The EV maker cut hundreds of jobs, under 2% of its workforce, just a week after deliveries of its mass market R2 SUV began. The retrenchment is paying for an autonomous driving program that Uber is backing with up to $1.25 billion.
Rivian has cut hundreds of workers from its service, sales, and customer teams, a move the company frames as an efficiency play but that lands one week after the EV maker began delivering its mass-market R2 SUV. The layoffs follow a March disclosure in which Rivian cited autonomous-vehicle program costs as the reason it pushed its first profit target back to 2028, and they arrived weeks after Uber announced up to $1.25 billion in backing and an order for up to 50,000 R2 vehicles for a robotaxi fleet.
Rivian declined to confirm on the record that the cuts were tied directly to funding the autonomy program. But the sequence tells its own story: the company is reallocating capital away from the commercial operations that generate near-term revenue toward the long-duration bet on software-defined vehicles. The layoffs and the Uber deal are the same strategic transaction, viewed from different ends of the balance sheet.
The cuts are small in percentage terms, at less than 2% of the overall workforce, and they are concentrated in the customer-facing functions that turn a delivered vehicle into a repeat brand. Sales, marketing, and service are the teams that dealers, owners, and would-be buyers actually feel. Pulling from those groups signals that Rivian is willing to absorb near-term friction in the showroom to preserve cash for autonomy research.
It is the fourth round of cuts since the beginning of 2024, according to reporting first published by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by TechCrunch with Rivian on the record (TechCrunch). The pattern is structural, not one-off, and it lands on a balance sheet that has accumulated roughly $30 billion in lifetime losses.
The pivot matters because the autonomy bet is genuinely high-stakes. The current R2 product is rated "hands-off, eyes-on," meaning the driver must keep watching the road, a level of capability well below what a robotaxi service requires. Uber's order assumes Rivian will close that gap. There is no public evidence yet that it has.
Rivian had been targeting its first profit in 2027 but pushed that goal back in March, citing the cost of building out its autonomous-vehicle program. The cuts land two months after that delay, suggesting the company is accelerating the reallocation rather than slowing it.
The risk for investors and customers is that the two bets pull against each other. Selling more R2s depends on the very service and sales teams that just got smaller. Building robotaxi software depends on a regulatory and technical breakthrough that the company has not yet demonstrated. Cutting one to fund the other is a defensible strategy, but only if Rivian can keep owners happy in the meantime. The next quarter's R2 delivery numbers, and any update on the autonomy timeline, will tell the reader whether the trade is working.