Rivian’s R1T Beats Tesla, Ford, and GMC to Market

• The Rivian R1T is the first fully electric pickup truck in customer hands.

• With four electric motors driving all four wheels, total system power is a whopping 835 hp and 908 lb-ft of torque, enough to tow 11,000 pounds.

• Prices start at $68,575, or $74,075 for the Launch Edition, which is the one being delivered to real buyers right now.

As the wheeled world slowly transitions from 120 years of gasoline, the electric pickup truck revolution seems to be led by Rivian. Or is it?

Rivian claims that, unlike rivals Tesla, GMC and Ford, it is actually delivering electric trucks to real people. And while early reports said that “people” seemed to mean Rivian employees, who were doing what amounted to beta testing for the company, Rivian insists otherwise. It says actual human buyers outside the company have received R1Ts and many others will get theirs in the coming months.

“Yes, there are non-employees driving their trucks today,” said a Rivian spokesperson when we asked. “More R1T deliveries to come the rest of this year and as we continue to ramp into next.”

Deliveries of the R1S SUV, meanwhile, will begin “by the end of the year,” said another company rep.

Little-known fact: when Rivian was founded in 2009, the first vehicle was going to be a sporty coupe that looked a little like a larger version of the Hyundai Veloster. That product was going to be in customer garages by 2013. Deadlines come and go in the electric vehicle world, and no one seems to worry too much about it except auto writers. Try starting a car company yourself and see how easy it is.

Meanwhile, GMC claims it’ll have Hummer EVs in customer driveways by “fall 2021.” That gives them about two weeks. Ford’s promising F-150 Lightning electric pickup is due for deliveries in “spring 2022,” which would give them until June 21. And the Tesla Cybertruck? Who knows? I’ll just call them up and… wait, the number’s been disconnected! Regardless, Rivian is (more or less) leading the electric pickup truck revolution. So congrats to them.

As you may have read recently, there’s a lot going on at Rivian. It just completed an IPO from which it raised $12 billion. That’s after half a billion invested in Rivian by Ford two years ago, three-quarters of a billion from Amazon, $350 million from a company called Cox Automotive, and then billions and billions more from various investment rounds thereafter. The company’s market cap hit $179 billion earlier this year before settling in at around $110 billion as of this writing. And it is being sued by its former marketing director, whom it recently fired after, according to her, she was sidelined and ignored.

Somewhere in and among all that news there are actual vehicles being built, and we got a chance to drive one late last week.

Rivian had a number of R1T electric pickups parked on the tarmac of a private airport in the SoCal foothills, with demos set up of everything from charging the truck’s 135-kWh battery to cooking popcorn on the $5000 optional slide-out “Camp Kitchen.” Suffice to say the R1T is a feature-laden thing of wonder, with gizmos galore everywhere you look at it.