Rivian Hopes Its Dual Motor Setup Will Speed Up Production

Rivian plans to put its foot on the gas, with some serious manufacturing shifts.

The Rivian R1S and R1T electric SUV and pickup truck certainly are critical darlings, but the brand has struggled with getting the trucks out of the factory and into customers’ driveways. Part of that has to do with the current motor setup of the trucks.

Right now, all Rivian products are powered by a quad-motor setup, with motors sourced from Bosch. The brand says supply chain issues have held the brand back, part of that stemming from the motor sourcing from Bosch. To mitigate this, Rivian wants to migrate to its own self-developed motor system. This new system will be a dual motor setup, moving from the individual wheel motors to one motor per axle. Rivian says this motor setup is cheaper, and still very competitive with the original quad motor setup currently in the cars. This system is called “Enduro.” The Enduro motor is already being used in Amazon delivery vans.

Most pertinently, is that Rivian is converting most of its quad-motor orders, to the dual-motor setup. When paired with the Max Pack battery option, the trucks should be able to hit 400 miles of range. By comparison, the older quad motor setup is an $8,000 upgrade, and can only be paired with the large pack, for a mere 328 miles of range. That’s down about 25 miles from the dual motor setup with the same battery.

Rivian missed its production target of 25,000 units (down from 50,000) for 2022. Will this new motor setup allow the brand to meet goals this time? We won’t know until it happens. The dual motor R1T and R1S are currently available for preorder.

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