Rivian offers benefits until 2027 to promote independence

Rivian no longer expects to meet its long-awaited profit target in 2027 due to increased spending on the standalone unit, the company said on Thursday.

The company said it does not expect EBITDA to improve by next year as it sees R&D spending rising in line with its efforts to develop self-driving technology.

The approval was deeply rooted in a reservation that some details Rivian’s new partnership with Uber to create a robotaxi version of its upcoming R2 SUV for the snow giant’s network.

Rivian declined to comment beyond the details.

Rivian has been telling shareholders that it can reach a positive EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) in 2027 as long as it successfully launches the R2 SUV, and increases its software investment. But the company has faced a number of challenges before that: The federal EV tax credit has been phased out, its ability to sell credits to other automakers has declined, and its costs have risen due to President Trump’s tariffs.

Those difficulties were making it difficult for Rivian to enter the darkness. One analyst, Joseph Spak of UBS, wrote in February that he did not expect the company to achieve EBITDA “for several years”. Rivian reported in February that it had booked a total of $27 billion between its founding in 2009 and the end of 2025.

But it is the company’s investment in developing self-driving technology that has caused it to delay its positive EBITDA target. Founder and CEO RJ Scaringe has said that Rivian is spending more on independent research and development than anything else at the moment. The company annual presentation it spent $1.7 billion on R&D in 2025, up from $1.6 billion in 2024. The company said that this jump was due to “increased engineering, design, and development costs, prototyping costs, and software costs to support our implementation of R2 and AI and autonomous systems.”

Rivian is developing its own “large scale driving model” and has developed its own processor and “autonomous computer” to run the software. He hopes to introduce eyes, self-driving cars next year and has the goal of making his electric cars capable of driving “autonomous L4”, pushing the level established by the Society of Automotive Engineers where an autonomous car can operate in a certain area without human intervention.

Rivian first described many of these efforts in December his first time The “Autonomy & AI Day” event, where Scaringe visited investors and publishers at the company’s Silicon Valley campus, and gave tests to demonstrate what its driver assistance software can do.

The deal with Uber was announced on Thursday and is a new test on top of the one that was revealed in December. It includes Uber investing up to $1.25 billion in Rivian, and the potential purchase of 50,000 R2 SUVs. But the snow giant is only investing $300 million to get started, and will initially only order R2 10,000 from Rivian. Most of the products appear to have been returned in the late 2030s.

The company has a lot of other investments ahead, too. It plans to start construction on a new factory in Georgia this year, and is months away from production of the R2. The company told investors in February that it expects to spend between $1.95 billion and $2.05 billion this year.