Rivian’s CEO says the company has torn down a hugely popular Chinese electric car. That’s what he thinks.
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Although Rivian is not in the Chinese market, it still pays attention to foreign electric vehicles.
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CEO RJ Scaringe told BI that the company disassembled a Xiaomi SU7 to see what’s going on inside.
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The CEO said SU7 “did a great job” but had nothing new to learn from it.
Rivian is not involved in China’s fiercely competitive EV market, where the likes of BYD and Xiaomi dominate.
That doesn’t mean the California-based electric car maker isn’t keeping a close eye on the world overseas.
Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe told Business Insider that the company disassembled the Xiaomi SU7, a popular electric sedan in China, as part of an industry-standard practice of benchmarking other vehicles on the market.
The SU7 is a success story for the Chinese smartphone giant. It launched in early 2024 with a starting price of $30,000 and helped Xiaomi beat annual delivery expectations by November of the same year.
The car was praised by Ford CEO Jim Farley. Business Insider previously wrote that the SU7 performs well. After Rivian took a look, Scaringe agreed.
“I would say this is a well-executed, highly vertically integrated technology platform,” Scarlinger said, referring to how the company develops the car’s technology stack internally. “here you go.”
The CEO said that if he lived in China, the SU7 would be one of the cars he would consider buying — since, of course, Rivian isn’t there.
However, Scaringe said the SU7 is affordable and has been a huge success domestically, and there is no secret sauce inside the car.
“The cost — we understand how they got there,” Scarinch said. “We learned nothing from the teardown,” he added.
The CEO pointed to macroeconomic factors such as low labor costs and Chinese government support for electric vehicles.
“The cost of capital is zero or negative, which means they can get paid for building factories,” Scaringe said of Chinese companies. “It’s a very different opportunity.”
Scaringe added that while the U.S. has provided loans, the idea of supporting production plants through government grants “doesn’t exist in the U.S.”
The Energy Department announced a $6.6 billion loan in January to support Rivian’s new manufacturing facility in Georgia.
Travis Fisher, director of energy and environmental policy research at the Cato Institute, previously told Business Insider that loose regulatory barriers, lower labor costs and more government subsidies have allowed China to produce more affordable electric vehicles.
