The most interesting part of the Rivian saga — for me — is the engineering and manufacturing of the R1T pickup, R1S SUV and Amazon delivery van.
Launching three new-from-the-wheels-up vehicles in close succession is a major challenge for an established automaker. It's far beyond difficult for a startup whose vehicles use proprietary technology and in-house-developed electronics, and when the tens of millions of lines of code for all the computers were written in-house, too.
This is the automotive equivalent of a moonshot. Yet Rivian, born in Florida within earshot of where Apollo rockets launched for the moon, just may pull it off.