Rivian made a name for itself when it unveiled one of the first electric pickup trucks, the R1T, in 2018. It followed that up with an SUV built off the same platform, the R1S, and has since built a passionate fan base around a brand that celebrates adventure and the outdoors.

Now it’s preparing for its next chapter with the R2, a smaller spin on the R1S SUV, and the R3, a rally-inspired hatchback.

“A lot of people were surprised on R3” Rivian Chief Design Officer Jeff Hammoud told CNBC. “It’s not something that I think a lot of people would have guessed that Rivian would have done … and that was the key thing we were trying to show, we’re not pigeonholed to one form factor.” 

The new vehicles, which were unveiled in March of last year, are part of Rivian’s strategy to reach a broader market for its electric vehicles, which currently start upwards of $70,000.

The R2, which the company says will start around $45,000, is expected to go into production by the end of this year at the company’s Normal, Illinois, manufacturing facility. 

“While R1 was designed through addition, we had to look at R2 through subtraction,” Hammoud said. “What are the things we can remove or take away, but still keep the ethos of the product and the brand?”

The R2 and R3 are coming on the heels of a tough time for the automaker.

Weak demand, higher costs and the U.S. cancelling the EV credit could spell trouble for Rivian. But that hasn’t stopped the company from breaking ground on a new $5 billion factory in Georgia, where the next generation vehicles will be built.

“We’re first launching R2 at our facility in Illinois, but this is really the site where we’ll scale global production. We’re building this into a 400,000 unit plant,” Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe told CNBC’s Phil LeBeau at the plant’s construction site in September.

CNBC got rare access inside Rivian’s design lab in Irvine, California, to see how the company shapes its distinctive vehicles. We see how the EV maker approaches design for its adventure-driven EV lineup, which includes the backstory on how it conceived its iconic headlights, a choice that provoked mixed reactions when first unveiled.

“They were controversial,” recalls John Voelcker, contributing editor at Car and Driver. “It took a while for people to get over it. I think it was smart in that it’s harder to make your truck distinctive. So a front end that immediately is like no one else is probably a good thing.”

Watch the video to learn about Rivian’s approach to design and its plans to expand its brand of adventure-themed EVs. 

Tesla announced a new version of its full self-driving supervised technology Tuesday morning, but investors are looking for something bigger.

Over the weekend, Elon Musk’s company shared a teaser clip featuring a logo-emblazoned, spinning component that could be anything from a wheel cover to a fan or turbine. The clip ended with the numbers “10/7,” indicating Tuesday’s date for the reveal.

Tesla posted a second clip to X on Sunday showing the outline of a vehicle’s headlights in the dark.

Shares climbed 5% Monday as the buzz grew online over what the announcement would be.

The big reveal could be the long-awaited lower-cost model, or the next-generation Roadster that Musk has promised for years.

Or something else.

The company hasn’t released a new model vehicle for sale since it began shipping the Cybertruck, its angular unpainted steel pickup, in late 2023.

Musk originally promoted the Cybertruck at an “unveiling” event in 2019, where his demo went awry and he shattered a window. The Cybertuck never achieved the level of popularity of Tesla’s Model 3 sedan or Model Y SUVs and has been the subject of at least eight voluntary recalls in the U.S.

With its auto sales in a multi-quarter slump, Tesla has been trying to shift investor attention to its future as a robotics and self-driving car business.

The slump has resulted, in part, from a consumer backlash against Musk, his endorsements of far-right political parties and figures, and his incendiary political rhetoric. But it’s also due to an aging lineup and increased competition from companies including Volkswagen and BYD.

In mid-October of last year, Tesla held its invitation-only, “We, Robot” event in Hollywood, where it showed off a low, two-seater Cybercab concept with no steering wheels or pedals. Musk said the driverless car would cost about $30,000.

As of the company’s second-quarter earnings call, it was not yet in production.

