Connect with us

Lifestyle

Rivian is a modern dose of Chicken Soup for the Soul

(Credit: Arash Malek/YouTube)

Published

on

Toothy smiles, boisterous laughter, and eyes filled with joy cover the nooks and crannies of Rivian’s story, making it more than just another EV startup. A glance through its website, and you won’t just find vehicles. You’ll see people. People having fun, exploring, basking in the sun, and, most of all, enjoying the outdoors.

When Rivian invited Teslarati to its First Mile tour event in the Bay area, we were excited to get a small taste of the outdoor adventures the company promises with the R1T. And we wanted to share the experience with our friend Arash Malek. After all, Rivian is also about community. 

“Meaningful change happens when people come together. That’s how we’ve built Rivian, and that’s how we want to build our community.” – RJ Scaringe

At the event, Tanya greeted Arash as if she was greeting a friend. He was met with welcoming smiles and a promising day with the R1T ready to hit the beaten dirt path. 

Rivian’s Roots

Arash was pleasantly surprised by Rivian’s R1T pickup truck, pointing out its impressive handling and traction. “The grip on the dirt feels like grip on pavement,” Arash told Teslarati.

Advertisement

The R1T ripped through muddy paths amid a backdrop that looked straight out of The Lord of the Rings‘ Hobbit village. Out in the open greenery, it was just Arash, driving the R1T with a few cool people who were egging him on to tear through the dirt paths. 

And that is what Rivian wants to bring to customers. The promise of adventure with friends, family, and a tiny bit of calculated danger.

Rivian Today

Rivian’s IPO happened recently, making history as the sixth-largest listing ever on a US exchange. RIVN is also the biggest listing of 2021, and a few analysts and investors are stumped by it.

Advertisement

The company’s historic IPO could be attributed to what Rivian actually provides as an automaker. When it comes to the R1T, Rivian isn’t simply selling the first all-electric pickup truck on the market. It’s giving people an opportunity. 

Rivian Tomorrow

The Rivian R1T starts at $67,500 before tax credits. At that price, the R1T appears to compete with the likes of the Ford F-150 Raptor and Ram 1500 TRX. However, Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe stated before that he wants the R1 vehicles to have a “Patagonia-like feel of enabling adventure,” referring to the iconic premium sustainable clothing line.  

The Patagonia brand has been renowned for decades among outdoor explorers. Given its history, it’s easy to see why Rivian wants its sustainable R1 vehicles to reach Patagonia’s heights.

Global Expedition Vehicles, which specializes in overlanding vehicles for adventurers-at-heart, launched a Patagonia-inspired expedition vehicle that starts at $700,000. It is fully equipped for comfort in the outdoors, with a kitchen, dining area, bathroom, and bedroom. It even has a tough zombie-apocalypse-level exterior to boot. 

Advertisement

A $700,000 overlanding vehicle may be too much for some. So, other outdoor and overlanding enthusiasts typically buy pickup trucks and equip them with overlanding gear. An overlanding buildout can range from a few thousand dollars up to $100,000 or more. Labor is usually the most expensive part of outfitting an overlanding vehicle.

The R1T treads the line between all-out deluxe setups like the $700,000 Patagonia-inspired expedition vehicle and the simpler overlanding pickup truck setup. Rivian’s R1T gives owners a premium, comfortable outdoor experience. But in a more natural way, similar to outdoor experiences in a pickup truck outfitted with overlanding gear. The R1T also happens to be electric, so it doesn’t harm the environment it explores either. 

“It’s like glamping but for off-roading. Glamroading,” Arash commented after his R1T drive.

At its price point, the R1T makes that premium overlanding experience accessible, attainable to more families, friends, and communities. And after a year indoors because of the pandemic, who doesn’t want to embrace the outdoors? 

With the R1T and R1S, Rivian is coaxing more people to go out on the open road and explore the natural world while maintaining the simple comforts we’ve built as a society. Rivian knew it years ago. People need to experience nature, its majesty, its serenity, and its unity.

