Before pausing Georgia factory, Rivian struggled to meet expectations

Scaringe, in his AJC op-ed, said the Georgia site will remain a critical part of scaling R2 production, even though the first wave of vehicles will be built elsewhere.

Fine-tuning first factory

Rivian has never built a factory from ground up before.

Its Illinois plant is a repurposed Mitsubishi factory that Rivian scooped up in 2017 for pennies on the dollar. There, Rivian builds its R1T pickup trucks, R1S SUVs and electric delivery vans, of which Amazon ordered 100,000 units.

Tesla, in its first few years, ran into production problems. Rivian immediately hit snags, too.

In 2022, its first full year of production, a pandemic shortage of computer chips and semiconductors forced Rivian to cut its 50,000-unit goal that year in half. Rivian ended 2022 just shy of that reduced goal.

Last year, Rivian assembled more than 57,000 vehicles, exceeding its annual production goal by more than 3,000. But Rivian said it would keep its production number flat this year, disappointing Wall Street and investors punished its stock price.

Investors so far have cheered Rivian’s plans. The Illinois factory has a production capacity of 150,000 vehicles, nearly triple its current output. Rivian officials said incorporating the R2 into the Normal factory will boost its capacity to about 215,000 vehicles.

“Normal has so much space left in it that the R2 would have to be an overwhelming success for them to hurry the second plant,” Fiorani said.

As proposed, the Georgia factory’s first phase will include the capability to produce 200,000 EVs, eventually growing to double that figure. Scaringe wrote in his AJC op-ed that pausing the Georgia factory is a lesson learned from the troubles ramping up R1T and R1S production.

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