Seattle’s University Village shopping center is turning into an auto row of sorts for electric vehicle makers.
Rivian, the maker of electric trucks, SUVs and delivery vans for Amazon, is opening a pop-up showroom in a space that was formerly an Amazon Books location, the Puget Sound Business Journal first reported.
The EV maker joins Tesla and Lucid with showrooms at U. Village. Lucid arrived last June with a space to show off its Air Grand Touring luxury sedan.
Rivian already has a service center in Bellevue, Wash., and leased a large warehouse location in South Seattle last fall, the Journal reported. The U. Village showroom is expected to open in late summer and operate through early 2024, a mall rep confirmed with GeekWire.
The first Amazon Books location opened at U. Village in 2015, and closed in 2022 when Amazon pulled back on a number of its physical retail operations. The location has been home recently to a Vuori clothing pop-up store.
Amazon first partnered with Rivian in 2019 in a deal for 100,000 delivery vans for the e-commerce giant. Amazon has continued to pour money into the EV maker through its Climate Pledge Fund. Amazon was among the lead investors in a $2.5 billion financing round in the company.
The delivery vans are becoming a more common sight in Seattle and elsewhere as Amazon rolls them out across a number of U.S. cities.
Founded in 2009, California-based Rivian, which also makes pickup trucks, has raised about $10.5 billion to date. The Amazon vans are made at Rivian’s factory in Illinois.
