Rivian CEO Claims The R1T Gets Cross-Shopped With Porsche 911s And Boats
As car enthusiasts who arguably know too much about cars for our own good, we tend to think about car buying a little differently than regular people. If we decide we want a rear-wheel-drive sports car with a manual transmission, good luck convincing us to consider anything else. So it makes sense that a three-row electric crossover would only be cross-shopped with other three-row EVs. Not everyone operates that way, though, so during a roundtable at the latest Rivian media event, I asked CEO RJ Scaringe what the company's data shows the R1 lineup gets cross-shopped with aside from the obvious Ford F-150 Lightnings and Kia EV9s.
If you believe Scaringe, when it comes to the R1T pickup truck the answer is Porsche 911s and boats, which even he agrees isn't necessarily logical:
There's more of that than you would think. So the R1T is a little different than the R1S. The R1T? Because it's less of a family hauler, it often is cross-shopped as like a sports car kind of thing. So it's like, do I get a Porsche 911 or an R1T, which doesn't make any sense in a normal sort of way of thinking about cross shopping. But because it's this purchase of something that's really fun and exciting and enables you to do certain things with it, you see it show up getting compared to very different things. Boats, you get cross-shopped with boats sometimes.
Then again, it isn't like anyone actually needs a $120,000 electric truck with more than 1,000 horsepower, so I guess, in a way, it actually does make sense to cross-shop it with other fun stuff you don't actually need.
The R1S, on the other hand, is apparently cross-shopped with other, more logical options more often, at least at the luxury pricepoint:
But I think interestingly, on the R1S, you know, the R1S is the best-selling electric SUV over $70,000 in the United States. Over $70,000, it's by far the market share [leader] at about 35% market share? And then in California, specifically, it's the best-selling SUV, electric or not-electric, over $70,000. It just outsells everything so significantly at the premium price point. So, by virtue of that, it ends up being crushed up with everything. So that you know, from $150,000 Land Rovers to $70,000 Chevy Tahoes to $100,000 Porsche Cayennes. And it's just like everything in between.
And because a lot of the things you would cross-shop or think about buying are in a similar price point to the R1S, it naturally has more of that obvious comparison between things that get crosshopped. Whereas the R1T, it's such a high-performance pickup that there's not a lot of pickups that are at that price point, so it just ends up drawing on things that are outside the pickup space.
I guess if you have plenty of extra money sitting around, you tend to look more at what you could get for your money instead of sticking to a specific powertrain and seating configuration. Must be nice.
