Tech
Why Rivian is holding the $45,000 base model R2 until ‘late 2027’
Rivian revealed the specs and pricing details for its pivotal R2 SUV on Thursday, and the company also finally answered a long-burning question: When will customers be able to buy the promised $45,000 base model?
That answer is “late 2027,” according to the company’s press materials. And there’s a catch. The language Rivian uses now is that the base model R2 will be “starting around $45,000.” That’s a notable change from how the company was recently promoting that the R2 would be “starting at $45,000″ on its website. (Emphasis mine.)
This is not exactly surprising. As TechCrunch first reported last week, Rivian removed the “starting at $45,000” language from its website in February.
Also, a lot has changed since Rivian first revealed the R2 in March 2024. The $7,500 federal EV tax credit is gone. Legacy automakers have stopped buying regulatory credits from companies like Rivian, effectively ending a stream of what was ostensibly free money pouring into its coffers. President Trump’s chaotic tariffs have increased the cost of components and materials Rivian uses to make its EVs.
In some ways, Rivian has bigger challenges to deal with.
Sales of its R1T pickup truck and R1S SUV declined in 2025. Rivian is about to start constructing a giant factory in Georgia where it expects to build hundreds of thousands of R2 SUVs (and, eventually, R3 hatchbacks).
The company is also trying to architect what would be one of the fastest electric vehicle launches in U.S. history with its more premium R2 models this year. Rivian is projecting sales of between 20,000 and 25,000 R2s by the end of 2026. If it succeeds, only Tesla’s Model Y would have reached 20,000 in sales faster.
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Rivian told TechCrunch it wanted to start with the pricier performance R2 models “so owners can experience the absolute peak of the new platform first.”
“Debuting with a high-spec trim is common industry practice and sets the stage for the entire lineup by showcasing the exceptional capability and acceleration that make a Rivian unmistakable, all while we scale production into our Premium and Standard configurations after,” the company said.
Rivian will offer a “Standard” R2 in the first half of 2027 that starts at $48,490, with a range of up to 345 miles. The true base model will only reach about 275 miles. That could be a sign of how Rivian is reaching the base model price — fewer batteries usually tracks with lower cost. The base model’s more meager range could also serve a dual purpose by encouraging customers to pay up to a few thousand dollars more for clearly superior range.
Rivian told TechCrunch the two Standard models share the same rear-wheel-drive propulsion but declined to say whether there are other differences beyond the battery capacity that could explain the price difference. It also declined to comment on its upselling strategies.
“We have made significant internal engineering, development and business efforts to reach our target price. We engineered out complexity by moving to a zonal electrical architecture, reducing the number of electronic control units, and utilizing our in-house drive units,” the company said in a statement. Rivian said it also applied lessons from how it reduced the cost of its second-generation R1 vehicles, and leveraged better supplier relationships.
This all comes just a few months after Rivian agreed to pay $250 million to settle a class action shareholder lawsuit centered around how the company suddenly hiked prices on its R1 vehicles in 2021.
It also has some light echoes of the controversy Tesla waded into a few years ago. Elon Musk and his company had spent years promising the Model 3 would cost $35,000. But Tesla only briefly made a $35,000 Model 3 available “off-menu,” and even that plan didn’t last long. Many of the customers who tried to buy it were pressured into buying higher-trim versions of the sedan, all while Musk publicly complained about how hard it was to fulfill the promise he had made.
Another Tesla vehicle was once announced with an attractive price that never materialized: the Cybertruck. Tesla first pitched the steel-clad pickup in 2019 as starting at just $40,000. But it ultimately launched at much higher prices that, when mixed with its broadly off-putting design, resulted in very meager sales.
It seems unlikely that the R2 would break as bad as the Cybertruck did for Tesla. After all, it’s a far more approachable vehicle that is also starting at a much lower price — all without the political cost of having Elon Musk as the CEO. But only the next few years will tell whether the R2’s base model winds up with a life that’s more like the $35,000 Model 3, or the Cybertruck, or something completely different.
Tech
Alexa+ gets a new ‘adults only’ personality option that curses but won’t do NSFW content
Amazon’s AI assistant Alexa+ is getting another new personality. On Thursday, the company announced it’s expanding its lineup of personality styles for users to choose from to include a “Sassy” option, which is for adults only. Notes Amazon, before opting to use the Sassy personality, users will be required to go through additional security checks in the Alexa app.
The personality style will also not be available when Amazon Kids is enabled, Amazon says.
The new option joins others like Brief, Chill, and Sweet, launched last month.
