is the senior personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal and author of the upcoming book I AM NOT A ROBOT: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything.
Hello, and welcome to Decoder! My guest today is Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe, and I’m very excited to be talking to him on my show today.
And when I say my show… I mean Nilay Patel’s show. This is my final episode filling in for Nilay while he’s out on parental leave. I’m Joanna Stern, the senior personal tech columnist at The Wall Street Journal, author of the upcoming book I AM NOT A ROBOT (out in 2026), and — fun fact — a cofounder of The Verge.
Listen to Decoder, a show hosted by The Verge’s Nilay Patel about big ideas — and other problems. Subscribe here!
Decoder is off next Monday, but when the show returns, Nilay will be back in the host seat. But until then, I get to drive the Decoder car one last time with Rivian’s CEO riding shotgun. This is RJ’s third time on the show, and it felt like the perfect follow-up to my conversation last week with Ford CEO Jim Farley.
I loved the idea of going straight from Ford — a legacy automaker deep in the EV transition — to Rivian, arguably the most competitive EV-only car company in the U.S. behind Tesla. If you listened to the Farley episode, this one flows nicely. RJ and I cover a lot of the same challenges: tariffs, China, EV pricing.
But Rivian doesn’t have the legacy tech and other baggage of a traditional automaker. That clean slate makes things like software easier, but it just means the road ahead has another set of bumps.
And yes, we talked about how my Ford Mustang Mach-E’s lease is up next year — perfect timing, since Rivian’s new R2, expected in early 2026, starts at $45,000.
Of course, I also asked about CarPlay.
Okay: Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe. Here we go.
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