MAX PACK, When will I see the R1S?
I've asked Customer Service this question several times. The answer has varied, but it's always been some form of "there should be an announcement [fill in this blank with your choice of ambiguous date]."
One of the blanks was "sometime after R1S deliveries begin", while another was "sometime early in the new year" and another "hopefully first quarter of the new year." The constant was that what will happen is that there will be "an announcement"; at no point did anyone say what that announcement would consist of.
I strongly suspect that reason Rivian is being vague about this is because it's proving to be more difficult than expected to fit the Max Pack into the R1S. This is a guess of course, but we can say for sure that there is less room for a larger battery in the R1S because of the third row of seats. I'd guess that the 180 kWh battery pack used on the R1T Max won't fit in the S and needs to be either reconfigued or redesigned, perhaps with a reduction in capacity.
I'll take Rivian at their word that we will see an announcement about the R1S Max in the next few months and hope that at the least, the announcement will signal that the R1S Max is now an option in the configurator. That means however that Rivian must finalize the engineering for the R1S Max over the next several months.
Design finalization aside, I frankly don't expect that Rivian will want to introduce the new model into their manufacturing line until they get much further along in Long Range production. If that's correct, I'd think that the R1S Max production would begin in late 2022, with deliveries ramping up beginning in 2023.
Most of us who want the R1S Max probably won't have one in the driveway for quite some time. I'd be happy to be proved wrong, but think that delivery in late 2023 or early 2024 is probably realistic.