Volkswagen to Invest $5B in Rivian, Jointly Develop Electric Vehicles
TapTechNews July 29th news, the German auto giant Volkswagen Group announced in June that it will invest 5 billion US dollars (TapTechNews note: currently about 36.339 billion Chinese yuan) in the US electric vehicle startup Rivian Automotive and jointly establish a joint venture.
Details of the cooperation between Volkswagen and Rivian are further revealed. The cooperation mainly focuses on software, domain control and network architecture. Volkswagen will switch to Rivian's technology and software from 2025 to 2030. RJ Scaringe, CEO of Rivian, emphasizes that other fields such as battery or electric drive technology are not within the scope of cooperation.
In the future, Rivian will provide software support for all Volkswagen brands. Brands including Porsche, Audi, Lamborghini, etc. will all use Rivian's standardized basic architecture, which will reduce the number of control units per vehicle from 70-80 to only 7.
In addition, brands such as Porsche, Audi, Lamborghini, Bentley and Volkswagen will all use the same Rivian basic architecture. Scaringe explains: A car can have two or even ten screens, which is easy to change. But everything at the bottom will be standardized.
This means that Volkswagen will be responsible for developing the user interface in the future, while the underlying technology comes from the new joint venture established with Rivian and supports a certain degree of customization, which means a significant transformation of the internal capabilities of the Volkswagen Group.
In addition, as Rivian transfers some of its software teams to the new company. This also means that they will no longer work only for Rivian, but also provide services for Volkswagen, and investors believe that this is unfavorable to Rivian's core business.
According to the official introduction, the new company will be clearly separated from Volkswagen's core business in terms of space and organization, and maintain Rivian's agile culture and rapid decision-making process. Scaringe says that Rivian products may be negatively affected by this organizational change.
The new company is jointly managed by Rivian's CTO-CEO and Volkswagen's operating co-CEO. In case of problems, it is directly decided by Scaringe and Volkswagen CEO Blume. It is introduced that the goal of the new organization is to avoid the spillover of Volkswagen culture and bureaucracy, but the Volkswagen Group has 100 years of experience, and Scaringe and Volkswagen boss Blume took into account the problems of the Volkswagen Group when designing the company. They hope to retain Rivian's agile culture and protect the new company from the impact of Volkswagen bureaucracy. Scaringe says: We hope to retain our speed and non-bureaucratic decision-making process.
Based on this, Rivian's teams such as control unit and basic software development, hardware design, and software development (from operating systems to applications) will be transferred to the new joint venture. In the future, these teams will work for both Rivian and Volkswagen at the same time.
Although the new company aims to avoid Volkswagen's bureaucracy, it still faces challenges in actual operation. Most of Volkswagen's technologies come from various suppliers, and integrating Rivian's architecture requires redesigning the entire IT architecture and vehicles. It is expected that the first model will be launched in early 2030.
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Volkswagen plans to invest 5 billion US dollars in the new force in car-making Rivian and jointly develop the next-generation electric vehicle