Rivian CEO saddened EVs became political

GM and Rivian’s CEO have something in common: Neither thought EVs would become a political lightning rod.

On Thursday while speaking at the New York Times’ Climate Forward event Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe said “I think it’s really important that we don’t make EVs a political thing, and I’m saddened that they are.”

“It doesn’t make any sense that they are,” Scaringe said.

But EVs have become political. Election 2024 has two candidates with very different stands on EVs, climate science, and democracy itself. Trump plans to gut EV policy. Harris backed the proposed Green New Deal and was a key figure behind VW’s emissions-cheating scandal.

Electric cars have been intertwined with politics at some level dating to the 1950s. Ike Eisenhower liked EVs, but his massive public works projects that included the modern Interstate highway system might have rung the death knell for short-range EVs.

Scaringe said he would’ve never predicted that electric vehicles would’ve been talked about as a positive or negative thing depending on one’s political affiliation. But believes it comes down different interpretations of what’s best for our kids.

“We as a species, there’s about 8 billion of us on the planet, there’s no reasonable way we could live anywhere other than earth. It’s our only home, it’s a beautiful home, and we need to do everything we can do to protect it,” Scaringe said. That’s going to require a massive shift a massive industrial complex we built to renewable energy, and that’s going to be hard with incumbent businesses and disruptions with legacy job transitions, Scaringe acknowledged. “And that charges people up,” he said.

Scaringe isn’t alone. On Sunday GM CEO Mary Barra told Kris Van Cleave during an interview “I never thought the propulsion system on a vehicle would be (a political) issue.”