This Half-and-Half R1S Shows Just How Seriously Rivian Takes Paint

• What's new: Rivian chief design officer Jeff Hammoud has a love for color, and it has led to some of the best paints in the auto industry today.
• Why it matters: Color is core to Rivian — an admittedly still budding manufacturer — because it enhances public perception of the brand.
• Edmunds says: Even though the amount of Rivians that are painted in brighter shades isn't very high, these design and color combos give both the cars and the brand real curb appeal. 

The split-colored R1S is a neat window into how Rivian selects paint colors and tests them. Scaringe said the company painted a functioning car so it could move it around and see how nearly production-ready paints might look out in the world.

The R2 launched with a purple called Borealis, inspired by a photo an owner sent in of an R1S under the northern lights. But getting a color like Borealis made isn’t just “hey, cool, let’s make this.” There’s a science to it all, plus lots of testing. A few years ago, Rivian got an in-house painter to test colors before cars went to production at the company's Normal, Illinois, facility. Inspiration, Hammoud said, “could come from anything.”

A soon-to-be-revealed Rivian hue will be based on something that inspired Hammoud while he was in Yellowstone National Park. Another, Rivian’s iconic Launch Green, came from a corrosion-resistant coating applied to the car’s bodies before they’re assembled. After inspiration strikes, teams will work on digital modeling, and also use virtual reality. Hammoud himself is very hands-on with color — it’s a favorite for the former Chrysler designer.

Once a color leaves the digital realm, real objects start getting painted. The process is long and intensive, so the team starts small — sometimes Rivian will do up to 100 different iterations of one color to find the hue that's just right. Any one of them could end up on a “Z Curve,” an industry tool that helps show paint in all sorts of different forms thanks to its highlights, shadows and natural contours.

After that, an R1 fender is up next. “We have ones we’ve painted over a bunch of times,” Hammoud said. If everyone is happy with the color, it goes onto RJ’s favorite school-run car, the split-colored R1S. 

“The development timeline of a color is, you know, roughly around two, three years,” Hammoud said. Borealis — the purple color — went through this process, and Hammoud and Scaringe loved it. However, making any color is about toeing a fine line. “We don’t want to make a color [Rivian’s suppliers] can’t make,” Hammoud confessed. If something is too complicated, a supplier may not be able to reproduce it at scale.

These suppliers have to be on it: They’re the ones who mix the paint that goes onto customers' cars, while also matching what Rivian is painting on some parts of the same vehicle. Paints have to be UV-tested in the Arizona desert, dragged out into different climates from Michigan to California to be tested in different lighting conditions and more.

Borealis made it all the way through this process and was a limited-run option for R1 models before making it onto the R2. These small-batch production runs help Rivian keep making interesting colors, even though the “take rate is not that high on them,” Hammoud told me.

Very few buyers want a purple car. But those who do? They won’t stop talking about it. Compass Yellow, a launch color for the R1T and R1S, made up less than 2% of orders, but when polled, it’s often one of the top things owners rave about. That’s great for Rivian, a small automaker always looking to get more word out. 

Despite that, even at Rivian, most buyers end up with the usual monotones of black, silver and white. In one small way, though, Rivian is bucking that trend. Forest Green makes up more than 10% of orders, which, for an OEM, is “not very common.” Hammoud, rightfully, seems proud that Rivian’s buyers like a little pop of color.