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VW’s new offshoot EV company Scout Motors, which revealed its first two vehicles last week, will use the software and zonal architecture being developed by the joint venture between Rivian and the Volkswagen Group.
Rivian Chief Software Officer Wassym Bensaid confirmed to TechCrunch at Disrupt 2024 that Scout will leverage the joint venture tech when its vehicles go into production in 2027. VW and Rivian are still working to close the $5 billion deal, which they expect to happen before the end of this year.
Rivian and VW had previously said that they planned to use the tech to power most of the German automaker’s future vehicles. But the question of whether the Scout vehicles would join the party had remained up in the air in the wake of last week’s reveal.
Scout revealed two EV prototypes: The Traveler SUV and the Terra pickup truck. The company said at the time that the vehicles would use a zonal architecture — meaning it would rely on just a handful of computers that control the functions of a few “zones” of the electrical architecture. And the software in Scout’s press images looked awfully similar to what you can find in Rivian’s current vehicles, so Bensaid’s confirmation is not all that surprising.
Bensaid stressed on the Disrupt stage that each brand that uses the joint venture’s software will “continue to have their own identity,” as well as “their own features.”
“We’re enabling competition,” he said.
Bensaid also noted how much the Scout vehicles resemble Rivian’s overall design sensibility, even outside of the software. “That’s fantastic,” he said. “It’s great validation of the Rivian product.”
Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.
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