Hi and welcome to the Automotive News Shift podcast, where we bring you the latest on automotive technology, trends, and transformation.

I'm Molly Boygan, tech and innovation reporter at Automotive News.

And I'm Riley Hodder, an editorial intern at Automotive News. Today's guest is RJ Scouringe,

the CEO of Rivian Automotive. This is the second half of our own Lawrence Iliff's conversation

with RJ about how Rivian is preparing for the next generation of automated driving.

I think it's inconceivable to maintain market share and not be in a software-defined architecture.

And that's independent of China.

But first, let's talk about the week.

Riley, you were working on a story related to Redwood Materials this week.

So what's the latest?

Yeah.

So Redwood Materials is a battery recycling firm. It was founded by some of Tesla's main players to kind of take end-of-life EV batteries from major automakers and turn them into newer batteries that could be used again in future EVs. But today, they're kind of shifting their priorities and taking a different turn.

They're kind of looking to, instead of making new EV batteries, also use those end-of-life

EV batteries to power energy storage systems that can, you know, power data centers for AI

and for climate control systems and stuff like that, rather than just focusing all in on

EVs.

So we've seen this in kind of a couple of ways.

They just announced in October that they raised $350 million in a Series C financing round

to power these kinds of projects.

Bloomberg also reported that they had some layoffs in November, and some of those layoffs were in

relation to commercial cathode material engineering. So, you know, that is a really big part of

EV batteries, specifically lithium ion batteries. And then they've also really invested heavily

...