“The Quad is really the pinnacle of everything that Rivian has done so far,” Wassym Bensaid, the company’s head of software, told TechCrunch, quickly providing a punch list on acceleration, speed, torque, and an estimated 374-mile range. “Now that we have full in-house motors, we have full control on the stack, hardware and software.”

That process is helped by Rivian's new system architecture introduced in the Gen 2 R1 platform last year. This not only greatly simplified the architecture of the vehicles, cutting cost and weight, but it enabled far more finite control over those motors.

Rivian has long held out the prospect of particularly powerful quad-motor versions of its R1 models. Now the company has presented the series versions with