Rivian executive quits amid major company shakeup

Rivian Automotive, Inc., an Irvine, California-based electric vehicle automaker and auto tech firm founded in 2009, is currently shuffling its management team. In the midst of this shakeup, one of its executives managing the production has quit.

According to Reuters, Rivian Automotive revealed late last week that Charly Mwangi is set to leave the company. The executive was said to have helped kickstart the firm’s manufacturing process.

It was reported that Mwangi was a former executive at Tesla Inc., and at Rivian, he was appointed as executive vice president in May 2020. His main contribution to the company was bringing the R1T pickup truck and R1S SUV to production at the end of 2021.

The executive filed his resignation prior to the arrival of the new chief operations officer in June. Frank Klein, a former Magna International executive, is set to take over the said role next month, and his tasks include overseeing production, supply chain, and manufacturing engineering.

Meanwhile, a Rivian plant caught fire last weekend, and this was said to be the third fire incident involving the same company facility in the past seven months. This time, the fire is being linked to battery packs.

WGLT News reported that a battery pack went into thermal runaway, which means a battery cell overheated and ignited a fire. This happened in a battery testing area which is located in the southwest part of the facility where the batteries for Rivian electric vehicles are being made.

The Normal Fire Department responded to the fire and forced the evacuation of the battery assembly section on Saturday morning. The firemen also transferred the batteries outside after putting out the fire. They also went to cool down the batteries using water to avoid more overheating.

The batteries were said to have been released later to engineers of Rivian for investigation and disassembly. While they have pointed to the batteries as the cause since the fire happened in that area, investigations are still being carried out to determine the exact origin.

The fire department returned the building under the control of Rivian three hours after the initial report of the incident. No injury was reported, and the only thing damaged was the test booth equipment.