A Rivian electric delivery van wrapped in Walmart+ branding was photographed on a car hauler on I-94 in northwest Indiana today. It’s the first public sign that Walmart could become Rivian’s next big van customer after Amazon.
Neither company has announced a deal. But Walmart’s last two electric van suppliers are out of the business, and Rivian is one of the few companies still building a purpose-built electric delivery van in the US.
A Walmart+ Rivian van on I-94
Reddit user biggie_ballzzz posted the photo to r/RIVNstock this afternoon, asking if anyone had heard about a partnership. The van is strapped to a multi-car trailer between two Ford pickups, with a big “Walmart+” logo on the side and “Same day. Right to your door.” on the rear doors.
There’s no mistaking the vehicle. It’s Rivian’s Commercial Van, with the same tall body and red light bar wrapping around the rear that you see on Amazon Prime vans everywhere.
A few commenters suspected an AI image, but there’s no clear evidence. In fact, a second commenter then shared a photo of a van in the same livery parked in front of a Walmart Supercenter in Hammond, Indiana, about 30 miles to the west.
Rivian (RIVN) stock was up more than 3% this afternoon as the photo made the rounds, according to screenshots shared in the thread. That’s two days before Rivian reports its Q3 2026 results on Thursday, October 29.
Walmart keeps losing its electric van suppliers
Walmart has been trying to electrify last-mile delivery for years. Its supplier picks haven’t aged well.
In 2022, it signed up to buy 4,500 Canoo vans and put them to work on InHome deliveries. Canoo filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in January 2025 and ceased operations.
The same year, Walmart reserved 5,000 BrightDrop vans from GM, and officially added them to its delivery fleet in late 2024. Then GM killed BrightDrop production at its CAMI plant in Ontario a year ago, with no plan to build the van anywhere else. BrightDrop was on pace for roughly 4,000 US sales in 2025, compared to more than 60,000 for GM’s gas-powered Express and Savana vans.
So Walmart is running two orphaned EV van platforms. And if it wants more purpose-built electric vans at scale, the list of US options is very short.
Rivian still needs a second big van customer
Amazon ordered 100,000 vans from Rivian, and its fleet has now passed 40,000 units on the road. But the deal came with an exclusivity period that ended in November 2023, and Rivian has struggled to land anything close to Amazon-scale since.
AT&T signed up for a pilot in late 2023, and HelloFresh came on board in 2025. In February 2025, Rivian opened van sales to any business, with the RCV 500 starting at $79,900 and the larger RCV 700 at $83,900. None of those customers moves the needle like Walmart would.
There’s also a charging angle. Walmart now operates its own 400 kW fast-charging network at 100 stores in 20 states, and its manager of retail charging, Wade Higgins, previously worked at Rivian, according to his bio on the board of Minnesota car-sharing nonprofit HOURCAR.
Electrek’s Take
One van on a trailer isn’t a fleet order. Not yet, anyway. This could be a test unit for a pilot program, like the one AT&T announced in 2023. And since Rivian sells vans to any business now, Walmart could have simply bought a few to try them out.
But the timing makes sense. Walmart bet on Canoo and GM, and both left it with vans nobody builds anymore. If you’re Walmart and you want to keep electrifying same-day delivery, Rivian is the obvious call. Its plant in Normal, Illinois, has already built tens of thousands of these vans, and the platform has been proven at scale by the one company Walmart is trying to beat on delivery.
That’s the awkward part. Walmart putting its brand on the same van as Amazon Prime is a bit funny, and it says a lot about how thin the electric van market has gotten in the US.
For Rivian, a Walmart deal would matter. The van business gives it volume in Normal while R2 ramps, and it badly needs proof that the van isn’t just an Amazon product. We’ll see if Rivian says anything on Thursday’s call. We wouldn’t bet on a massive order announcement, but a Walmart pilot wouldn’t surprise us one bit.
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