At an event in late 2017, Musk promised Tesla would make a next-generation Roadster, but the vehicle has never moved into production. In 2021, Musk promised the Roadster would be able to “fly,” and last year he said the elusive sports car was being redesigned in collaboration with SpaceX, his aerospace and defense contractor.

Musk has been promising to turn existing Tesla EVs into robotaxis with a software update for about a decade.

The company currently has human safety drivers in its Robotaxi-branded test and fleet vehicles, unlike robotaxi rivals like Alphabet’s Waymo and Baidu’s Apollo Go.

In the realm of humanoid robots, Musk has said Tesla’s Optimus robots will be capable of factory work or babysitting your kids, but they’ve yet to hit the market. Meanwhile, competitors like Agility Robotics and Unitree are already selling bipedal, humanoid robots.

Following a brutal first quarter that saw Tesla lose 36% of its value, the stock has been on a tear, jumping 40% in the third quarter. It’s now up 12% for the year. That stock price increase was aided by Musk, who purchased about $1 billion of Tesla stock himself in mid-September.

WATCH: Tesla teases new product launch

Qualcomm wants to get closer to robot makers.

The company said Tuesday that it’s acquiring Arduino, an electronics maker whose inexpensive programmable circuit boards and computers are common in hardware startups and robotics labs for prototyping.

Qualcomm didn’t announce a price for the transaction, but said the Italy-based company would become an independent subsidiary.

The deal gives Qualcomm direct access to the tinkerers, hobbyists and companies at the lowest levels of the robotics industry. Arduino products can’t be used to build commercial products but, with chips preinstalled, they’re popular for testing out a new idea or proving a concept.

Qualcomm hopes that Arduino can help it gain loyalty and legitimacy among startups and builders as robots and other devices increasingly need more powerful chips for artificial intelligence. When some of those experiments become products, Qualcomm wants to sell them its chips commercially.

“You start to move towards prototyping, proof of concepts, and once you’re ready, you can go commercial, which is something we are obviously very familiar with,” said Nakul Duggal, Qualcomm’s general manager for automotive, industrial, and embedded Internet of Things, or IoT, in an interview.

Qualcomm is also seeking to diversify its revenue away from a concentration in mobile chips and modems as the smartphone market stalls and as Apple starts to move to its own modem chips.

Still, in the most recent quarter, Qualcomm’s IoT business, which includes many of its current chips that can be used for industrial or robotics products, and its automotive business accounted for a combined 30% of overall revenue from chip sales.

To date, it’s been difficult for smaller developers to get access to Qualcomm chips because they typically get sold in large quantities to established enterprises. Rival Nvidia, however, has sold developer kits for its robot chips that can be directly purchased from retailers for as little as $249, and has said that robotics is the company’s biggest growth opportunity after AI.

Duggal said Qualcomm purchased two other companies in the past year, Foundries.io and Edge Impulse, in an effort to become more essential to robotics developers. He added that Qualcomm hopes to eventually help power humanoid robots, which are similar to self-driving cars in how much AI computing power they require.

Tuesday’s announcement said Arduino will, for the first time, release a board with a Qualcomm chip. It’s called the Uno Q and, priced at $45 to $55, comes equipped with a Qualcomm Dragonwing QRB2210 processor.

Qualcomm’s chip can run Linux, along with Arduino software, and can even do computer vision, which deciphers what a camera sees and translates it into software.

Current Arduino boards, which use lighter processors called microcontrollers, aren’t powerful enough to do a lot of cutting-edge AI. Those boards use chips from companies including STMicroelectronics, Renesas Electronics, Microchip and NXP Semiconductors. Qualcomm will continue to sell those chips through Arduino.

That’s part of Qualcomm’s plan to not make any significant changes to Arduino’s operations, management or its developer community.

“My success criteria is that the Arduino ecosystem doesn’t even feel that there is any change in ownership here,” Duggal said.

WATCH: Qualcomm CEO on latest chips and plan ‘to bring AI everywhere’