Where Are Rivian EVs Made?

The name Rivian sounds like it's an exotic and foreign luxury brand, like a French chocolatier or an Italian leatherworks, conjuring images of cruising the Riviera, or hiking a ravine in the Alps. In truth, the brand is as American as they come, building electric delivery vans, pickup trucks, and SUVs on U.S. soil. Founded in 2009 by Steve-O lookalike R.J. Scaringe, the company has grown into one of the global leaders in electric vehicle evolution and a driver in American automotive industry growth. Being a tech-forward automaker with a 2000s start date and a brand identity entwined with the splendor of the natural world around us, you might be forgiven for thinking it builds all of its trucks in gorgeous oceanside California city, like Santa Cruz or Ojai. The reality could not be further from the truth. 

Midwesterners are good at two things, building stuff and enjoying the great outdoors, and Rivian understood that, basing its manufacturing operations smack in the middle of the dab of Midwest culture. Rivian took a page out of Tesla's handbook, kicking off its mass production by purchasing an existing automobile manufacturing plant and modernizing it to produce EVs, but unlike Tesla it chose a factory with closer proximity to automotive-minded manufacturing staff, engineers, and all number of tier one OEM suppliers. It was from this foundation that the behemoth of Rivian was built, and since 2009 the plant has churned out around 150,000 vehicles. That's well shy of the facility's 100,000 units per year capacity, but the company is in serious growth mode.

Rivian bought the former Diamond Star Motors plant in Normal, Illinois. 

Constructed in 1988, the 1.9-million square foot facility in Normal, Illinois was initially a Diamond Star Motors joint venture between Mitsubishi (diamond) and Chrysler (star) to build their then-wildly-popular small 2+2 coupes; Mitsubishi Eclipse, Plymouth Laser, and Eagle Talon. Chrysler sold its stake in the plant to Mitsubishi in the early 1990s, and over the next quarter century or so, the plant churned out hundreds of thousands of Mirage and Galant sedans, as well as Outlander Sport and Endeavor SUVs. Production at the facility peaked with over 222,000 units passing through its doors in 2000. As Mitsubishi fell into tough times, however, the plant gradually became more idle and vacant. In 2014, after producing just 61,000 units, Mitsubishi announced it would be closing and liquidating the plant and moving all production back to Japan. 

Rivian took ownership of the Normal facility in 2017 for a paltry $16 million. The company burst into production with the all-electric R1T pickup truck around September of 2021, delayed slightly by COVID lockdowns and an international microchip shortage, though still beating Ford, General Motors, and Tesla to the punch. Since then the facility has become the production home of the company's R1S electric SUV as well as the EDV electric delivery vehicle created for Amazon. With the smaller R2 model also kicking off production in 2026, the factory is once again abuzz with action and productivity. Rivian is currently working on one additional production facility in Georgia. The American EV automaker is currently investing around $120 million to build a supplier park nearby in order to reduce product lead times and warehousing costs. 

When Rivian announced its R2 model back in 2024, it also dropped the covers on an additional surprise vehicle, the smaller R3. With the company rapidly expanding its electric vehicle lineup, and hopes for large-scale adoption of the less-expensive R2 and R3 models, the company would soon need yet another assembly line, which the Normal facility alone couldn't accommodate. 

Rivian broke ground in September of 2025 on a new multi-billion dollar facility just east of Atlanta, Georgia. The first phase of this facility is expected to be onboard by 2028, producing as many as 200,000 units per year, and a second phase ramping that capacity up to 400,000 units by 2030. Like Normal, Illinois, the new Rivian plant is also in a strangely named town, this time Social Circle, Georgia. Both the R2 and R3 are expected to be produced at this plant for worldwide consumption.

As it stands no Rivian vehicles have yet been produced in either Social Circle, Georgia or Stuttgart, Germany, but the expectation is that there soon will be.