Back in January 2020, Ford and Rivian announced that the former automaker planned on building a new, all-electric Lincoln model riding on the latter’s Skateboard platform shortly after The Blue Oval invested $500 million in the upstart EV maker. However, that project was canceled just a few months later, following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and in November 2021, Ford and Rivian scrapped any and all plans to collaborate on a new EV. At the time, Ford CEO Jim Farley said that this decision stemmed from the company’s desire to develop its own EVs, but Rivian CEO R.J. Scaringe recently expanded on that topic a bit.
“Well, it’s interesting you bring up all the examples of other partnerships, and we’ve seen this now we’ve looked at the idea of sharing our vehicle platform through a variety of lenses,” Scaringe told The Verge in a recent interview. “We looked at vehicle platform sharing with Ford, vehicle platform sharing with Mercedes, both very publicly. As you alluded to, we’ve looked at big platform opportunities with other vehicle manufacturers as well. What is, in every case, always the challenge is getting the network architectures of Rivian’s platform and those other manufacturers that we’ve talked to to work together.”
“It’s a challenge in every possible way. It’s a challenge to get the top hat from a traditional company that’s using lots and lots of supplier source ECUs to work with our platform – battery, drivetrain, chassis that has very few ECUs. It’s a challenge to get those two very different architectures to run down the same manufacturing line. And by far, putting aside the strategic reasons those deals didn’t happen, the biggest technical boundary was always network architecture.”
Regardless of these challenges, Rivian and Volkswagen recently announced a new joint venture partnership that will grant the latter access to the former’s software at first, followed by the co-development of next generation EV platforms, which will be used in future electric vehicles from both brands. As for Ford, it has sold off most of its stake in Rivian, and recently pivoted toward smaller, cheaper EVs, as well as expanded hybrid offerings.
We’ll have more on Rivian and Ford’s relationship soon, so be sure and subscribe to Ford Authority for more Rivian news and 24/7 Ford news coverage.
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