The minute I strapped on a helmet to test out Rivian’s new generation of electric vehicles, I could tell the Amazon-partnered electric car company was entering a new stage.

On a race track outside of Seattle, Washington, I — along with several other journalists and content creators — were eagerly awaiting to hop in two of the company’s refreshed R1S and R1T EVs, both of which were clad in shiny tire blankets to keep their rubber hot and ready for speed trials.

Needless to say, our experience wasn’t going to be your typical test drive. We were there to behold not just the power that four electric motors and a new drive unit bring to the table, but also how software (a critical piece of Rivian’s identity) can convey and augment the expert engineering of a car company with big ambitions.

More specifically, we were there, with Rivian’s help, to freakin’ launch — Tesla-style.

An estimated 30 percent of produce in America never makes it off the farm. That means that for every two heads of iceberg lettuce shipped to a grocery store, one is left to rot. Likewise, for every two bunches of spinach or celery, for every two ears of sweet corn, for every pair of tomatoes, one is allowed to sit unharvested.

In the race to reduce such food waste, some farmers are turning to technologies to conserve resources and cut losses before produce even leaves the farm. They are using composting systems and anaerobic digesters to turn waste into fertilizer for the next planting. To improve those systems, agri-engineers are working on “recycling robots” to sort edible food from waste more accurately. And there is also a significant effort going into developing artificial intelligence programs that identify and monitor points of waste in the production process.

But technology only gets us so far. We’re not likely to engineer our way out of this problem.