“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.