Advertisement

Rivian encourages people to use their R1 vehicles out in nature and bond with others. After all, isn’t human connection the best Chicken Soup for the Soul? Rivian is giving people the opportunity to create their own adventures and share stories around a camp fire–or in Rivian’s case, the Camp Kitchen.

The Teslarati team would appreciate hearing from you. If you have any tips, reach out to me at maria@teslarati.com or via Twitter @Writer_01001101.

Maria--aka "M"-- is an experienced writer and book editor. She's written about several topics including health, tech, and politics. As a book editor, she's worked with authors who write Sci-Fi, Romance, and Dark Fantasy. M loves hearing from TESLARATI readers. If you have any tips or article ideas, contact her at maria@teslarati.com or via X, @Writer_01001101.

Advertisement
Comments

Investor's Corner

Tesla unfolded its first European “folding Supercharger”

Tesla’s folding Supercharger just arrived in Europe and it changes how fast charging expands.

Published

on

By

Tesla’s Folding Unit Supercharger has officially landed in Europe, with the company teasing a new installation in its effort for a broader rollout targeting major motorway rest stops across the European continent in Q3 2026. The arrival marks a notable shift in how Tesla is thinking about network expansion, moving from hardware performance alone to engineering the logistics chain itself.

While Tesla did not reveal the exact location for the new folding Supercharger in Europe, the photo shared on X heavily suggests that this maybe somewhere in Norway. Historically, whenever Tesla rolls out an entirely new infrastructure architecture in Europe, whether it was the original Supercharger stalls years ago or these brand-new modular V4 “Folding Units”, Norway is almost always the designated launch pad because of its unmatched EV adoption rate and supportive infrastructure

The Folding Unit, introduced in March 2026, is a factory pre-assembled V4 charging station built on an industrial hinge system mounted to a heavy-duty concrete base. The entire assembly arrives on site ready to unfold and connect. Tesla confirmed the units feature telescopic light poles specifically designed for easy transportation and fast on-site deployment, a detail that signals how carefully the logistics chain has been engineered alongside the hardware itself. The design allows 33% more stalls per delivery truck, cuts installation time roughly in half, and reduces overall deployment costs by more than 20% compared to traditional installations.

Tesla’s newest “Folding V4 Superchargers” are key to its most aggressive expansion yet

Tesla also noted telescopic light poles which provide benefits over traditional Supercharger installations that require fixed-height poles that are awkward to ship, slow to position on site, and often require separate crews and equipment to erect before charging hardware can even be staged. By engineering poles that compress for transit and extend on arrival, Tesla has removed one of the quieter bottlenecks in the physical deployment process. Every hour saved on a light pole installation is an hour redirected toward getting stalls energized. At scale, across dozens of new sites per quarter, those hours add up to a meaningful acceleration in how quickly a location goes from approved permit to serving its first customer.

Each Folding Unit pairs a single V4 power cabinet with eight charging posts. The V4 cabinet delivers up to 500 kW per stall for passenger vehicles and up to 1.2 MW for the Tesla Semi, supporting twice the stalls per cabinet at three times the power density of its predecessor. Longer cables make every new station immediately usable by non-Tesla vehicles, a priority as Tesla continues opening its network to Ford, GM, Rivian, Hyundai, Stellantis, and others.

As Teslarati reported when the Folding Unit was first unveiled, Tesla’s Gigafactory New York produced its final V3 Supercharger cabinet in March 2026 after more than seven years and 15,000 units, completing a full pivot to V4 production. The European arrival of the folding design is the next chapter in that transition.

Faster and cheaper deployment means Tesla can justify building in markets and corridors that were previously too expensive to serve, filling the coverage gaps that have slowed EV adoption outside major urban centers.

Continue Reading

Elon Musk

SpaceXAI just launched into your kitchen with their new app

SpaceXAI just powered its first consumer app and it predicts what you want to buy.

Published

on

By

SpaceXAI just made its first move into consumer AI, and it involves your grocery cart. On June 3, 2026, Gopuff and SpaceXAI announced the launch of Go, a Grok-powered shopping assistant built directly into the Gopuff app that predicts what you need before you even start searching for it.

