Biography|RJ Scaringe — Mainstream Motors Starts on Yellow Place

The name Rivian is later.

The first company name was borrowed from his father's shop.

In June 2009 Scaringe went back to Rockledge, Florida, and founded Mainstream Motors as the sole employee.

CNBC reported that he formed the firm the day after the MIT doctorate.

Florida corporate records list Mainstream Engineering Corporation — Robert P. Scaringe's firm, filed in 1986 — at 200 Yellow Place.

The Orange County Register and CNBC both place the son's first workshop in that same industrial cluster.

Father and son refinanced houses to float the start. Those houses are not this pin.

The first product idea was a small sports coupe priced near 25,000 dollars, as he told the Orlando Sentinel in May 2010.

The firm was later styled Avera, then Rivian in 2011, a play on the Indian River that runs past Rockledge and Melbourne.

Hyundai objected to Avera as too close to Azera, which is why the river spelling is the one that stuck.

Yellow Place is a working industrial park, not a visitor exhibit.

Twelve years later the same founder would put a finished truck on a line in Illinois.

Photo: Richard Truesdell, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Los Angeles Auto Show, 27 November 2018).