Rivian made big news on Thursday with its announcement of a new $5 billion factory that will be constructed in Georgia, but the EV company's third-quarter shareholder letter also contained some good tidbits about Rivian's delivery van for Amazon. Maybe the biggest, at least to us, is that the van finally has an official name: EDV.
The EDV is produced alongside the R1T pickup and R1S SUV at Rivian's factory in Normal, Illinois, which the company announced is expanding production capacity from 150,000 units a year to over 200,000 annually. The EDV was designed and engineered specifically for Amazon as part of a 100,000-van order, and it uses a proprietary FleetOS fleet managament system also designed by Rivian. While testing has been going on for months, Rivian says the first "saleable" vans will be delivered to Amazon later this month, right on schedule.
The version of the van that we've already seen is more specifically called the EDV 700, referring to its 700 cubic feet of cargo space. Under the EPA's official testing procedure the EDV 700 has a range of 201 miles, more than enough for the average delivery route. Rivian also announced that a narrower, shorter EDV 500 van will debut in early 2022 on the same RCV commercial vehicle platform as the larger van.
To streamline operations the factory in Illinois has shared production lines for batteries, drive units and stamping across the two vehicle platforms, while the body shop and general assembly sections are separate. According to Rivian, the parallel development of the models helped speed up production of the EDV. Rivian isn't saying the production split at the factory between the R1T, R1S and EDV, though it seems the pickup remains the current priority.
