News
Rivian R1S: 7-seat, 410-mile SUV is taking on Land Rover in the luxury off-road game
Rivian CEO and founder RJ Scaringe is adopting a bold and strategic play to enter the auto industry. With the recently unveiled R1T electric pickup truck, Rivian is attempting to breach a market dominated by America’s best-selling vehicles like the Ford F-150. With the R1S SUV, which is set to be unveiled today at the 2018 LA Auto Show, the company is taking on pedigreed carmakers such as Land Rover in the luxury SUV segment.
The Rivian R1S, just like its pickup truck sibling, could be described as a luxury adventure vehicle. The SUV is fitted with the same four 147 kW electric motors that power the R1T, as well as the same 2170 battery cells. Similar to the startup’s pickup truck, the R1S is available in three battery configurations — a 105 kWh entry-level variant, a 135 kWh mid-level version, and a 180 kWh top-tier variant. Compared to the R1T, though, the R1S has slightly more range, with the 105 kWh trim having an estimated range of 240+ miles per charge, the 135 kWh version having 310+ miles of range, and the 180 kWh variant having 410+ miles of range in one charge.
Performance between the R1T and the R1S is identical, with 135 kWh SUV capable of traveling from 0-60 mph in 3 seconds flat. Keeping the company’s character, the R1S could go through up to 1 meter of water. That said, the two vehicles also have their differences.
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- The Rivian R1S. [Credit: Rivian]
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- The interior of the Rivian R1S. [Credit: Rivian]
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- The Rivian R1S dashboard. [Credit: Rivian]
The Rivian R1S SUV. [Credit: Rivian]
The R1S, for one, has a slightly shorter wheelbase at 3,075 mm, which is less than the R1T’s 3,450 mm. Due to the absence of a bed, the R1S’s 5,040 mm overall length is also shorter than the R1T’s 5,475 mm length. Being a three-row SUV capable of seating seven, the R1S does not have as much storage as the R1T as well, with flourishes such as the pickup truck’s “gear tunnel” being absent on the vehicle. That said, the R1S is still capable of hauling a generous amount of cargo, thanks to its 330-liter frunk and its foldable third-row seats.
We asked the company why it opted to release an SUV together with its flagship pickup truck, considering that the SUV market is equally as dominated by big-name, veteran carmakers. Rivian noted that the risk for the R1S is actually quite low, considering that it shares 93% of the R1T pickup truck’s components. The company further pointed out that the SUV market has already been established, and the success of vehicles like the Tesla Model X, which is built on the Model S platform, has proven that cross-pollination is a viable strategy.
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- The Rivian R1T and R1S take center stage at the 2018 LA Autoshow
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- The Rivian RT1 and the R1S compared. [Credit: Rivian]
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Teslarati‘s Christian Prenzler was able to get an early preview of the Rivian R1S prior to its unveiling, and he notes that the vehicle’s overall form and size seem to be similar to the Chevrolet Tahoe and the GMC Yukon. He also stated that the SUV has a liftgate at the rear, which gives passengers a place to sit on. The R1S’ third-row seats, which are usually cramped in conventional SUVs, are also adjustable, allowing passengers to gain more legroom in exchange for less luggage space.
Rivian CEO and founder RJ Scaringe stated that he wants the company’s vehicles to focus on the adventure niche. In this light, the R1S SUV and the R1T electric pickup truck complement each other well, allowing the company to enter two hyper-competitive segments with vehicles that have a serious punch.
“They may have different form factors, they may be different sizes, but every single one of [our products] has to have this Patagonia-like feel of enabling adventure. We want to keep that very sharp. We want to focus only on the adventure space, so customers understand what we stand for,” he said.
Reservations for the R1S SUV are now open. Interested customers can place a refundable $1,000 deposit for the vehicle here. Production is expected to begin in 2021.
With assistance from Christian Prenzler.
Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.
The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.
Introducing Liner Truck 3 — our latest fully electric tunnel vehicle.
– Tesla Model 3 battery and drive units
– Transports 22,000+ lb of concrete segments to the boring machine
– 28 miles of range
– 12 mph max operating speed
– Remotely piloted from Global OCC in Texas, with… pic.twitter.com/XB7FgSXnpy— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) August 7, 2026
The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.
