Rivian Stock Is Flying After EV Maker Unveils Its R2 and R3 Models

Rivian Automotive stock was surging after the company introduced its new vehicle platform on Thursday.

Investors knew the car was coming, but the electric vehicle start-up sprinkled a couple of extra surprises in its presentation to the delight of its shareholders.

As its name suggests, R2—unveiled Thursday afternoon—is Rivian’s second vehicle platform. It’s a lower-cost product that should enable the company to widen its addressable market with a cheaper price tag. The R2 will start at around $45,000, and is slated to hit the streets in 2026.

The timing was the first surprise. CEO R.J. Scaringe said the car will ship in the first half of 2026. That brings some certainty for investors and, of course, the sooner the better.

“I’m so excited about this vehicle,” said Scaringe. “I’m so excited about what it represents for us as a company in terms of achieving scale.”

Rivian’s first platform, R1, is the base for the R1T pickup truck and R1S SUV. Those two vehicles start at around $75,000.

The R2 SUV shown at the event has Rivian’s trademark look. The vehicle—which could be called the R2S if Rivian sticks with its first platform’s naming conventions—is a smaller version of the R1S. The wheelbase is a little shorter than that of the R1S.

The R2’s per-charge range will exceed 300 miles and there will be a tri-motor version that goes from zero to 60 miles an hour in about three seconds.

The second surprise was another vehicle—the R3 and sportier trim called the R3X. It’s another vehicle that will be built on the platform. Pricing and timing for the R3 weren’t part of Scaringe’s prepared remarks. Rivian didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Rivian shares were up 13.8% in late trading at $12.55, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite were up about 0.9% and 1.4%, respectively.

The stock had gotten a lift even before the R2 launch event, which started around 1 p.m. ET Thursday, thanks to a new call to buy the shares on Wall Street.

Earlier Thursday, Jefferies analyst Philippe Houchois launched coverage of Rivian with a Buy rating and a $16 price target.

“Rivian has looked closest to Tesla in spirit, with its own software stack, strong brand identity, global potential, and similar growth pain,” wrote the analyst.

(Product launch events weren’t what Houchois was referring to, looked a little like a Tesla product launch event run by Elon Musk.)

The cost of the new platform will be key, the analyst said.

Rivian “is facing two critical if not existential tests this year: (1) deliver a $35,000-to-$40,000 reduction in unit production costs from redesign, purchasing, and manufacturing efficiency; and (2) demonstrate the R2 model can be developed at a significantly lower cost than R1,” wrote Houchois in his coverage launch report.

The new vehicle and Buy rating should come as a relief for investors. Coming into Thursday trading, Rivian stock was down about 53% so far in 2023. Slowing demand growth for EVs, along with disappointing production guidance from Rivian, has pushed down shares.

Rivian expects to produce about 57,000 units in 2024, roughly the same amount produced in 2023. But Houchois sees a silver lining there.

“Slower EV demand and planned second-quarter [plant] shutdowns will constrain growth this year but could also help deliver the sharp $20,000 reduction in unit costs to achieve positive gross margin exiting 2024,” wrote Houchois.

Rivian hasn’t achieved the scale required yet to generate positive profits and cash flow. It delivered about 50,000 unit to customers in 2023. Tesla wasn’t producing consistent profits until it was delivering roughly four times that amount.

Wall Street expects Rivian to use about $4.3 billion in cash in 2024. It ended 2023 with about $9.4 billion in cash, and $10.5 billion in total liquidity.

Overall, 55% of analysts covering Rivian stock have Buy ratings, according to FactSet. The average Buy-rating ratio for stocks in the S&P 500 is about 55%. The average analyst price target for Rivian stock is about $17.

Gold is one of the market’s go-to hedges in rocky times. Don’t forget that gold miners’ stocks are too.

The stock market’s gains in 2026 belie the rocky macroeconomic picture: elevated inflation, heightened geopolitical tensions, and jitters about the artificial-intelligence trade. That backdrop, in theory, should be the time for gold to shine. Instead, the price of the yellow metal has tumbled more than 5% so far, after last year’s blistering 65% rally. In part, the U.S. dollar’s recovery has stymied gold, which benefited from the greenback’s weakness in 2025.

Even with the precious metal’s recent weakness, gold mining stocks could be the best way to profit from this year’s uncertainty.

Gold miners “are a valuable hedge against macro risks that would likely be damaging for equities,” BCA Research’s Noah Weisberger and Rishabh Shah wrote this week.

Concerns about the Federal Reserve’s next moves to tackle inflation, the increasingly crowded AI trade, and steep valuations for tech stocks are just some of the drivers that could help gold’s price get on even footing— and lead to even bigger gains for miner stocks.

These stocks’ prices tend to outpace gold’s moves, because the companies have fixed operational costs. So when gold’s price rallies, their profit margins soar, and vice versa. For instance, the VanEck Gold Miners GDX +7.39% exchange-traded fund has fallen 11% this year as the metal has slumped.

Now, gold’s price just needs to stabilize to help miners’ stocks take off, and that seems to be happening. The precious metal has recently found support above the $4,000 level, and has stuck in a narrow range since the end of June. But its price rose ever so slightly in July, ending a four-month losing streak for the metal. Technical analysis also suggests that gold is due for a comeback.

Barron’s recently wrote that the pullbacks for both gold miners and the metal itself are overdone. Senior technical analyst Doug Busch noted that the VanEck ETF is on the “verge of a breakout” and has the potential to hit $11o in early 2027, up more than 40% from its current price.

Gold miners also have more than their role as a market hedge going for them. Their fundamentals are solid, too, says Chris Mancini, portfolio co-manager of the Gabelli Gold Fund.

“Precious metals miners are generating substantial amounts of free cash flow given profit margins of over $2,000 per ounce, and are returning this cash to shareholders through buybacks and dividends,” he said in an email.

“Buying the miners is a cheap way to get exposure to the price of gold,” he added. His fund owns Newmont NEM +6.71%, a Barron’s stock pick last year, and Agnico Eagle Mines as top holdings, as well as miners Northern Star Resources, Endeavour Mining, and Kinross Gold K+8.59%.

Miners are better businesses than they used to be, the BCA team added.

“Capex is more disciplined, margins are high and rising…and they are largely independent of the AI story,” Weisberger, BCA’s head of equities, and Shah, a senior analyst, wrote.

That last part is key. AI is disrupting the software industry and many other services and information-oriented businesses, and investors have piled into AI stocks. But ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and other large-language models aren’t going to replace the need to mine for metals.

“Equity portfolios can benefit from exposure to quality that is uncorrelated to AI risk, and gold miners fit the bill,” the BCA team said.

They recommend that investors buy the VanEck Gold Miners ETF, which owns top miners such as Agnico, Barrick Mining ABX +7.24%, and Newmont.

An important bonus for big gold miners’ stocks is that their valuations are attractive after the gold’s pullback, too. The VanEck ETF is now trading at just a little more than nine times next year’s earnings estimates. That’s a big discount to its five-year average price-to-earnings ratio of 14, according to FactSet.

What’s more, the ETF is currently valued at a more than 50% discount to the S&P 500 SPX -0.17%, which is trading for about 19 times earnings estimates for 2027. Mining stocks have typically traded at just a 25% discount to the broader market over the past five years. So there is significant upside for the group if valuations move back toward normal levels.

One factor that complicates mining stocks as a market hedge, of course, is if stocks bounce back, which has been the case so far in August.

But both the market and economic outlooks remain cloudy, and investors remain nervous about the Fed’s next moves and AI stocks. Gold miners should do just fine, even if the anxious mood on Wall Street persists.