America's next car factory has campsites, a treehouse and a stargazing site. nobody noticed
Rivian has revealed the full design for its $5 billion Georgia campus, a 2,000-acre site where the assembly plant occupies one half and preserved forest the other. This unique design, which includes named trails, a treehouse, bird-watching posts, a stargazing site, ten campsites, ten EV-charging eco-cabins, a 50-seat restaurant, an off-road driving circuit, and a 13,000-square-foot museum, positions it as America's first car factory conceived as an overnight public destination.
Rivian has released the site plans and renderings for its manufacturing campus at Stanton Springs North, Georgia — a $5 billion facility on roughly 2,000 acres along Interstate 20, 45 miles east of Atlanta — and the layout breaks a century of factory logic. Roughly half the property, about 1,000 acres of forest, will be preserved for driving tracks, campsites and walking trails, according to Jimmy Knauf, Rivian's Executive VP of Facilities.
The industrial core is orthodox and serious: stamping beside the body shop, feeding paint and general assembly, with an automated storage facility and a rail marshalling yard connecting to the CSX main line for Atlanta and the Georgia ports — and a new I-20 interchange pulling truck traffic onto the property before it touches local roads.
Everything around it reads like a park map. Trails named The Burls, The Moss, The Arrowhead and the Loblolly Trail wind through the western woodland, with a treehouse, a stargazing site, bird-watching posts and timber eco-bridges, under a program board titled "Where Adventure Starts" that promises visitors "a literal and psychological threshold into the serene, protected woodland."
The public build-out arrives in three phases. First, a 39,200-square-foot service and delivery centre with ten lifts, indoor delivery bays, a shop and an initial test track with viewing pavilion; then a full driving-experience circuit anchored by a 50-seat restaurant, display lounge and terraced spectator seating; finally, ten canvas-tent campsites with fire pits, ten 250-square-foot eco-cabins with Level 2 chargers, and a 13,000-square-foot Rivian museum.
The architecture matches the ambition: SOM is design architect, with mass-timber grids, deep overhangs and facilities lined with plantings, and the plant is estimated to create 7,500 jobs by 2030. Rivian's senior director of facility operations, Elle Navarro, describes the campus as "a city in the forest."
Buildings go vertical in 2027, with customer vehicle production targeted for 2028 — meaning the forest, the trails and the visitor campus are being designed in from the foundations, not retrofitted as decoration.
Trend context
American manufacturing is in its biggest construction boom in a generation, and almost all of it is being built the old way: fenced, windowless, and apologised for. Europe long ago proved the alternative — Volkswagen's Autostadt made Wolfsburg a tourist destination and BMW Welt made a delivery centre a Munich landmark — but no American carmaker has designed a plant as a public destination, let alone one with overnight guests. Rivian's Georgia plans import the idea and radicalise it: not a brand pavilion bolted to a factory, but a preserved forest wrapped around one.
The timing gives it stakes. The EV market has entered its unsubsidised era, where brand gravity has to do the work incentives used to — and a factory people hike, camp and learn to off-road at is brand gravity made of timber and trails. It also lands in the middle of the South's EV-corridor story, where states have spent billions courting plants that communities often experience as traffic and tax abatements; a factory that gives its county a museum, trails and campsites is a new answer to the oldest question in industrial development: what do the neighbours get?
And there's the quieter business story underneath: a company known for burning cash choosing to spend design money on public forest — a bet that the factory itself can be marketing, recruitment tool and community licence all at once. Whether that bet works will be studied by every manufacturer breaking ground in America this decade.
About Rivian
Why we exist
Rivian was founded on a belief its category treated as a contradiction: that a love of vehicles and a love of the natural world belong to the same person. The company exists to keep the world adventurous forever — its own words — building in service of a future "our kids' kids' kids deserve," where exploring the planet and preserving it stop being opposites.
How we do it
Vertically and deliberately. Rivian develops its own vehicle software, electrical architecture and much of its hardware in-house, manufactures in America, and sells direct to customers rather than through dealers. The same integration became a second business: the company's software and services now power partners beyond its own badge.
What we do
Rivian designs and builds electric adventure vehicles — the R1 and R2 passenger lines and commercial delivery vans — manufactured in Normal, Illinois, supported by its own charging, service and software ecosystem, and reported across two segments: Automotive, and Software and Services. Founded in June 2009 by RJ Scaringe; headquartered in Irvine, California.
