The sand dunes piled high in a downtown Austin parking lot during this year’s South By Southwest festival aren’t going to make anyone think they’ve somehow been transported to the Mojave Desert. But they are serving as a playground for electric vehicle maker Rivian to introduce the public to its lineup of EVs aimed directly at the active lifestyle set.
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As the primary sponsor of this year’s SXSW, Rivian’s branding and activations are hard to miss in Austin this spring.
The brand invited curious visitors to take a ride up and down the steep slopes and feel the performance of the R1T and R1S. In addition to showcasing the capabilities of its stalwart models, visitors can get up-close looks at the forthcoming R2 and R3 models intended to expand into new corners of the automotive market.
The Daily Dot spoke with Jeff Hammoud, Rivian’s chief design officer, about the brand’s latest bow in Austin, connecting with auto buyers of all varieties, and what it’s like being on Tesla’s home turf.
Daily Dot: Rivian’s profile and awareness have really done a hockey stick curve upward in the past handful of years. This event in Austin, is it about introduction or is it about presenting a new phase in Rivian’s profile and personality of the brand?
Jeff Hammoud: It is more about us just having experiential moments. We want to continue to build off of that. With South by Southwest being such a cool event that’s around innovation, technology, and sustainability we thought it really aligned with a lot of our brand values.
We still have a lot of work to do in terms of expanding our brand and our awareness, and there’s different ways of doing it. We don’t want to focus too much on traditional marketing. So doing more experiential marketing is more aligned with our brand. This is one of those great opportunities to be able to do that. Also, it’s been about a year since we built our showroom space in Austin. The amount of traffic we have coming in through here is awesome. And we were also able to get our R2 and R3, which a lot of people haven’t been able to see, having those here as well.
The R2 specifically, which is coming out next year, is the big moment for us to really expand the reach of our brands simply just based on, you know, a much lower price point than R1 is.
DD: So far, what experiences that you’ve presented have had the most impact on people?
JH: We have this really cool dirt track downtown on Congress, which people are loving. It’s constantly busy. We have our California Dune special edition as well. So a lot of people are checking that out. We have one going on right now with Dolby for customers, being able to see the R2 and R3. We also had a panel where we brought in some designers from some different walks of life to talk about color and color theory.
DD: In such a short time, Rivian has managed to create such a strong brand identity. You know those vehicles when you’ve seen them. Talk to me a little bit about the design language and the fundamentals that have helped make the vehicles so distinct.
JH: We really want to look at how the customers use our vehicles and how can we solve different problems in a way that makes the vehicles not only unique, but extremely usable. I like to use the example when we’re designing the truck, which, especially in America, is used as a family car where people drive them every day. You think of things like F150s and things like that, where you’ll have this big truck literally designed to haul things, but then it’s not great at doing simple things like grocery shopping, for example. You’re not going to throw your groceries in the back bed because they’ll just fly around and be all over the place, so usually you end up putting them in the back seat, which is fine if you don’t have anyone else in there. But if you’ve got kids or four other passengers, it doesn’t work really well.
With R1T, we looked at having that front trunk space, being able to utilize that, but then having the gear tunnel as well as another area that we could store [things] around. Then, obviously, there’s how we treated the bed. Even though the bed is shorter, the thing that we looked at is: what is the use case? What are people trying to do, and what is the bed length driven by? One of the key things we want to do—Can it fit a motorcycle in there? The way we designed the gate was that it has this swing gate extends the length of the bed so you can fit a full dirt bike.
On the design side, you know, knowing that we’re designing a truck and SUV. In a lot of trucks and SUVs, have these big aggressive grills. We’re an EV, so we don’t need big grills. But also, they’re very aggressive. And our brand key thing for us is to be inviting and friendly. It’s a type of persona that we want for our vehicles and also all of our touch points. Just being playful a little bit with how we treat the cars.
One of my favorite things is how we came up with the front end. It started off with us looking at different things to inspire us for color and materials and looking at a lot of things that our aspirational users and people we thought would use. That could be anything from hiking gear, surfing gear, kayaking, [and] mountain biking.
And on our color materials table, we had a carabiner. It was there because we really like the anodized finish of the aluminum. Another designer had this idea and said, what if you had sort of this carabiner hook on the edge of the hood that you could extend it and use it as a tie down point for something on the roof, like a kayak, for example. We saw that, and I said, ‘What if we scaled that up and made it the actual headlamp shape? When we did that, it was something that we wanted to make sure we had a very clear and recognizable face, which has become everly, increasingly difficult to do in the automotive industry, but also something that would last, something we could build off of and not need to revisit it all the time.