When you toggle on the option for Sassy in the Alexa mobile app, you’re warned that the Sassy style uses explicit language, which is why it requires a security check. On iOS, this involved a Face ID scan.
The AI assistant explained its style to us like this: “The Sassy style is built on one premise: help first, judge always. Every answer comes wrapped in wit and a well-placed roast — it’ll answer your question; it’ll just make you feel something about it first. Expect reality checks delivered with charm, compliments that somehow sting, and warmth you didn’t see coming. Equal-opportunity irreverence, zero apologies. Honest, sharp, and funny — and somehow that’s more helpful than helpful.”
Alexa’s app also had warned that the style could contain “mature subject matter.”
However, further investigation discovered this is not Amazon’s version of something like Grok’s adult AI companions. The AI assistant said the new option won’t get into areas like explicit sexual content, hate speech, illegal activities, personal attacks, or anything that could cause harm to oneself or others.
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The move is the latest example of how Amazon is trying to make Alexa+ more customizable, as it revamps the assistant for the generative AI era. By offering the assistant different personalities — including one positioned as more adult — Amazon is borrowing from a broader trend in AI, where companies have been experimenting with tone, style, and personas to make their assistants more engaging and personalized to the individual users’ choices.
Tech
Tesla becomes a utility in the UK, setting up showdown with Octopus Energy
Tesla is now an officially licensed utility in the United Kingdom, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. The automotive and energy company recently received a license from the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets, allowing it to sell electricity directly to households and commercial and industrial users.
The company has long dabbled in electricity markets. Its first pure energy products, the Powerwall and Powerpack, were introduced in 2015, but it wasn’t until a year later when Tesla merged with SolarCity that it started scaling the division rapidly. In 2022, the company launched Tesla Electric in Texas, which allowed it to sell electricity directly to customers. Powerwall owners can sell electrons from their batteries to participate in the company’s virtual power plant.
The new division, known as Tesla Energy Ventures, will compete with existing utilities in the U.K., including EDF, E.ON, and Octopus Energy. The competition with Octopus should prove particularly interesting. Since its founding in 2015, Octopus has become the country’s largest utility by focusing on slick software, renewable energy, and creative marketing. Sound familiar?
Tech
A writer is suing Grammarly for turning her and other authors into ‘AI editors’ without consent
Grammarly released a controversial feature last week that uses AI to simulate editorial feedback, making it seem like you’re getting a critique from novelist Stephen King, the late scientist Carl Sagan, or tech journalist Kara Swisher. But Grammarly did not get permission from the hundreds of experts it included in this feature, called “Expert Review,” to use their names.
One of the affected writers, journalist Julia Angwin, has filed a class action lawsuit against Superhuman, the parent company that owns Grammarly, arguing that the company violated the privacy and publicity rights of her and the other writers it impersonated. A class action lawsuit allows writers to join Angwin in her case.
“I have worked for decades honing my skills as a writer and editor, and I am distressed to discover that a tech company is selling an imposter version of my hard-earned expertise,” Angwin said in a statement.
The situation is more than a little ironic — Angwin has spent her career leading investigations into tech companies’ impacts on privacy. Other critics of this kind of technology, like renowned AI ethicist Timnit Gebru, were also included in Grammarly’s “Expert Review.”
The “Expert Review” feature, available only to subscribers paying $144 a year, predictably fails to deliver on the promise of thoughtful feedback.
Casey Newton, the founder and editor of the tech newsletter Platformer and another person impersonated by Grammarly, fed one of his articles into the tool and got feedback from Grammarly’s approximation of tech journalist Kara Swisher. Grammarly’s imitation of Swisher produced “feedback” so generic that it raises the question of why the company would go through the rigmarole of using these writers’ likenesses in the first place.
Here is what Grammarly’s approximation of Kara Swisher told him: “Could you briefly compare how daily AI users versus AI skeptics articulate risk, creating a through-line readers can follow?”
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Newton relayed the message from the AI approximation of Kara Swisher to the actual, real human being, Kara Swisher.
“You rapacious information and identity thieves better get ready for me to go full McConaughey on you,” Swisher texted Newton (referring to Grammarly). “Also, you suck.”
Grammarly has since disabled the “Expert Review” feature, according to a LinkedIn post by Superhuman CEO Shishir Mehrotra. While Mehrotra offered an apology, he continued to defend the idea of the feature.
“Imagine your professor sharpening your essay, your sales leader reshaping a customer pitch, a thoughtful critic challenging your arguments, or a leading expert elevating your proposal,” he wrote. “For experts, this is a chance to build that same ubiquitous bond with users, much like Grammarly has.”
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