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EXCLUSIVE: ‘Rivian wanted what Georgia had’: How the Peach State became Rivian’s $5B match
In the Northern portion of Georgia, about 45 miles East of Atlanta, a 2,000-acre slice of land is covered in beautiful trees, hosting stunning landscapes of the rural sections of the Peach State. For several years, Georgia Economic Development Department Commissioner Pat Wilson has pitched this massive piece of beautiful real estate to various automakers, with nobody willing to bring another massive vehicle manufacturing facility to the heart of the Southeastern United States. That was until Rivian came to town.
“It was the perfect company for the perfect site.”
“We considered making it an OEM site,” Wilson, who has been the Commissioner of the State of Georgia’s Economic Development Department since November 2016, told Teslarati in an exclusive interview. He showed the property to Volvo and Toyota/Mazda, among others, over the past few years, but could not come to terms with them on the land. These large-scale, mass-market automakers were unwilling to join Kia, which has a massive $1.8 billion, 2.2 million square foot factory just miles away from the Georgia-Alabama border, to bring a sizeable manufacturing plant to Georgia. It just was not the right fit.
The right fit would eventually come along. While sifting through requests from various companies who were interested in the site and ultimately coming up with no buyers, Wilson knew the right company would eventually show up to build on the land. It would not end up being a car company with a long-standing history of successful automotive manufacturing. Instead, a company known as Rivian Automotive, which just rolled its first production units off of an assembly line in Normal, Illinois, and completed its first deliveries earlier this year, was requesting information. It would end up being the peach Georgia needed to secure its single most significant investment in state history — $5 billion, to be exact. “It was the perfect company for the perfect site,” Wilson said. “Rivian wanted what Georgia had.”
Rivian will build its next EV manufacturing plant in Georgia
CEO RJ Scaringe eventually drove around the 2,000-acre site in a Rivian R1T, plotting ideas and envisioning his young and scrappy company’s second U.S.-located automotive assembly plant. It is a beautiful landscape, and it needed to be preserved. “RJ was genuinely concerned about keeping the area environmentally stable. ” Wilson said. “You only have to look at their website and read a little bit of it to see that this is a company that cares about the world and sustainability. It was important to him to keep the area in its beautiful state.”
“RJ was genuinely concerned about keeping the area environmentally stable…It was important to him to keep the area in its beautiful state.”
Rivian wanted a property with a beautiful landscape, and Wilson said the company wanted to preserve its beauty and integrate its future automotive facility into the topography, which will hit its expected employment of 7,500 people in 2028. It also did not intrude on locals or nearby residents, who gave their blessing for the Economic Development Department to offer the area to large industries. “We don’t propose sites unless we are invited to do so,” Wilson clarified. Citizens welcomed projects with open arms, which solved half of the issue. The next was selling Rivian on the idea.
Selling Scaringe: Lofty Expectations
Rivian undoubtedly had its reservations, and its elevated expectations and accelerated timeline scared off plenty of other regions that were in the running for “Project Terra.” Like other high-tech electric vehicle startups, Rivian had lofty goals to begin production shortly after construction starts. Other states and areas might not have been as willing or able as Georgia to commit to the quick turnaround Rivian and Scaringe had described. Construction will begin in Georgia in Summer 2022, with production lines ramping up in 2024. Rivian hopes to have one of its non-negotiable terms met by launching production around two years after construction crews break ground. Evidently, Speed to Market was a real need for Rivian, and it needed the right State and the right team to make it happen.
CEO & Founder of Rivian, RJ Scaringe (Photo: Rivian)
Speed and efficiency of the construction process was not the only advantage Rivian saw with the site, however. The 2,000-acre land plot that the company locked up and subsequently announced during the company’s first quarterly earnings call as a publicly-traded entity last week also has a great location that could alleviate potential supply chain concerns. Sitting in the Interstate 20 corridor, the plant will have easy access to the Port of Savannah and the State’s 5,000 miles of railway to deliver manufacturing materials quickly. This solved logistical concerns relatively quickly.
There were other concerns too, however. Georgia has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the United States, which sounds like a good thing. Department of Labor statistics listed Georgia’s unemployment rate at just 2.8% for November 2021, the fourth-lowest rate federally, following Nebraska (1.8%), Utah (2.1%), and Oklahoma (2.5%). Interestingly and nearly counterintuitively, a low unemployment rate could actually bring some large-scale companies with sizeable employment needs problems down the road, and Rivian knew that Georgia had a reputation for keeping its people employed. Governor Brian Kemp kept the State’s workforce relatively operational through the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. “He created structure for the State,” which ultimately kept Georgia’s people at work, eliminating widespread unemployment and furloughs, Wilson said.
