Rivian Is Speeding Up Service Times, Doubling Service Centers

— Park City, Utah

Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe thinks the R2 is the first and only real alternative to the Tesla Model Y. I've now driven Rivian's newest EV, and while Scaringe might be a little biased, I see where he's coming from. It's excellent. But that won't mean anything if living with one — especially getting it serviced — is a huge hassle. 

At the R2 media drive event in Utah last week, Scaringe told me that one of the company's blind spots when it launched the R1T and the R1S was service centers — or lack thereof.

"[The] Pacific Northwest area was one that we were really under capacity … there were times where for a noncritical service action, so not something that was grounding the vehicle, but let's say a rattle, it would take 50 days to get a service appointment," Scaringe said. How a brand takes care of a vehicle after its release is a crucial part of the customer experience, and that's a long time to wait to fix a rattle.

Fast-forward to 2026 and the company has lowered wait times to a day or two in most of its locations. Scaringe says that's still not enough. "Our goal was to have service wait times down to a couple of days across all of our service locations, all regions at the time of [the R2's] launch," he said. 

But the R2 is likely going to sell vastly more units than both the R1T and R1S ever did — it's much cheaper ($45,000-$60,000) and that makes it accessible to a much wider swath of buyers. That means there are going to be a lot more people who need their cars serviced. Rivian has a plan for that, too. 

"We have now over a hundred different service locations that's going to grow to roughly double that through 2027," Scaringe said. "And we're becoming much more efficient running and scaling our service centers as well." Not only will Rivian double the number of places you can get one of its cars serviced over the next 18 months, but it will also run them more efficiently.