Why it matters
The enemy is the false choice the last century of industry offered: progress or preservation, never both. Every fenced-off plant, every vehicle that treated the outdoors as scenery to drive past, reinforced it. A company built by people who actually use the wild has different incentives — and different obligations.
Who it's for
The person whose vehicle is the means, not the point — the family whose best weekends end with mud on the sills, the owner who chose electric not to give up the outdoors but to keep it.
Proof points
Founded 2009. 10,365 vehicles delivered in Q1 2026, with full-year guidance of 62,000 to 67,000. Two reporting segments including Software and Services. A commercial van programme with America's largest e-commerce company. An East Coast headquarters in Atlanta bringing 500 jobs, alongside 7,500 planned in Georgia by 2030.
Traction & credibility
Seventeen years from founding to a second vehicle platform in production and a third factory under construction. The software business now sells beyond Rivian's own vehicles — the startup supplying a global automaker rather than the reverse. State partnership at the highest level: Georgia's governor and Atlanta's mayor jointly announced the company's East Coast expansion.
Spokespeople
RJ Scaringe
founder & CEO
The origin scar is the contradiction he grew up inside: a lifelong car obsessive who came to see what cars were doing to the places he loved — so the MIT-trained engineer founded, in 2009, a company to dissolve the contradiction rather than pick a side. His unfair advantage: seventeen years of refusing the industry's either/ors — performance or efficiency, software or steel, industry or forest. The Georgia campus is that refusal poured in mass timber.
Jimmy Knauf
EVP of Facilities
The man who put a treehouse in a factory plan. On the record that half the property stays forest, he carries the how: the phasing, the preserved woodland, the logistics that keep trucks off local roads.
Talking points
The asset
The factory you can camp at: Rivian's Georgia campus, half plant, half forest
The story
Rivian has revealed the full design for its $5 billion Georgia campus: a 2,000-acre site where the assembly plant occupies one half and preserved forest the other — threaded with named trails, a treehouse, bird-watching posts and a stargazing site, and finishing, across three phases, with an off-road driving circuit, a 50-seat restaurant, ten campsites, ten EV-charging eco-cabins and a 13,000-square-foot museum. SOM-designed, vertical in 2027, producing vehicles in 2028 — the first American car factory conceived as an overnight destination.
Why it matters
America is building factories at a pace not seen in decades, almost all of them designed to be endured by their neighbours rather than visited. One company spending real money to invert that — public land, public trails, public beds — creates a reference point every future plant will be measured against, and tests whether a factory can be a brand's strongest marketing asset instead of its best-hidden one.
Who does it impact
Walton and Morgan counties get a museum, trails and campsites where other communities got fences. Rivian owners get a pilgrimage site — buy the vehicle, learn to off-road it, sleep under the stars where it was built. Georgia gets the flagship of its EV corridor. And every manufacturer breaking ground in America gets an uncomfortable new question from local officials: where are your trails?
Proof points
$5 billion; roughly 2,000 acres; 39,200 sq ft phase-one delivery centre; a 50-seat restaurant; ten campsites; ten 250 sq ft eco-cabins with Level 2 charging; a 13,000 sq ft museum. Half the site — about 1,000 acres — preserved forest, per Rivian's EVP of Facilities. SOM design, mass-timber construction, 7,500 jobs by 2030. Renderings and site maps published.
CTA
The full renderings are available via Rivian's newsroom. Jimmy Knauf is available for facility interviews. The site itself, 45 miles east of Atlanta, is already visible from the interstate.
Key facts
- Project Name
- Rivian Georgia Campus
- Investment
- $5 billion
- Site Size
- 2,000 acres
- Forest Preservation
- 1,000 acres (half the site)
- Location
- 45 miles east of Atlanta, Walton and Morgan counties, Georgia
- Architect
- SOM
- Construction Start (vertical)
- 2027
- Vehicle Production Start
- 2028
- Jobs Created
- 7,500 by 2030
- Key Features
- Off-road driving circuit, 50-seat restaurant, 10 campsites, 10 EV-charging eco-cabins, 13,000 sq ft museum, named trails, treehouse, bird-watching posts, stargazing site
Get in touch
Elle Navarro
Senior Director, Facility Operations & Workplace Development
Drop me a note and I'll reply by email.