Georgia committed to Rivian’s needs and essentially removed its concerns regarding employment by securing plans for a Quick Start workforce training program facility at the future automotive plant. Quick Start is a State-sponsored program created in 1967 that provides customized workforce training for expanding industries. It runs through the Georgia Technical College System and gives workers free, hands-on, in-depth training that contributes to the state’s economy. Wilson said the program essentially lets taxpayer dollars be funded back into local communities through job training. It keeps people at work, it invests back into the citizens of the State, and most importantly, it prepares them for the job they are about to start. It is a highly successful and proven program that resulted in the first car ever built at the Kia Factory in West Point being fully operational. This is an event that does not happen often, as most vehicles that roll off of production lines as prototypes in a facility’s early days are usually a result of training and are not close to production quality.
Quick Start does more than give employees comprehensive, hands-on training. It also gives Georgians the opportunity to stay in their communities and develop them. Wilson was adamant that the Quick Start program has retained indescribable amounts of talent in Georgia, keeping the State’s workforce and some of its most brilliant minds local. “It gives people a chance to help their communities, but it keeps Georgia talent in Georgia. It benefits the taxpayers because we are investing back into our people,” Wilson added.
While Rivian’s project is the most recent to enter Georgia, Wilson certainly hopes it is not the last. “I hope more EV makers come to our State,” he said. “There will be more change in the automotive industry in the next ten years than there was in the last 100. These are jobs for the future, and we are looking for them because it is generational for the State. These plants will create jobs 60 years down the road.”
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SpaceX’s Raptor engine family has steadily increased sea-level thrust while simultaneously reducing mass, turning iterative engineering gains into substantially higher performance for the Super Heavy booster. CEO Elon Musk shed more light on how powerful Raptor 4 will be, and it’s pretty crazy.
Raptor 1 delivered 185 metric tons of thrust at roughly 2,080 kilograms, while Raptor 2 raised that to 230 tons while cutting mass to about 1,630 kilograms. SpaceX data for Raptor 3 lists a target of 280 tons at 1,525 kilograms (with further reductions in associated vehicle hardware), while operational flight ratings have been cited near 250 tons.
This morning, Elon Musk stated that Raptor 4 is expected to reach 300 tons of sea-level thrust at roughly the same mass as Raptor 3. Across these versions, thrust has risen by more than 60 percent from the first engines while engine mass has fallen, producing a sharp improvement in thrust-to-weight ratio. This is a true testament to how great SpaceX engineering has been:
🚀 Elon says Raptor 4 will make 300 tons of thrust at sea level at roughly the same mass as Raptor 3.
How far Raptor has come:
Raptor 1: 185 tf, 2,080 kg
Raptor 2: 230 tf, 1,630 kg
Raptor 3: 250 tf, 1,525 kg
Raptor 4: 300 tf33 on Super Heavy = ~9,900 tf, nearly 3x Saturn V https://t.co/HQDswZhyvL
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 26, 2026
With 33 engines on SuperHeavy, the jump from earlier versions to a 300-ton Raptor 4 would produce roughly 9,900 metric tons of total liftoff thrust, nearly three times the Saturn V’s approximately 3,400 metric tons from its five F-1 engines.
This is not just a larger number on a data sheet, either, as sea-level thrust is the force available the moment the vehicle leaves the pad. This is when it is heaviest and still deep in Earth’s gravity well and dense atmosphere.
Higher levels of sea-level thrust directly improves the initial thrust-to-weight ratio of the full stack. A higher ratio produces faster acceleration off the pad, which shortens the time the rocket has to spend fighting gravity, and gravity losses during the first minute or two of the flight are a major drain on total available delta-v. Every second shaved off of that early climb preserves more propellant energy for reaching orbital velocity or for carrying extra payload.
Because Super Heavy’s engine count is constrained by vehicle diameter and packing density, increasing thrust per engine is the most straightforward way to raise total liftoff performance without redesigning the booster structure or design.
The same-mass target for Raptor 4 is equally important. Holding engine mass roughly constant while raising thrust improves the engine’s own thrust-to-weight ratio and reduces the structural and propellant mass fraction that must be carried solely to support the engines.
Earlier Raptor iterations also simplified or eliminated extensive vehicle-side hardware such as heat shields. These gains compound: more force for less installed mass leaves additional capacity for propellant, payload, or operational margins such as engine-out capability.
For Starship’s architecture, the practical effects are large. Greater liftoff thrust supports heavier vehicles, larger propellant loads, and higher payloads to low Earth orbit, figures SpaceX has targeted in the 100-plus-ton reusable range. That capacity underpins orbital refueling, lunar missions, and eventual Mars cargo and crew flights.
Continued growth in sea-level thrust therefore tightens the gap between theoretical rocket performance and the high flight rates and reusability needed to make large-scale space transport practical.
Tesla has expanded its Tesla Assisted Driving (TAD) suite to its tenth European country, as Latvia joined a growing list of European Union member states authorizing the company’s advanced driver assistance technology.
