Just a day after new pre-configured dual-motor R1Ts appeared in Rivian’s R1 Shop, Rivian has now added the new “Dual-Motor” and “Performance Dual-Motor” options to its online configurator for new vehicles, letting customers add these options to their custom R1 builds.
Up until now, Rivians have come in a quad-motor configuration, with one electric motor driving each wheel. While this results in excellent traction, it also adds cost and complexity. In addition, Rivian outsources the production of these motors, which adds another layer of cost for the company. And cost is currently the main issue Rivian is dealing with as it scales production.
In order to address this issue, Rivian has been working on producing its own “Enduro” drive units. Its first dual-motor trucks with these Enduro drive units rolled off the line in May. And now production volumes have scaled up enough that Rivian is starting to offer these dual-motor units to customers.
Just yesterday, these trucks started appearing on Rivian’s website in the “vehicle shop” section. This isn’t a public section of the site – it’s an invite-only area where preorder holders can see inventory vehicles that can be picked up without having to wait as long for their custom build.
But now, these configurations have been added to the public configurator so interested customers can look at different configurations, and order holders can lock in the cheaper dual-motor models.
The base model R1T dual-motor now starts at $73,000, and the R1S starts at $78,000 with the smallest “standard” battery pack. These prices are $8,000 down from the base quad-motor price, quite a big chunk of savings, made even larger by the increased availability of tax credits.
Crucially, these numbers are both under the $80,000 MSRP cap needed to qualify for the US EV tax credit from the Inflation Reduction Act, which means qualifying vehicles/buyers can get an additional $3,750 back from the government on either model.
Adding the “Performance” dual-motor setup (which was shown to the public for the first time last week) will upgrade you from 533 hp to 665 hp, bring your 0-60 time from 4.5 to 3.5 seconds, and set you back $5,000. But you can’t add the performance system to a “standard” battery pack, so the base price of performance models is $84,000.
If you want to look at other configurations, you can head over to Rivian’s R1T or R1S configurator to see what options are available for your build.
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