By Abhirup Roy
Palo Alto, California (Reuters) – A joint venture between American electric collection and the SUV manufacturer Rivian and Volkswagen is in talks with other car manufacturers on the supply of their software and their electrical architecture, said a senior manager on Thursday from Rivian.
The German car manufacturer agreed in November to invest $ 5.8 billion in the joint venture, which will integrate advanced electric infrastructure and Rivian software technology for future electric vehicles of the two companies.
While joint venture will give higher volumes to Rivian to negotiate better supplier offers and reduce costs, considered essential in the middle of a slowdown in the demand for electric vehicles, Volkswagen and potentially other car manufacturers will have a Quick and easy access to technology and software they have had trouble building for years.
“I would say that many other OEMs hit our door,” said Rivian software director Wassym Benaid, in an interview, referring to the manufacturers of original equipment, a sentence used to describe the vehicle manufacturers .
Benaid, who is also a co-deepecree’s co-prone, refused to provide names of the interested car manufacturers and details on the stage of the talks.
Rivian architecture requires fewer electronic control units and significantly less wiring, reduction in vehicle weight and manufacturing simplification. Technology is at the heart of car construction with software that could be updated in the air like a smartphone – what the industry calls “software defined vehicles”, a field where the established car manufacturers are still behind.
“There is a request,” said Benaid, adding that priority until 2027 was to deploy R2, the smaller and cheaper SUV in Rivian and integrate technology into other brands in Volkswagen. “Obviously, other OEMs talk to us and we try to understand how to support this in the future.”
“Any other OEM that wants to take a jump from a technological point of view, the joint venture becomes today one of the key partners with which they can make this collaboration,” he said.
The company is likely to become the platform of choice in the Western world apart from Tesla, Genuity Canaccord analysts said in a note. The joint venture also helps to alleviate “a significant part of the concern for capital” for Rivian, analysts said.
(Report by Abhirup Roy to Palo Alto, California, and Arsheeya Bajwa in Bengaluru; edition by Peter Henderson and Jamie Freed)