Gopuff is an instant delivery platform that operates more than 400 micro-fulfillment centers across the U.S., delivering everyday essentials, snacks, drinks, and household items in as little as 15 minutes. It is not a restaurant delivery app or a marketplace. It owns its inventory, controls its warehouses, and handles its own logistics, which means it has built one of the most detailed consumer behavior datasets in retail over its 13-year history.

Go combines SpaceXAI’s advanced reasoning, voice, and image generation models with Gopuff’s dataset of hundreds of millions of orders and real-time cultural signals from X to prepare a suggested cart the moment a customer opens the app. It learns each shopper’s habits and automatically builds a personalized cart based on time of day, location, order history, and real-time indicators. Returning customers can check out with a single tap.


Rather than searching for specific items, users can describe a situation like a game-day party or the desire for a healthy breakfast and Go will assemble a cart automatically. It can also predict when shoppers are running low on items like coffee or paper towels and have them packed and delivered in under 15 minutes. Grok voice integration lets users talk to the app in plain conversational language and check out completely hands-free.

Gopuff co-founder and co-CEO Yakir Gola said: “Today, we believe the greatest friction left in commerce is not delivery or instantaneous access to the essentials customers need. It’s the moment before: the thinking, the deciding, the remembering. We’re combining Gopuff’s demand intelligence with xAI’s frontier reasoning to create an everyday shopping experience that feels like a true extension of you.”

Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO

The timing carries context beyond the product launch. SpaceXAI was formed after SpaceX completed an all-stock merger with Elon Musk’s xAI earlier this year, folding one of the most advanced AI labs in the world into the same corporate structure as the company preparing what could be the largest IPO in history. SpaceXAI is dipping into consumer-focused AI just as it prepares for its public debut, and while Musk has openly discussed building an everything app, this launch uses Grok to power another company’s product rather than launching a standalone consumer platform. Every consumer-facing deployment of Grok ahead of the IPO roadshow adds tangible evidence that SpaceXAI is not just an infrastructure play but a direct competitor in the AI application layer where OpenAI and Google are already fighting for dominance.

Continue Reading

Lifestyle

Tesla saves its passengers again – This time after a 300-foot cliff fall in Malibu

A Tesla Model 3 fell 300 feet off a Malibu cliff and both passengers survived.

Published

on

By

A Tesla Model 3 plunged roughly 300 feet off a cliff on Mulholland Highway in Malibu on Friday morning, May 29, 2026, and both occupants survived. The crash was reported at approximately 7:30 a.m. near the 2500 block of Mulholland Highway, triggering a multi-agency rescue operation involving Malibu Search and Rescue, the Los Angeles County Fire Department, the California Highway Patrol, and McCormick Ambulance.

When first responders arrived, the male driver was outside the vehicle shouting for help while the female passenger remained pinned inside the Tesla. Rescue crews rappelled down the cliffside on ropes to reach the wreckage. A flight medic was lowered by helicopter to begin treating both victims, and the driver was hoisted up to the roadway before crews used the Jaws of Life to free the trapped passenger. Both were airlifted to a local trauma center with moderate injuries despite a remarkable result for a fall that steep.

The outcome is not surprising, considering Model 3 earned an overall 5-star rating from NHTSA in every category and sub-category, and recorded the lowest probability of injury of any car ever evaluated by the U.S. New Car Assessment Program. The absence of a traditional engine in the front of the vehicle creates a longer crumple zone that absorbs impact energy before it reaches occupants, and the battery pack running along the floor gives the car an unusually low center of gravity that reinforces structural rigidity.

This is not the first time a Tesla has kept passengers alive after going off a cliff. A Tesla Model Y carrying a family of four survived a plunge off a cliff at Devil’s Slide near San Francisco in January 2023, with two adults and two children walking away from a 250-foot fall. That incident drew widespread attention to how the structural integrity of Tesla’s electric platform performs in extreme crash scenarios that most vehicles would not survive.

Tesla Model Y driver who drove off cliff with family attempts to avoid criminal conviction

Continue Reading