Rivian Will Delay Construction of a $5 Billion Factory in Georgia

“Our Georgia site remains really important to us,” Rivian’s chief executive, R.J. Scaringe, said at an event on Thursday where he unveiled two new sport-utility vehicles. “It’s core to scaling across all these vehicles.”

One of the S.U.V.s, called the R2, is a five-passenger vehicle that is expected to be available in the first half of 2026. Originally, the R2 was supposed to be the first vehicle produced in Georgia. Shifting production to Normal, Ill., where the company has an operating factory, will allow Rivian to begin delivering the vehicle to customers sooner, Mr. Scaringe said.

The R2 will have a starting price of about $45,000, he said, which is $30,000 less than its larger S.U.V., the R1S. The R2, Mr. Scaringe said, “combines capability, performance, utility, storage, functionality in a way that we think really fits with a huge customer need.”

Rivian also introduced the R3, a compact S.U.V., and a high-performance version of that vehicle, the R3X. The company did not say when or where those models would be produced.

Delaying construction of the new factory is a setback for Georgia and its governor, Brian Kemp, a Republican, who had promoted the construction as the largest economic development project in the state’s history. Rivian had said it expected the plant to create 7,500 jobs and eventually produce 400,000 vehicles a year.