Amazon took nearly a decade to become profitable, and seven years after its IPO, and that was during the crazy growth of the dotcom era. The article seems to try to make something of the company being around since 2009, ignoring that they were on a shoestring for multiple years until they had the idea and raised enough money to build their R1 prototypes which sparked significant interest. They're hardly hurting for orders with over 100,000 reservations still in their queue.
The article seems to want to pain as negative a picture as it can, taking the position that the Mercedes partnership may be a negative because Rivian cautiously (and properly) caveated the investment as not factored into their operational capital flow, when ninety percent of the companies I've seen would be fundraising on that fundraise. without shame and without looking back.
As for treating their initial reservation holders better, I don't think the CEO will ever be forgiven for the way he sprang the price increase on them, regardless of his quick about face on the matter. The company most assuredly could do better communicating actual useful information instead of warm and fuzzies with nothing actionable.
And finally, they need to come-to-Jesus quit shipping at a rate that doesn't allow absolute quality of assembly and requiring multiple service center visits. Whomever convinced the CEO that shipping anything to be repaired later did the company absolutely no favors.
I don't see many companies trying to build a multinational manufacturing operation from scratch these days, much less starting just before Covid kicked everyone's asses. Rivian will, eventually, be fine.
Amazon always seemed to claim they could have been profitable in the years after they IPO'd but simply chose to reinvest in growth and development. Investors believed in high future returns on this re-investment and preferred it over extracting it via dividends.
I'm not sure Rivian is making similar claims or investors would believe them if they were. Most likely, investors in Rivian are anxious for them to become profitable now that they're finally producing and selling cars. The "hard/expensive" part should be over for Rivian now that their production lines are operational.
These are very different companies operating in very different industries.
For a company, making a profit is the company saying across all of our divisions, on all the work that we do, we couldn't find a single initiative that we believe will return a higher risk adjusted ROI than paying down debt/putting money in a bank account/investing in index funds/returning money to shareholders.
When you have an order book 100,000 vehicles deep, the last thing on your mind should be making profits. There's obviously thousands of different projects at the company that are going to be returning wildly higher ROI than public markets and you should be spending your money on exploiting those opportunities.
Rivian needs something like Tesla's profitable 2H2018 where they showed that they could be profitable just selling S's and X's just before they endured massive losses while ramping up the 3 and Y.
Comparing a tech startup/company with a car manufacturing company is a bit much. First of all scaling isn't nowhere as easy as tech. Manufacturing is very capital intensive, and physical recalls are super expensive.
> And finally, they need to come-to-Jesus quit shipping at a rate that doesn't allow absolute quality of assembly and requiring multiple service center visits. Whomever convinced the CEO that shipping anything to be repaired later did the company absolutely no favors.
Curious, since you seem knowledgeable about this: do you truly think the CEO is choosing to ship products that aren't quite right? Or is someone in the QA space not doing their job thoroughly enough? Or do you feel like those things are indistinguishable, since the root cause doesn't matter and at the end of the day Rivian is shipping broken products?
Choosing might be the wrong word, but I would say "accepting", as I sincerely doubt the CEO is unknowledgeable of product delivered vs (expensive) rework required and demanded. One monkey on their back is the ever short-sighted demands of Wall Street, and they always want (too) rapid return on investment, which is made visible by the quantity of shipping product. A lot of people will be initially accepting of imperfection, happy to be engaging with the newly hot marque. But not all, and not forever, and especially when others may begin delivering that quality.
A company targeting quality needs to be delivering it from the outset (shades of Phaedrus). Tesla got away with, and still does to a huge extent because of customer buy-in, in delivering shoddy assembly because of the newness and strong desire for their initially niche product. Those EV manufacturers coming after Musk will not get such customer forgiveness, at least not as for long, and well, Tesla's no longer riding so high in valuation either. My opinion is that to be around for the long run, you need to be trusted and desirable - or to grow too big to fail - i.e. have the right kind of influence invested in your success for reasons other than the company's mission.
I absolutely believe the CEO's stated mission of building EVs for a climate focus reason is his actual goals, but he has to juggle delivering ROI sooner rather than later because that's what his early investors demanded, against producing product people will want to buy today and ten years from now. The already limited by $80K price customer base though is slowly becoming more discerning, mostly because they can, and those early company acceptances of unforced errors won't make it easier to become and remain the climate influencer he wants to be.
All said, RJ's job is a lot of electrified barbed wire fence straddling.
IMO, the powered tonneau was an unforced error. They could have shipped a manual one first, but instead went ahead with a finnicky design that has been problematic.
Beyond that, I don't have a problem with the decision making. From watching the forums, the issues look like normal growing pains for a startup to me.
It’s different. Rivian will have serious issues without all the gov loans and money Tesla got. I expect Tesla to struggle a lot in the future as the more established brands get their EV stories solidified. There is a lot more to a car or truck than a drivetrain. In some ways that’s the easiest part.
This is kind of a nasty article that just totally ignores the economics of scaling a complex manufacturing company.
The same quarter last year Rivian earned a nominal $1mm. This quarter they produced actual product they sold for $536 million.
I don’t know much about Rivian’s product, but I know people called Tesla “structurally unprofitable” for years. They were totally bankrupt, a fraud, etc…
Fact is that it costs a tremendous amount of money to scale up a car company to the point where volume and margins will lead to profitability and positive free cash flow.
What matters is that they are shipping real cars, and that people who own their cars are nearly fanatical in their love and support for them. If that is true, which I don’t know if it is, then burning money to scale up is the right move.
