Rivian surges over 20% on delivery guidance, R2 launch in Q2; CEO says 'key inflection' reached

Rivian's big R2's ramp up is not without risks, however.

"The biggest risk in our ramp up, and what we've experienced in the past, and built some skills around managing, is just the complexities of ramping a supply chain, some of the unknowns within the supply chain, and that can be as specific as memory or chip set, or it could be as broad as aluminum supply," Scaringe said.

For the quarter, Rivian reported revenue of $1.286 billion versus $1.26 billion, per Bloomberg consensus estimates, down around 27% from a year ago. Rivian attributed the revenue declines to the loss of regulatory emissions credit sales, the expiration of the federal EV tax credit, and lower average selling prices.

The company posted an adjusted loss per share of $0.59 versus $0.69 expected, with an adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) loss of $465 million versus $568.2 million expected.

Rivian's Universal Hands-Free assisted driving software in action.·Rivian

Last month, Rivian said it produced 10,974 vehicles at its manufacturing facility in Normal, Ill., and delivered 9,745 vehicles in Q4, with full-year tallies of 42,284 vehicles produced and 42,247 vehicles delivered, reaching the midpoint of its guidance range of 41,500 to 43,500 vehicles delivered. However, Rivian’s original 2025 delivery target was between 46,000 and 51,000.

As part of the R2 product initiative, the company plans to amp up its AI and tech development, which investors are keen to hear more about.

Last December, the company said software advancements from its new Autonomy platform and Large Driving Model (LDM), an autonomous model trained similarly to a large language model (LLM), will expand its Universal Hands-Free assisted driving to second-gen R1 vehicles, covering 3.5 million miles in the US.

Later this year, a point-to-point hands-free system will be released, followed by a hands-free and eyes-free self-driving product, with the ultimate goal of achieving "personal Level 4" autonomy, meaning the vehicle will be able to drive fully on its own without requiring the driver's attention.

"We realized we wanted to do a clean-sheet approach to our Autonomy platform, and so we started the process on that, and that involved developing a camera platform, so a perception platform, redesigning the compute platform, and really architecting the whole system around an AI-centric approach, where the vehicles that are on the road are part of a large data flywheel, where we're collecting data and using that data to train the models," Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe told Yahoo Finance at the December event in Palo Alto, Calif.

Part of the company's AI-centric approach is to make its own chip, known as the Rivian Autonomy Processor, which will power Rivian EVs' self-driving capabilities. Previously, the company used Nvidia's (NVDA) Orin chip in its self-driving computer module.