Listen to my thoughts on being a part of the 2024 InsideEV’s Breakthrough Awards as a podcast guest.
Rivian has long toiled in the EV salt mines. It’s spent its formative years competing against the likes of Tesla while sorting out various start-up issues including tech, production and profitability; call them “growing pains.” But when Rivian launched the all-new R1 platform earlier this year with the aim of making its popular R1S and R1T better to drive, cheaper and easier to build and slightly more efficient, we were impressed by the work that the company did under the skin.
“There is so much to like on this car,” Patrick George, the EIC of InsideEVs, wrote of his time in the 2025 R1S Adventure Dual Motor tester he tried out. “From its exceptional range to the many terrain options to its friendly styling. It’s packed with features, handles remarkably well for its size and has vastly better software than the last R1S I was driving late last year.”
Despite the updates, though, judges declared that Rivian’s “second generation” R1 didn’t yet offer enough meaningful improvements that really move the needle and make it a more enticing proposition for owners. The company didn’t pass cost savings onto consumers, and software bugs still abound. It’s clear that Rivian still has some things to sort out.
(Welcome to The Breakthrough Awards, InsideEVs’ year-end awards program recognizing the EVs, people and technologies that are paving the way for our clean energy transition. Read about the awards and the other contenders below.)
The 2024 Breakthrough Awards
The Chevy Equinox EV Is Our 2024 Breakthrough EV Of The Year
The Breakthrough Awards: How We Decided The Year’s Best EV And More
The Tesla Cybertruck Was Too Caustic To Win
The 2025 Lucid Air Pure Is As Good As EVs Get Right Now
The Hyundai Ioniq 5 N Is A Blast, But That’s Not Enough
The Kia EV9 Does What Tesla And Rivian Couldn’t
Why GM CEO Mary Barra Is Our 2024 Person Of The Year
Why The Tesla NACS Revolution Is Our Technology Of The Year
Why We Nominated The Rivian R1 For Breakthrough EV Of The Year
As a Tesla alternative, Rivian stands out both for its innovation and the starkly different politics of its founder and CEO, RJ Scaringe.
Rivian has an innovative and creative design with a focus on adventure and off-road experiences, and as a couple of our jurors rightly pointed out, on the road, the R1S is a lot like driving a lifted Toyota SUV: familiar but with a bit more tech underneath. While most people won’t take their Rivians out for an offroading adventure, the trucks still offer plenty of space, comfort and amenities to make any drive pleasant.
“Rivian is absolutely nailing the ‘big electric off-roader’ class of vehicles without feeling like a tank, as General Motors’ EV trucks do, or a practical joke gone too far, like the Cybertruck,” Patrick added in his driving notes.
The updates aren’t visible from the outside, but they are vast. In June of this year, Rivian announced what amounted to a very heavy mid-cycle refresh that ultimately made some features and software more efficient and made the vehicles lighter by approximately 44 pounds.
Most remarkably, Rivian removed 1.6 miles of wiring, cut down on the number of ECUs, and lowered the cost of production as the company continues to struggle with everything from massive supply chain missteps to significant OSHA violations in its Normal, Illinois, plant, and works its way toward profitability. This is a significant development because it comes from what still amounts to a small, scrappy startup working very hard to avoid falling into the so-called EV Valley of Death, where electric vehicle companies struggle to ramp up production and make a profit.
What We Thought About the R1 Platform
While the tech breakthrough was less obvious for the person behind the wheel, that doesn’t mean that our jury didn’t love many of Rivian’s updates to the new platform, particularly in light of the promised (yet to come) smaller R2 and R3 SUVs.
“The experience of driving a Rivian is as much about hardware as it is about software,” Senior Reporter Tim Levin said. “While automotive software can come off like an afterthought, Rivian’s is notably cohesive, quick, and thoughtfully designed. Interacting with its digital interface—whether it’s to find a charging station or view vehicle settings—feels a whole lot like using an Apple product. And that’s refreshing. The interior, too, has a modern flair without the Tesla austerity. All in all, Rivians feel like special vehicles that break the norm, and that’s because they are.”
Both Staff Writer Kevin Williams and Patrick noted that the R1S feels a lot like a Toyota. “The R1S feels like it almost shouldn’t exist,” Patrick said. “If Toyota—itself an early battery pioneer, as we’re all aware—had bothered to make an all-electric Land Cruiser or 4Runner or Sequoia, I bet [Rivian] might not be here. Yet here we are, with the most promising American EV startup since Tesla, making the kind of outdoor-friendly all-electric SUV that Toyota wouldn’t. That’s why it’s so charming to most of us: this country loves a good off-roader, and the R1S nails the assignment.”
Most notably, Kevin, who traveled to China to get a taste of electric innovation from overseas, noted that while the new R1 platform may only really benefit Rivian’s bottom line, there’s more than meets the eye.
“I think the real breakthrough is Rivian’s software stack,” Williams said. “It’s quick and innovative. It’s pretty and has features that are executed way better than other Apple CarPlay-less interfaces,” he continued, noting that the Apple Music integration was slick. Williams said that the R1S was “one of the first cars [he’s] driven in the U.S. that felt on par with Chinese stuff.”
Why Rivian Isn’t our Pick for the Breakthrough EV of the Year
But who are these updates for? As Deputy Editor Mack Hogan pointed out, we perhaps shouldn’t overstate the scale of the breakthroughs that Rivian made. After all, the innovation targeted a specific audience: Rivian employees and shareholders, with some small benefits to the consumer.
“A company that makes $80,000 luxury cars has achieved a stunning breakthrough: It is now losing less money on the expensive trucks it sells,” Mack wrote.
He meant this not as a criticism of Rivian; after all, making a car from scratch as a start-up is a Biblical undertaking. But this award isn’t meant to hand car companies a trophy for doing what they need to do to survive in the short term. “It’s about breaking down the barriers preventing consumers to transitioning to EVs,” Hogan said. “The new Rivian R1S doesn’t do that. It saves Rivian’s investors some money, but that savings isn’t passed onto the consumer.”
Moreover, the R1S—while undeniably special—didn’t rise above the tough pack of competitors we assembled. Patrick summed it up:
“As much as I like this thing, besides improving on a formula that’s clearly revealing the future of automotive technology in real-time, I’m not sure exactly where the R1S itself is a ‘breakthrough.’” he wrote. “It shows an extremely promising evolution for this exciting American car startup. But the product itself doesn’t move the needle for me enough.”
