Since I own both, I can speak from our family’s perspective. For my own use case, Rivian really makes a damn good compelling product with tons of practicality. For our road tripping, my family prefers R1S over Air. I think R1S drives fine if you are just doing highway, but for inner city, Air is more ride comfortable of course. Both have luxury interior, but R1S excels at many software intuitiveness, built-in motion trigger surveillance, driver-cams in 4 directions, camping mode, snow mode, tons of cool off-road modes, map and CGI traffic view on dashboard, strong sound system, towing, enormous storage with frunk and spare tire compartment.
Its weakness is no soft door close, high vampire drain, to me it’s acceptable if you have level-2 charger in your garage. Also when switching to 2 motors from quad motors drive mode for energy conservation, I find I can get closer to EPA than I ever can with Air. Air I have to do hard hypermill to get to 85-90% EPA, but R1S, I can probably do 115% of EPA without putting excessive effort. But at EPA 2.2mi/kWh, that’s not too hard to beat. And its navigation range estimate is usually on dot which I hope Air will have OTA to improve that eventually.
Style-wise, I like both R1S and Air. Gravity does not speak to me, at least not yet until I see the full reveal.