The (bird) sound of something different

“Someone said you sound like an owl…”

The wholesome TikTok prank (which gets people to say “who?” before they realize what they’ve done) could just as easily be about Rivian, the high-end electric vehicle brand with an owl hoot for a car lock sound. 

Rivian is seeking not only to electrify the world, but generate a community of fully plugged-in drivers. Founded by chief executive officer RJ Scaringe in 2009, the brand — despite just reporting its first quarter of positive gross profit in its last fiscal quarter of 2024 after about 16 years in business and a net loss of about $4.7 billion for the year — has always been one to tend to the minutiae. The owl hoot started out as a 2024 Halloween novelty, replacing the typical bird chirp onomatopoeia that sounds when a driver taps their hand on the car handle. But when the hoot went away, Rivian drivers sought restitution.

"SAVE THE OWL SOUND (I have unexpectedly strong feelings about this)" made its way to r/Rivian, with Reddit users petitioning for the seemingly inconsequential feature’s perpetual return. One driver commented: “I want the owl all the time, or even better can we have it shift to the owl after dark automatically?”

That’s exactly what Rivian did in early 2025. They not only brought back the option to use the owl hoot sound for locking your car, but added functionality of transitioning from bird chirp to owl hoot between day and night, respectively. “When you do something like that, I think the customers really appreciate it, and they see [...] Rivian is listening,” said Jeff Hammoud, chief design officer at Rivian who has been with the company since 2017. Earlier in his career, Hammoud headed up design for the Jeep, a brand with drivers that do most of the community building for them (think Jeep ducking). At Rivian, Hammoud leads a team that’s closely tied to the user base, using details — from a sasquatch-like digital character that warns peepers they’re being recorded to a power bank that doubles as a hand warmer — to build community as an innate part of Rivian ownership.

Whatever the detail, Rivian, Hammoud said, wants to make the vehicles inviting. And in order to be inviting, the details have to be underpinned by empathy.

Scaringe emphasizes Rivian makes decisions as a company “through the perspective of our kids’ kids’ kids, which is an elegant way of saying we're going to take a long-term view on our decisions, and we're going to make decisions that work towards creating a better world for the generations to come,” as he said at the SXSW 2025 keynote where Rivian was the headline sponsor.

Over the course of its first 16 years, Rivian has become one of the key brands synonymous with the larger EV transition in the United States (alongside Tesla, whose public image has become increasingly politically divisive). It’s also squeezing its way into an industry that has historically been unwelcoming to newcomers. (Of the 50 brands available in the U.S, 10 were founded in the current century, and just six are independent from existing auto manufacturers.) Even with their traction, it’s not the easiest position: Drivers know and trust the legacy auto brands that hold a bulk of the market share, and the price of entry for an EV overall remains high, something Scaringe has said comes down to “a lack of choice” — though with the Bezos-backed, bare-bones EV pickup truck from Slate Auto set to hit the market for an estimated base price of $25,000, that may well change. These pressures have shaped Rivian’s public messaging and appear to influence strategic decisions across product, pricing, and design.

Much like the country singers who belt tunes about a working-class life when they’re sleeping in a penthouse, many product creators can be — or become — disconnected from the users they think they represent. (Anecdotal examples: Levi’s as a favorite brand of denim enthusiasts, but having quality issues as they scale their outlet stores; Airbnb’s original brand call to “Live Like a Local”, but then shifting their focus to corporate travel in following years, and so on.) At Rivian, they’re teeming with people who remind the company who they are and what they’re doing this for.

On the software team, one employee is internally dubbed the “chief Reddit officer,” according to Hammoud, because he often scours Reddit looking for feedback.

This aligns with the notion that community is pivotal at Rivian. “We are very engaged with our customer community and read their thoughts on our vehicles and new features, especially the ones with critiques,” said Rivian’s chief software officer Wassym Bensaid. It’s not uncommon for brands to cite that their purpose seeps into the philosophical (take REI’s “Opt Outside” campaign, for instance, which closes stores on Black Friday in favor of time in nature), but Rivian backs this up with the fact that driver insights tangibly contribute to the future of Rivian just as much as those on the inside. “It's about a community, and it's about something that we are all building together,” he said.

