Schwab, 48, joined Rivian last fall after being recruited from Aston Martin, where she was president of the Americas for five years. She also had a long career at Jaguar Land Rover, where she rose to marketing director for the British automaker’s U.K. operations.
In 2020, she was named one of Automotive News‘ 100 Leading Women in the North American Auto Industry.
Her job at Rivian was to set up the sales and marketing operations for the automaker, headquartered in Irvine, Calif., as it began the pivot from startup to revenue-generating company. Her base salary was $360,000 per year; she was eligible for a 40 percent bonus; and she received other incentives.
The lawsuit, announced by Schwab on Medium, states that she did not believe the company could sell its vehicles profitably and would have to raise prices; she was not convinced the manufacturing process could produce a safe and reliable vehicle; and she thought the company’s delivery dates were “not achievable.”
Schwab’s supervisor, Jiten Behl, Rivian’s chief commercial and growth officer, the suit says, asked her not to “raise these issues in front of Scaringe.”
The company set a December 2020 date for the first deliveries of its highly anticipated R1T electric pickup, a deadline that would be pushed back several times. Across the globe, automakers and their supply chains have been slowed the microchip shortage, which compounded production problems related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The company’s first customer deliveries of the R1T finally took place late last month. It remains unclear whether Rivian will meet its goal of delivering 1,000 pickups to customers by the end of next month or whether the Launch Edition of the R1S electric SUV remains on track to be delivered by then as well.
As of late October, only two R1Ts per day were rolling off the assembly line at the Rivian plant in Normal, Ill. The company is also under pressure to meet its obligation of delivering 100,000 electric delivery vans to Amazon. Rivian hopes to build 10,000 of the vans in 2022.
