, this thing fits the bill. If they can keep the prices near what they announced, they will slay. I would even consider trading in my GX460 for this…

    1. I’m glad they’re at least going to build this in the Illinois factory instead of waiting for the (now paused) Georgia one to get going. That should mean fewer delays and fewer early production mistakes.

  10. Are these crazy-early reveals just for shareholders or something? I can’t be the only one really annoyed when a manufacturer unveils their next car but “oh if you want one you’ll have to wait two years.” Bruh, how do I know society as we know it will even exist in two years? Really kills the enthusiasm when in an unstable world you gotta wait two years for a car from a barely-stable manufacturer to come out, given they could’ve announced it when, you know, it was ready for sale.

    1. In a way I think you’ve answered your own question. If you’re a barely-stable new car company you need to do everything you can to make people confident you’ll be around in the future. They almost need to show something early to give hope that they’ll make it and that if they do make it, they have a plan for future growth. So, yes, this was basically just an exercise in building confidence in the company. I wouldn’t be surprised if revealing the R3 at the same time was a last minute move too.

    2. How long was it between when the 2006 Camaro concept was first shown and when the car started production in 2009 as a 2010 model?

      I’m completely ignoring the fact that Elon made a big deal about the new Roadster at least 5 years ago – and it’s never seen production – or the long, long lead time for the Cyberfuckup – because we know what a huckster that guy is…
      (Oops)

    3. Don’t worry. Either things will be hunky dory and you can buy the rivan, or we will all be running around a post apocalyptic landscape in the last of the v8s and looking for guzzlene. So win-win. Well, win-win if you actually want to be mad max

    4. Start-up car companies can’t operate like traditional car companies. GM can “reveal” most of their new models just months before release because they have plenty of other vehicles generating revenue for them. Rivian has to reveal their future models super early so people have a reason to stay interested in the brand and investors can “see the future”.

      That’s not to say major traditional car companies don’t show some models super early (Silverado EV…)

    5. Ton’s of car companies do this early reveal thing, kinda sorta with concept cars, but also just with prototypes. Look at VW, their electric bus concept first came out since 2011 and it’s still not available here in the US; it only became available in Europe a year or two ago. We’ve been hearing VW tout Scout now for like a year. Ford took like a decade to go from Bronco concept to actually making one. I’m more OK with this than the concept stuff that gets put out that almost never ever ever has a chance or even thought of getting made.

      1. But the super-early reveals are basically only on their “special” vehicles. When was the last time Ford previewed their basic sedan super early (back when they still made them) or the new Escape super early. It’s always their more “fun” focused products, or ones that rely heavily on projecting an image, or rely heavily on drumming up support. So things like the Bronco, the VW Bus, the Silverado EV…

        The Mk IX Golf ain’t gonna be revealed three years in advance. The next generation Camry ain’t either. And if they are, it’ll be because it’s a huge departure from the generation before it.

  11. I’m torn. I’ve got a vehicle that will do just fine waiting. But I’d like to get into something this size, preferably EV. This looks great in a lot of ways (I’d like physical HVAC controls and such, though). But I could get an Equinox EV this year, and it doesn’t have a frunk or opening back glass, but it is backed by a company that is less likely to collapse, has physical HVAC controls, and starts at a lower price.

    This is cooler. This has neat features. But two years is a long time in the EV space right now, especially for a company that has been hemorrhaging money. (I did drop the $100 deposit, though.)

  12. It’s more or less the exact same size as my CX-50, which honestly seems like where most of the CUV/SUV sales volume is. Consider me SUPER interested now that I’m a boring dad with recently acquired taste for things like safety, utility, seats other than the drivers, efficiency, and comfort. The starting price, the range, looks, non-suppository shape, interior, the rear hatch and rolldown window, flat floor, size, etc all seem to make a very compelling package. Hopefully Rivian can survive long enough to actually produce it; at least to me, it seems like the best EV in the small to midsize SUV EV segment.

    PS, why did those rear vent windows seem to die out? They were somewhat common and now are nonexistent. I remember being a kid loving them in my mom’s Chrysler minivans.

    1. I can’t speak for the rear vent windows, but when we got too rowdy in the rear facing third row, the parent would lower the rear tailgate/hatch window and all that exhaust would calm us right down. Yes, I grew up in the 70s.

      I hope Rivian makes it. Great looking stuff!

    2. I remember being a kid loving them in my mom’s Chrysler minivans.”

      Of course we loved them. They were our only form of life support fresh air. Also like being able to have them open in light rains.

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