The Rivian R1T electric pickup truck is still a few months away from customer deliveries, but it looks like Blue Origin already has its own fleet of Rivian R1Ts.
Yesterday, Blue Origin, a private American aerospace company, conducted its latest test in its New Shepard program with its reusable rocket and capsule called RSS (Reusable Space Ship) “First Step.”
They launched the latter on top of their reusable rocket at their test facility in West Texas and landed both.
During the webcast of the test, watchers spotted two Rivian R1T electric pickup trucks being part of the effort to recover the capsule and simulate astronaut recovery (hat tip to airliu):
After the capsule landed (2:10:00), several vehicles converged at the scene and two of them are R1T electric pickups numbered 09 and 10 on top.
The electric pickups are easily recognizable thanks to their unique vertical headlights:
Blue Origin is owned by Jeff Bezos, who is also behind Amazon, one of Rivian’s largest shareholders.
Amazon is already working with Rivian on an electric delivery van for which they placed an order of 100,000 vehicles.
Now it looks like Blue Origin, Bezos’s other company, is also working with Rivian, but this time to use its R1T electric pickup truck.
The R1T is still in the pre-production phase and customer deliveries are not expected to begin until June.
The EV startup has been known to test the electric pickup in Arizona, Colorado, and a few other places, but we haven’t seen prototypes being tested in West Texas.
Rivian claims that the R1T has a range of over 300 miles on a single charge with an even longer range version coming next year.
With its quad-motor powertrain, the R1T is expected to deliver some impressive performance, inlcuding a towing capacity of up to 11,000 lbs.
The electric pickup truck’s price currently starts at $75,000 for the Launch Edition and along with the longer range version next year, a base “Explore” version will also be available for $67,500.
It is expected to become the very first electric pickup truck to be delivered to customers in the US.
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