That pure, simple stadium shape that we have, I like to say is that if you look at certain brands, could you close your eyes and still remember it? If somebody asks you to draw it, can you draw it simply? That’s something I’m proud to say. I think we really achieved that with the front end of the Rivian.
DD: Let’s talk about the challenges and opportunities in EV design, because with EVs come different considerations of aerodynamics, battery replacement, and weight distribution. How have you embraced the challenges to make something distinct and unique?
JH: With the truck and the SUV, even though we didn’t have a big grill, there is still something that a lot of people over time have sort of tended to associate with power and strength. And if you look at the silhouette of the R1T, the R1S, we purposely made the hood horizontal and the front vertical. If you had a front end that just kind of sloughed off, it wouldn’t communicate that sort of bold power and strength. The other thing we did with R1s, which also carried over to R2, is that very simple sort of two-box silhouette. The silhouette of a vehicle is something that you notice, especially when it’s in motion.
Some of the best designs in the world are things that if you put a sheet over top of it, could you still remember what it is? Just defining a silhouette was something we really wanted to do. Also with R1s, that two-box silhouette also provides you a lot of room for storage. It makes it easier to see outside of the vehicle. So there’s also functional benefits with that. But it also comes at a trade-off of aerodynamics. So we had to spend a lot of time tuning every single surface to make sure we meet the aerodynamics. If you look at the R1T, some people would not picture that as being an aerodynamic vehicle. But it is by far the most aerodynamic truck in the market. It’s got a sub 0.3 (drag coefficient), which is insane for a truck. A lot of slick SUVs don’t even have that. We spent a lot of time managing the airflow through those vehicles to make sure that we got efficiency out of them, to make sure because it directly correlates to range.
DD: As a growing company, what questions are you asking around your design philosophy. What concepts are in your head right now around the design approach and the design language?
JH: Really, how can we scale the brand? We started off with the truck and the SUV. The size of those are very U.S.-centric, so we start to think about other markets, including Europe. With R2, we scale down quite a bit. R3 was met with a lot of praise and a lot of excitement. The thing I love about that vehicle specifically is a lot of people were reading online and saying, if they were going to show a second vehicle everyone assumed it was going to be a smaller truck.
But we did this little vehicle that the design brief was to be inspired by the soul of a rally car and taking that sort of juxtaposition our brand has with great off-road capability, great on-road capability and stretching it. Which one goes where? So, R1T really flexes in terms of off-road capability because of the wheel and tire size and air suspension with huge articulation up to 15 inches. And then R3 being the one that we know spends a lot more time in urban environments, we still wanted to have capability to go off road and have fun. Maybe you’re not rock-crawling, but you still have that ability to do that.
When we start to think about design, our brand, and everything we approach, it’s a question of how do we expand the definition of adventure? Adventure doesn’t mean just going off-roading, overlanding, surfing, or kayaking. An adventure could be just taking your family to the beach. It could mean, like when we’re doing early iterations on R1, something as simple as if you’ve got kids and… You ever tried to go to Ikea? That’s an adventure in itself trying to load up the vehicle. We have seen a lot of our users put dogs in the vehicles, so how can we better serve that and focus on cleanability? How can we make the vehicles make sure they still feel elevated and premium, but are really easy to clean and stay looking cleaner longer?
The idea behind it was that if you look at some of these things as like how you treat a home space, oftentimes you buy a rug and you design the furniture around it. That’s literally what we did. We liked this idea of this sort of plaid tartan floor mat and being more like a rug. We designed the interior around that space and added details in. In the seats, in the back of the grab handles and the back of the seats, the little straps and in the doors, just to make that feel like this elevated sort of home space and really treating the vehicle different than what you’d normally see from other automotive brands.
DD: Obviously, there is another notable EV maker based here in Austin that you’re in the backyard of right now. Are you all doing anything to try to punch them in the nose, get their attention or otherwise be a burr in their side?
JH: Not really. Something that we truly believe in is that if all EV companies succeed, it helps further push electrification, which is our goal as a company. It’s about sustainability. And the more people get into the adoption of EVs, it really helps us, and it helps everyone. Just like today with all the different ICE [Internal Combustion Engine] vehicles out there, there’s choice, and that’s what customers want. Choice. We’re really focused on what we think is the right thing to do as a brand and, and trying to stay in front of that.
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