RV Tech, a joint venture between Volkswagen Group and Rivian, has completed a successful winter test program, it said this morning. The partnership was created in 2024 when VW Group announced it would invest $5.8 billion in the American electric vehicle maker to gain access to Rivian’s expertise in vehicle software and electronic architecture. VW Group initially paid Rivian $1 billion in cash, with further payments over time: the completion of the winter testing milestone should unlock a further $1 billion payment.

VW’s decision to turn to Rivian followed a tortuous history of its own internal software development. It created a new division in 2019 just to develop software for cars, then immediately bit off more than it could chew by trying to simultaneously develop three different vehicle operating systems. Things went the opposite of smoothly, with software-related delays to the two new platforms used by cars like the VW ID.4 and Porsche Macan that led to chairman Herbert Diess’ firing and the third platform delayed until late in this decade.

Rivian, meanwhile, had no such problems developing its own vehicle electronic architecture and software, starting from a clean sheet unencumbered by generations of legacy cruft. As a startup automaker, Rivian needs money, and since Volkswagen needs better tech, the joint venture makes a lot of sense.

To the Arctic Circle

Automakers love testing cars in the Arctic Circle. It’s about as cold an environment as anyone’s going to drive a car, so if you can make your systems reliable in those extreme temperatures, they should be just fine in milder winters. And there are plenty of frozen lakes, with vast flat expanses of ice thick enough to drive cars across with no worries. So you can test chassis tuning and traction and stability control work at the same time.