Rivian won’t make a longer-range hybrid, but that’s what virtually all of Scout’s customers want – Jalopnik

Scout Motors still doesn’t have a single paid customer and hasn’t planned to build its first truck for a while, but there’s no denying that the two concepts shown last year looked pretty cool. It turns out that people love the idea of ​​a cool, retro-inspired off-roader that also happens to be electric. And while it will be at least a few more years before production Scouts end up in customer hands, the Terra pickup and Traveler SUV appear poised to position Scout as an incredibly popular electric car manufacturer. Except not really.

It turns out that very few of the potential customers lining up to buy the new Scouts actually want the electric-only version. Instead of, InsideEVs reports the vast majority of Scout’s pre-orders are for the version that comes with a gas range extender, likely making Scout more of a hybrid startup dabbling in electric vehicles. That is not speculation or insider information either. It’s something Scout CEO Scott Keogh says publicly told Bloomberg in a recent interview. According to Keogh, Scout has about 130,000 pre-orders, and about 80% of those are for the version with a range extender.

Considering how few people have pre-ordered an all-electric Scout, you might think it’s only a matter of time before a petrol-only version is offered. But as Keogh told Bloomberg, that probably won’t happen:

I don’t see it. And look, there’s a lot of drama now that says the world was all EV. Now the world is becoming a 100% combustion engine. The world is still going electric. The technology is there, the innovation is there. We are in the early stages. Technology is only getting better; our costs are only going down. And we want to make sure Scout is prepared for the next 100 years; We don’t build a brand for two years.”

On Rivian’s earnings call Tuesday: InsideEVs reports one analyst asked CEO RJ Scaringe that exact question and specifically referenced Keogh’s BloomberG interview when they asked. Scaringe quickly shut down that idea, saying, “We don’t plan to offer an EREV, or for that matter a series hybrid, which would require putting an engine in the vehicle. So that’s not in our product roadmap, or something we’re thinking about at all.”

That shouldn’t be a surprise, especially considering how much work it would take to add a gasoline engine to the electric cars it has already developed. It’s also important to remember that Scout still hasn’t started building its EREVs, much less sold them. Oh, and let’s also not forget that the plan here is to hang a four-cylinder engine behind the rear axle. Cynicism may not be cool, but let’s just say I’m extremely skeptical that any of these rear-engined Scouts will go into production in 2028 or even before 2030. Maybe someday? I would love to be proven wrong, but we still have years before we find out.

From Rivian’s perspective, it simply doesn’t make sense to invest in a bridge technology that will soon become irrelevant. As Scaringe put it, “We believe that everything will be electric, everything will be software-defined and everything will have a very high level of autonomous capability. And so we’re very focused on staying at the forefront of electrification.”