On the design side, there’s a Studio Ghibli fan in their midst, resulting in dream-like animations and nods to Ghibli-esque vibes throughout their vehicles’ digital user experience.

“If you're in certain modes [like the all-purpose drive mode], you’ll see the windmills moving, or tiny little blades of grass that move, or the clouds are sort of floating, and they’re very slow and very subtle, because we don’t want to be distracting,” said Hammoud. “There’s just that little attention to detail [that] makes it really fun, and we hope that customers discover these little different things as they own the vehicle.”

Hammoud said his team and others within Rivian (a company of more than 16,000 workers despite multiple rounds of layoffs in 2024) work together in a way that invites curiosity, incites ideation, and rewards tinkering. For a company redefining what it means to be an American automaker, this feels only natural — and it’s baked into the founder-led company’s ethos, too. Scaringe admitted to having to remind himself to “think like a kid,” as he said at the 2025 commencement ceremony for his undergraduate alma mater Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. In other words, preserve that imagination and idealism that can be terribly easy to lose as we grow up.

If you grew up going to the beach, you may share the core childhood memory of your parents making sure you wipe your feet of sand before getting into the car. In the Rivian, that’s not such a big deal. While rubber floor mats can look dirty the second they get debris on them, Rivian’s Chilewich brand floormats are woven in a way that they don’t swallow sand. "It's not a matter of just being easy to clean,” said Hammoud. “It's a matter of looking clean longer.” A detail like this doesn’t just reflect thoughtful materials design — it speaks to Rivian’s attention to everyday use, especially for people hauling sandy kids, dogs, or gear. 

It's an especially pertinent detail for the California Dune, which Rivian launched as a limited-edition earlier in February 2025. The Dune is a special trim for the R1T and R1S models, meant to feel at home in its environment without disappearing into it. Its sand-forward colorway echoes what the EV is meant to do: adventure on the beach (or, for that matter, anywhere).

While Rivian’s detail-oriented design approach adds to the driver experience, Hammoud emphasized the need to prioritize the driver and not get lost in flashy possibilities: “Yes, you can put more technology on it, but it shouldn't be at the expense of user experience and approachability,” he said. 

If a driver gets into their car for the first time and they can't figure out how to use it within the first couple of minutes, Rivian has essentially failed at their job. “There are a lot more features you can [add on], but the initial barrier to entry should be quick and simple…Really, the technology’s there to support what you're doing and to make your life easier, not more complicated,” said Hammoud.

That means not all of Rivian’s attention to detail is obvious to the driver. There’s decidedly unsexy stuff, like how they’ve removed about a mile of wiring harnesses out of the vehicle, which saves money on materials and weighted transportation (a crucial factor given cost implications amid the current automotive supply chain) and increases capabilities via smart electrical engineering. Then there are the kinds of things that all but the most discerning or in-the-know drivers will likely miss. For example, the company was adamant about getting a full glass drop in the rear passenger windows — something Hammoud said isn’t common in their vehicle class, but that he feels is a must for an adventure vehicle if only so backseat drivers can stretch their whole arm out of the sill without a pesky window in the way — which meant redistributing the design to make it possible with still less material. They had to reorient the wheel well and side panels to make it happen, ultimately (subtly, at least to the human eye) changing the shape of the Rivian.

This attention to detail in Rivian’s updates and tech has drawn industry interest, perhaps explaining Volkswagen’s $5.8 billion investment in Rivian in 2024 to develop EV software (the highly affordable ID.EVERY1 will be the first VW model to use Rivian’s technology stack, according to Bensaid).

“We’re a new company trying to build our brand, but I think it also provides us a lot of opportunity, because we don’t have an old business that is competing with this EV revolution that we’re pushing towards,” said Hammoud. “If you’ve got a business that’s highly built upon something that is a completely different technology, which all your factories and your supply chain is built around, it’s a lot harder to pivot.”

Flexibility and a willingness to challenge the status quo has always given startups an edge, but, one could argue, it’s how you use that flexibility that determines fate. For Rivian, sweating the small stuff just as much as the big — from owl hoots to multi-billion-dollar investments that would make a young Scaringe scream — has played a part in them making a dent in the broader electrification of personal mobility. “If you look at the EV market share, it’s like 10% of sales in the US,” said Hammoud. “We're not going after that 10%. We're going after the other 90.”