Rivian Automotive LLC has yet to sell its first pickup truck or sedan to the public, but the electric vehicle startup has already staked a notable claim among Orange County’s large and growing roster of automakers: it now has the second-largest local real estate presence of any car or truck manufacturer.
The company, which has raised more than $3 billion in funding since its 2009 founding, with financial backers including Ford, Amazon, T. Rowe Price and Cox Automotive, recently signed a new lease spanning nearly 96,000 square feet for an industrial facility in Tustin, close to the Santa Ana (5) Freeway, brokerage data indicates.
The latest deal boosts Rivian’s reported real estate presence in Irvine and Tustin to north of 350,000 square feet.
Most of that leasing has taken place this year.
The company’s had an operational presence in OC, Los Angeles and the Silicon Valley for several years, but prior to this year the firm’s base of power was in Plymouth, Mich., although founder and Chief Executive RJ Scaringe lived in OC.
“The technology that moves our vehicles, and the experiences that move our customers, are developed here,” the company said of its OC operations as of earlier this year.
This summer, news emerged that the company planned to move its headquarters from Michigan to Irvine.
“Of Rivian’s 2,300 employees, approximately 1,000 are based in California and 750 in Michigan, and we are consolidating some engineering teams to our locations in California to improve workflows and reduce environmental impact from travel,” the company said at the time.
The company was estimated to employ about 100 people in OC as of last year. By the end of this summer that figure had grown to 400, making Rivian OC’s No. 3 automaker by employee count, according to the Business Journal’s Oct. 5 list.
The company continues to super-charge its local hiring plans: Rivian currently lists north of 300 job openings in Irvine on its website, across several divisions.
New Cluster
The latest reported Rivian lease is for the entirety of 14192 Franklin Ave., a Tustin building situated a half mile from the company’s forthcoming new HQ at 14600 Myford Road, a roughly 186,000-square-foot building in Irvine just off Jamboree Road and about a mile from the Market Place shopping center.
Both buildings were seeing heavy amounts of construction work as of last week. They appear a few months away from being operational. Neither site has any Rivian signage on them yet.
The two facilities are a short drive from the nearly 240,000-square-foot Irvine headquarters of Kia Motors America, which has one of the larger presences of an area automaker.
Among other notable carmakers with operations in the city, Karma Automotive counts a nearly 260,000-square-foot headquarters along Jeronimo Road in the Spectrum area, while Mazda North America Operations leases some 115,000 square feet of space at the 200 Spectrum Center office tower in the city.
Hyundai North America’s headquarters along the San Diego (405) Freeway in Fountain Valley runs nearly 470,000 square feet, giving it the largest local office presence of any OC automaker—for now.
Hyundai is OC’s No. 2 automaker by employee count, with 472. Mazda is No. 1 with 548 local workers.
Dealmaking
Rivian’s new Tustin building traded last year for nearly $20 million. It marked the first local acquisition for Newport Beach-based EBS Realty Partners, which paid about $207 per square foot for the building.
The newest lease also joins a Spectrum-market industrial deal the company made a few months back.
Rivian was reported to have struck a sizeable industrial lease for a portion of 117-119 Waterworks Way, an approximately 143,400-square-foot building in the Spectrum submarket.
Rivian is taking close to 64,000 square feet of space at that facility, sources previously told the Business Journal.
The Irvine site was previously entirely leased to Billabong and used for its local manufacturing base, but the retrenching retailer has consolidated a portion of those operations to Huntington Beach.
The Waterworks facility and the Myford Ave. property are both owned by Irvine Co.
Amazon Orders
Rivian has been making national headlines in recent weeks following an announcement with Amazon.
The e-commerce giant this month received delivery of a working prototype for an EV delivery van, custom-built by Rivian.
It expects to have 10,000 of the new vans on the road delivering packages and groceries to customers as early as 2022, Amazon said in a blog post. By 2030, that figure could be closer to 100,000.
“The vehicle we’ve developed with Amazon is not just electric. We prioritized safety and functionality to create a vehicle that’s optimized for package delivery,” Scaringe said in a statement.
Industry reports estimate the delivery trucks have a fully charged driving range of about 150 miles, tops of any EV delivery vehicle to date.
Amazon was part of a $2.5 billion funding round that Rivian announced in July; the round was led by T. Rowe Price.
For the consumer, Rivian has a pair of vehicles in the works: the R1T pickup and the R1S SUV.
The vehicles are expected to start around $70,000, travel up to 400 miles on a single charge, and hit 60 miles per hour in under three seconds. Sales for the vehicles are expected to begin next year.