The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.
The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.
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It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.
SpaceX stock did the opposite of what most of Wall Street expected this week, when the day designed to be its most dangerous turned into a rally, and the rally kept going.
Thursday marked the first major lockup expiration since SpaceX’s June IPO, making roughly 911.5 million insider held shares eligible to trade for the first time, more than doubling the company’s public float. Analysts and short sellers had spent weeks bracing for a flood of selling, especially after the stock fell 13 percent following its first earnings report as a public company on Tuesday. Instead, shares rose 6.1 percent Thursday to close at $114.92, and by Friday they were trading near $129, up more than another 12 percent on the day.
SpaceX shorts get warned by Musk ally, echoing Tesla’s early struggles
The setup made the outcome notable. Short interest had climbed to roughly 34 percent of the float heading into earnings, among the highest of any large cap stock, with about 95 percent of available shares to borrow already on loan. CEO Elon Musk warned short sellers twice in the weeks before the lockup, writing on X that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” then following up on the morning of earnings with “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”
When the newly unlocked shares hit the market and the selloff never showed up, some of that short position appears to have started unwinding. TipRanks reported that options activity shifted toward bullish strategies like put selling and risk reversals following the rally, with roughly $600 million in options premium trading Thursday alone. Retail buyers also stepped in during the earnings dip, according to Vanda Research.
The fundamentals behind the stock have not changed much in a week. SpaceX’s revenue nearly doubled year over year to $7.8 billion, with Starlink subscribers doubling to 12 million and the company’s AI segment growing 247 percent. What spooked investors on Tuesday was the spending side. Capital expenditures jumped to more than $18 billion for the quarter, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier, with AI investment alone rising from $749 million to $15.8 billion. Wall Street remains split on whether that spending is building infrastructure SpaceX needs or outrunning what the business can currently support, a debate Teslarati has tracked since shares first came under pressure.
None of that resolves the bigger question hanging over the stock. Thursday’s release was only the first of nine staggered lockup tranches, with roughly $800 billion worth of additional shares scheduled to become eligible through October, and Musk’s own stake stays locked until next June. If this week is any indication, the market is treating that supply as something it can absorb rather than something to fear, at least for now.
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News
The Boring Company’s newest Vegas Station has a permit quietly waiting behind it
Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station, joining an exclusive two resort transit club.
Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station Thursday, giving The Boring Company’s underground transit system its northernmost stop yet on the Strip. The station sits at Sahara’s Paradise Road entrance, on the southeast corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara Avenue, and connects riders to the Las Vegas Convention Center, other Strip resorts on the network and, eventually, Harry Reid International Airport.
The addition makes Sahara the second resort, after Fontainebleau opened its own station in January, to get a stop built at street level rather than tucked into the property itself. Sahara now joins Westgate as the only two Strip resorts offering both a Vegas Loop station and a stop on the Las Vegas Monorail, giving guests two separate ways to get around without leaving the property.
The Boring Company just doubled its tunneling power in Nashville
The bigger news buried in Thursday’s announcement is what comes next. Boring Company has already secured its first permit to tunnel north of Sahara Avenue, extending the network beyond where it currently ends, even though permits to push the Loop toward downtown Las Vegas still haven’t been granted. Crews are also working on a two mile dual tunnel line running from Westgate to a planned station at 4744 Paradise Road, just north of Tropicana Avenue, that Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority CEO Steve Hill has said the company hopes to open in time for November’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.
Ridership has grown alongside the buildout. The Loop moved roughly 82,000 passengers during CONEXPO in early March, a total the company highlighted on its own X account at the time, and the system has now carried more than 4 million passengers through 11 open stations since it began running in 2021. The airport connector tunnels, meant to give the Loop a direct link to Harry Reid, have slipped past their original first quarter target and remain under construction, with Boring Company director Mike Baier saying that a full opening is still a few months out.
For Sahara, the calculation is straightforward. Convention traffic drives a large share of Loop ridership, and a station at the property’s front door gives conventiongoers one more reason to book rooms on the Strip’s north end instead of closer to the convention center itself.
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The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
Elon Musk and SpaceX shrugs off the trading day Wall Street feared most
