During the summer of 2006, back when RJ Scaringe was working through a degree in automotive engineering at MIT, he began to wonder how difficult it might be to live within strict environmental boundaries. How much would you have to change—and how fast, for how long—if you desired to wipe away the carbon traces of your everyday life? Scaringe decided to conduct an experiment, using himself as the subject. For months, he walked, biked, or used public transportation wherever he went. He took cold showers, washed his laundry by hand, and traded his dryer for a clothesline. When he ate out, he brought his own spoon, to cut down on plastic waste.

“I was tracking the data really closely,” Scaringe, a soft-spoken, genial sort with Clark Kentish glasses and short dark hair, told me recently. By summer’s end he had reached two conclusions. The first was that he still had a meaningful carbon footprint. The second was that he was disheveled and uncomfortable. “I said, holy smokes, no one will sign up for this, and if this is our plan to address climate change, we’re going to lose,” he recalled. Asking billions of people to don an unwashed hair shirt wouldn’t work; the solution would have to be rapid technological innovation.

See more from The Climate Issue | April 2020. Subscribe to WIRED. Illustration: Alvaro Dominguez

Several years later, PhD in hand, Scaringe founded an automotive company called Rivian, named for the Indian River in Florida, near where he grew up. He’d spent his teenage years rebuilding classic sports cars and now hoped to produce a modern one of his own, powered by a hybrid system. “Almost from the very beginning, I knew in my heart something was wrong,” he said. The hybrid seemed lacking in higher purpose, and it could have limited financial potential. As Scaringe put it, “The product we were building was really failing to answer the question of: Why do we need to exist as a company?”

The answer came two years later, at the end of 2011. With Tesla poised to release the Model S, which would dominate the market for high-end electric sedans, Scaringe told his team it was time to pivot to trucks and SUVs. They might be less exciting to build than glossy roadsters, but they’d give the company an existential purpose. At the time, light-duty vehicles—the Environmental Protection Agency’s catchall term for cars, trucks, SUVs, and minivans—accounted for more than 60 percent of the country’s transportation emissions. Trucks were the thirstiest gas drinkers of them all, with EPA ratings that had hovered between 16 and 19 miles per gallon for the previous 30 years. Yet along with SUVs, they were also among the most popular vehicles on the road.

It has taken Scaringe more than a decade, but at the end of this year, Rivian’s first pickup truck, the R1T, will begin rolling off the production line in Normal, Illinois. A sister SUV, the R1S, will follow in early 2021. The wisdom of the company’s pivot is now clear: In 2019, the best-selling vehicles in the United States were the Ford F-150 (896,526 sold), the Dodge Ram (633,694), and the Chevy Silverado (575,600); the next four on the list were all SUVs. And according to the International Energy Agency, SUVs alone have done more to increase 2 2 CO 2 emissions in the past decade than planes, cargo ships, or heavy industry. The market is there, in other words, but it hasn’t yet proved willing to enter the 21st century.

The R1T and the R1S are pure battery electrics. They’re targeted less toward construction workers hauling tools than hikers taking a Subaru into the Sierras on weekends. This is by intention. Scaringe, who has read a psychographic profile or two, estimates that only around 10 percent of pickups sold in the US are used strictly for work. Many now come loaded with luxury flourishes and roomy cabins and chromium baubles. Owners drive them not around the ranch but to football games on weekends and the office on weekday mornings. Rivian designed the R1T for this 90 percent, with a focus on what Scaringe calls “ride quality” and “a demonstrably better driving experience.” The pickup walks a careful line between Detroit traditionalism and EV iconoclasm. Where Tesla’s forthcoming Cybertruck looks like origami on wheels, the R1T, slim and limber, looks more like an F-150 on a gym-and-yoga regimen.