Rivian customer and enthusiast forums are rife with complaints about the R1T truck and R1S SUV, and the company has historically ranked below the industry average in J.D. Power’s Initial Quality Study. Customers frequently cite frustrations with advanced technology, over-the-air updates and complex in-vehicle controls rather than mechanical failures as pain points.

While some pain points can be solved with physical repairs, others are more complex and require extensive software updates and system flashes to solve.

Since its R1 models came to market, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, the product lineup has matured with fresh versions of those two vehicles on sale today. And, the company is readying to launch its third vehicle, the R2 midsize SUV.

During the last four years, Rivian has been learning, listening and evolving CEO RJ Scaringe told Newsweek.

“This has been an interesting journey,” he said. “When I meet someone who's had a R1 since early 2022, I usually start by saying, ‘thank you,’ because they had to experience a much earlier version of Rivian that didn't have the service infrastructure we have today, that didn't have all the capabilities that we have today.”

Over the last five years, Rivian has worked to address one of its biggest customer pain points, service, among other improvements. When its first vehicles launched, they had, “a handful of service locations in some of the biggest markets, but there were huge portions of the country that we didn't have coverage in,” Scaringe admitted.

He used Seattle as an example: “We didn't have enough service capacity to support how quickly the brand sold in that market, and so, as a result, there were long service wait times.”

The company has changed. “Service lead times can't be measured in weeks or tens of days, it needs to be a couple of days at most, and so a lot of work over the last four years has been to take service lead times that in some of our really popular markets were 20, 30,40 days, in some cases down to two or three days,” the CEO said.

Scaringe said that the company was charged with fixing the service issue before R2 launched. “The goal was to have that in place before we launched R2, and so there was a big ramp up of huge investment into our service infrastructure, a very large investment into building a lot more service technician capacity, big investment into the processes that we run our service network with—everything from vehicle diagnostics to the tools that get used within the service center,” he explained.

Like they did with their infotainment technology, Rivian took things into their own hands to create a good owner experience. “We built all those ourselves, and now we’re even integrating AI very deeply into how the service centers run, and they're now running like a much better-oiled machine,” Scaringe said, vowing to continue to improve service infrastructure.

Some Rivian early adopters were driven away by the ownership experience. Scaringe holds out hope that they will be willing to give Rivian another try. “I think the amount of progress we made between 2021-2022 and where we are in 2026 is really significant. A lot of folks who left the brand with a bad service experience in 2023, I'm excited for them to re-meet the brand and re-meet the company as we've scaled,” he said.