Tesla Europe announced this morning that the system is now approved in Latvia, with a software rollout to begin soon.
The approval and rollout follow recognition of a provisional European type approval originally granted by the Netherlands’ RDW authority on April 10.
🚨 Latvia has just received approval for Tesla Full Self-Driving (Supervised)
This is the 10th country in the EU to gain approval:
1. Netherlands — 10 April 2026 (original RDW approval)
2. Lithuania — 20 May 2026
3. Estonia — 29 May 2026
4. Denmark — 9 June 2026
5. Belgium — 10 June 2026
6. Slovenia — 7 September 2026
7. Czechia — 21 September 2026
8. Croatia — 29 September 2026
9. Slovakia — 16 October 2026— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 26, 2026
Latvia’s Road Traffic Safety Directorate (CSDD) evaluated the Dutch documentation, coordinated with the other national authorities, and reviewed updates from Tesla. These included tightened limits on speed offsets, automatic resets of any manual speed adjustments after each trip, and stronger driver monitoring.
In Europe, the feature is marketed as Tesla Assisted Driving after a recent rule change that labeled the name “Full Self-Driving” as misleading.
The system remains an SAE Level 2 driver assistance tool, not unsupervised autonomy. It can control speed, steering, braking, lane changes, and intersections while following a navigation route. Drivers need not keep their hands on the wheel at all times, yet they must continuously monitor the road and be prepared to intervene immediately.
The sequence of EU recognitions began with the Netherlands in April and continued through Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Belgium, Slovenia, Czechia, Croatia, and Slovakia. Most have relied on mutual recognition of the single Dutch provisional approval rather than independent national testing.
These national clearances do not yet constitute bloc-wide authorization. An EU-wide decision requires a qualified majority in the Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles: at least 15 of 27 member states representing 65 percent of the EU population. Larger markets, like Germany, France, and Italy, remain under review, and a vote is expected this December.
However, for Latvian Tesla owners with compatible vehicles and software, the imminent rollout expands access to the supervised system while underscoring that attentive human oversight remains essential.
Tesla expanded its Robotaxi geofence in Houston, Texas, today, enlarging the service area and drawing a new rocket-shaped boundary across the city’s northwestern and central parts.
Although CEO Elon Musk said it was just a coincidence, the expansion seems to be an ode to SpaceX and its potential merger with Tesla.
🚨 Tesla has just expanded its Robotaxi geofence in Houston
It looks a lot like a rocket — we all remember the shape in Austin 🤣 https://t.co/cFOPEuiJ4u
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 26, 2026
The official Tesla Robotaxi account announced the change with the lines “Houston, we have liftoff” and “Bigger service area now live,” pairing them with a map overlay.
The prior white geofence, roughly 25 square miles covering Jersey Village, Harvest Bend, and the Willowbrook corridor along U.S. 290 and State Highway 249, now sits inside a larger blue zone that stretches southeast toward Bellair and closer to central Houston.
Houston’s Robotaxi service launched on April 18, 2026, the same day as Dallas, as Tesla’s first unsupervised public expansion beyond Austin. From the start, the vehicles were Model Ys running without anyone in the front seats, booked through the dedicated Tesla Robotaxi app and open to the public inside the geofence.
Trackers measured the initial zone at about 25 square miles; by late September it had not grown substantially. Community and registry data indicated a modest local fleet of unsupervised Model Ys, while dozens to nearly 200 Cybercabs, the purpose-built, steering-wheel-free two-seaters, have been spotted staging and testing in Houston lots, though public Cybercab rides remain limited to Austin for now.
Across the broader Robotaxi program, Tesla began public Robotaxi rides in Austin in June 2025, as a small geofence and vehicles with safety monitors became available for a ride-hailing service. Later on, Tesla removed the monitors and steadily expanded the service area until it covered most of the Austin metro area.
Unsupervised Robotaxi services now run in six cities: Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, and Tampa. Cumulative driverless miles reported by the company have reached several million. The Cybercab entered public service in Austin in early September 2026 and has scaled rapidly there. The company has also said that Dallas is next for Cybercab rides in November, with further cities and 24/7 hours targeted by year-end, plus fleet-operator sales of the vehicle.
Waymo also operates a fully driverless service in Houston, which has been open to the public since August of this year.
The Houston expansion continues Tesla’s pattern of starting with tightly controlled validation zones before widening coverage as real-world data accumulates, while the rocket motif on the map underscores the company’s habit of injecting visual flair into its autonomy rollout.
Riders inside the new boundary can request unsupervised Model Y trips in the Robotaxi app; exact operating hours and further Cybercab availability remain subject to app updates and company statements.
How SpaceX Is raising Raptor’s sea-level thrust while holding engine mass steady
Tesla Assisted Driving expands to tenth EU country
