The Rivian R3 Look Has a Name: Julliana Cho
Oregon childhood, Royal College of Art, Porsche and Mercedes desks, then Rivian: the Korean American senior design manager who led exterior design on the R3 — the compact EV that still stops scroll feeds years before deliveries.
IRVINE — Everyone has an opinion about the Rivian R3’s shape. Fewer people can name who owned the silhouette.
Julliana Cho can. As a senior design manager at Rivian, she led exterior design on the compact EV that sits somewhere between hatchback and crossover, with rally-car posture that made it a Top Gear Design of the Year favorite long before anyone can order one for 2027. In a MotorTrend profile for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, she said the R3’s silhouette and main graphics came from her original themes — then the team layered wheels, rear graphics, and the R3X spoiler together.
That is the version of the story Asian American and Asian Canadian households should hear more often. Not another faceless brand film. A person with a passport full of studios who still had to invent a new Rivian proportion from a blank page.
Cho’s path is the map. Childhood in Oregon, years in Korea, industrial design studies that wandered through fashion, graphics, and architecture until car design clicked as art plus engineering. A master’s in transportation design at London’s Royal College of Art. Internship at Porsche in Germany. Full-time EV work at BMW. Exterior lead roles on Mercedes-Benz’s A-Class and GLA-Class. Family pulled her back to Korea for advanced design leadership, including concept work that never needed a U.S. dealer lot to matter. She joined Rivian in early 2021, just as the R1T was becoming real metal.
She drives a Porsche 911 Carrera S and an R1S Dune Edition now — the quiet proof that the person penning your next EV also understands a Sunday canyon and a weekday school run.
What she notices about Rivian is the room layout. Interior, exterior, color, and trim sit together. Decisions move faster. Impact is larger when the company is still young. Designing the next S-Class has precedent; inventing a Rivian that is not an R1 shrink-wrap does not. Keep the brand’s honesty, she told MotorTrend, without exaggerating forms that cannot survive production. That is why the show car still looks like something you might actually see on Wilshire or in Markham in a few years.
Her design creed sounds almost boring until you look at the R3: extreme simplicity, strip what is nonessential, let natural volumes meet sharp technical details. She cites Dieter Rams. She also cites living across countries as a strength, even when identity feels complicated. For readers who grew up translating between a parent’s badge loyalty and an Instagram feed of concept cars, that line lands.
Jeff Hammoud’s brief for the car — joy of driving, soul of rally machines like the Lancia Delta Integrale and Audi Quattro without cosplay — needed someone who could translate emotion into clay and pixels. Cho’s job was to make that brief look inevitable.
If your household is waiting on R2 deliveries or still arguing hybrid versus EV, park the R3 as a design story first. Production math, range, and insurance come later. Start with our two-car EV and hybrid household split, the road trip charging networks guide, and yesterday’s practical note on old NACS adapters and the R2.
When the R3 finally shows up in real traffic, you will already know whose sketches you are looking at.