Rivian The first production Rivian R1T electric pickup truck rolled off the assembly line in Normal, Illinois in September of 2021. It was a long road for the company to arrive there, having kicked off as a company over a decade earlier under a different name, in a different state, and with a completely different idea for what kind of vehicles the company would make. Initially based on the campus of father R.P. Scaringe's Mainstream Engineering facility in Rockledge, Florida, CEO R.J. Scaringe (then only 26 years old) initially called his automobile company Mainstream Motors before deciding on Avera. The company's initial goal was to create an affordable, fuel-efficient hybrid sports car called the R1 (above). The Scaringes, both father and son, took out second mortgages on their homes to float the company through the development phase, hiring 15 engineers to get started. A blog post on Avera's website touted the car as having "supercar-like handling, aggressive looks, an affordable price tag, and Prius-beating efficiency." Put all that in a 2+2 body style shaped a little bit like a Honda CR-Z, and it's a car enthusiast's dream. It's mine, at least. 2011 was a big year for Avera. Early in the year the company was presented with a legal objection to the Avera name, as Hyundai believed it confusingly similar to its large Azera sedan, so a name change was in order. The younger Scaringe picked Rivian, a muddled portmanteau of the Indian River, where he spent much of his leisure time as a youth. That summer the newly renamed company hired Peter Stevens, the guy who designed the iconic McLaren F1, to re-shape the R1 for more modern tastes. So far I'm failing to see the downside! Why did the car fail? Rivian Later in 2011, as the Rivian R1 sports car approached production-ready, Scaringe and his cohorts took a step back to examine their go-to-market plan. They didn't like what they saw, and gave the company an Etch A Sketch shake-up to start from scratch. "It became increasingly clear that we weren't answering a question that the world needs an answer to," Scaringe said in an interview with his alma mater, MIT. Wadding the whole car up in a ball and starting over was a chaotic move for a startup, but probably the right one. It took a full decade for Rivian to recover from this decision and actually beat the Big Three and Tesla to an electric pickup truck. With a few years of production under its belt, a smaller new R2 just launched, a new production facility underway, and the upcoming R3 to push through the process, Rivian is busy enough these days without building a low-volume sports coupe in a largely dead two-door market. Honda has attempted to build something similar to the original R1 prototype twice with the CR-Z between 2010 and 2016, and the current Prelude. Neither attempt has resulted in big sales, as the CR-Z never really cracked the market, and the Prelude is moving just around 300 a month in its first year. Even an international behemoth like Honda can't get this concept off the ground, and sales are a far sight from the 42,247 vehicles Rivian delivered in 2025. It seems the car-buying public (in America at least) doesn't want a compact hybrid (or electric) sports coupe. As much as I would love a compact EV coupe with supercar handling and Peter Stevens-designed bodywork, Rivian probably made the right choice to build a truck.
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