The oil and conventional ICE industries are still desperately hoping that EVs will fail and I'm sure they are sponsoring incredible amounts of astroturf to that effect.
I got an EV a while back. It's a Nissan Leaf, not the "sexiest" EV by any stretch, but other than recharge time it outperforms a similar class gas car on every single metric: fuel cost, driving experience, acceleration, overall performance, TCO, reliability, and so on.
Gas cars are inferior in every single way except recharge time and (depending on model) range and the gap is closing rapidly in those areas.
What are you basing these claims on? What ICE cars is the Leaf outperforming?
Nobody considers an 8 second 0-60 time to be fast. The MSRP on the Leaf starts at $28,000. And for that price, you can get a base model Accord that is 2 seconds faster 0-60.
What other ICE cars did you drive to compare the driving experience? (I bet you didn't even drive any.)
Please tell me how you came to the conclusion that your Leaf is more reliable than an Accord. I don't want to hear how there are less moving parts. Stats on your reliability claim.
What the hell is "overall performance"? The Leaf outperforms ICE cars on "overall performance?" What does that mean?
Overall performance means all things considered: cost, cost of fuel, acceleration, driving experience, maintenance cost, etc. Think of it like a weighted average.
I’ve driven tons of ICE cars.
It’s not a sports car and I’m sure many will beat it to 60. It does however seem to beat most ICE cars at accelerating from full stop and maneuvering to merge. This is because electric motors give you full torque instantly. There is zero noticeable latency between pedal and motion and you really get used to that.
The only ICE cars that don’t feel mushy now are muscular sportscars that are more expensive than the Leaf. But there are more costly EVs that will beat virtually any ICE car to 60 and beyond.
The technology is just superior at everything but range and recharge time, and as I said those gaps are closing. Prices are also slowly coming down, especially if you factor in fuel and maintenance cost.
ICE engines have maybe a decade left at most in the regular car market. They will persist longer for long haul vehicles due to recharge time and range. It will be a while before electric works for long haul trucking unless we spend a lot on charge infrastructure.
I think this is just head in the sand thinking. BEVs are here to stay and are indisputably the future. EVs are already cheaper than comparable ICE vehicles in terms of TCO, and they can be made cheaper than comparable ICE vehicles even up-front.
But more importantly, gasoline will only ever get more expensive. The expertise to maintain extremely complex and efficient gasoline engines will only get more expensive. The taxes on burning gasoline will only get more expensive. And as volume falls, gas stations have to spread their overhead across fewer gallons sold, only exacerbating the price increase at the pump.
All the while electricity will only get less expensive. Many homeowners will choose to make a small upfront investment in panels and produce more energy onsite than they will ever consume, making their EVs even less expensive per mile. Real-world advances in battery tech and smart grid infrastructure will allow the car to play double-duty as a backup power source for the home, and even triple duty a profit-generating part of the electrical grid.
The only limiting factor for BEVs is charging infrastructure. If you have a home you can charge at, and particularly if you have a roof you can put solar panels on, then your next car, or the car after that, will absolutely be an BEV. For those without home charging, we will either need incredible public charging infrastructure, or perhaps the ability for the car to go get itself a charge on its own in the middle of the day/night.
Well Energiewende is making energy more expensive despite the promises about cheap energy. Renewables thanks to the fact that you need to keep baseline via fossil plant (gas or coal), is making electric energy more expensive. The fact that you are creating more demand for electric energy through mandated BEVs is making electric energy more expensive and BEVs unappealing. There is no reason for electric energy to be cheaper, it will be only more expensive.
Point and case: It is already more expensive to charge on Fast DC chargers than take gas for ICE.
BEVs and biofuels are not even comparable at all. For starters, biofuel is always at least as expensive as oil-based fuel if not more. Electricity is almost always dramatically cheaper except for maybe those few areas that get electricity from oil.
It's very interesting how the EV industry models itself off the software industry, where companies deal more in hype and promises than actual products. This is expected from software, but it's surreal when it's a car company. The only EV company that started as an EV company and actually makes cars is Tesla, Rivian is a strong second and they have made like 2,000 cars.
It's a capital-intensive industry with a long lead development cycle. You develop the product, then you develop the factories, then you actually build the factories. Software has a long lead development cycle but no capital investment in production facilities afterwards. I'd expect the auto industry to have longer times before profitability vs the software industry.
Rivian has produced about 14,000 cards YTD and they seem to be on-pace for annualized production of 25,000 cars. That's not an overall impressive number, but getting a car company off the ground seems quite difficult and capital intensive. Rivian seems likely to survive. Some of the others... not so much.
They should have treated their reservation holders better. I put in a reservation before they signed a delivery van deal, then they played pricing games, then IPO games, and now I'm hearing the RWD versions are being cancelled.
Maybe their partnerships will keep them afloat or maybe the quad motor offering will be enough. Either way, I've lost all interest in this company I supported early on and I know I'm the not only one.
Agree they should have treated their reservations better, but their reservation holders were only going to help them lose money faster. It doesn't help anyone if they go bankrupt. I don't think they can just blame inflation although I'm sure that's a big factor in their increased losses, but watching some tear down videos, they have lots of opportunity to reduce costs.
Decided I don't need a truck, buying a mid-size electric SUV.
The Lightning Pro seems positioned really well for price; I did see a Platinum trim at a show which I liked a lot but it's way more cost and vehicle than I need.
A truck without solid state batteries or lithium-sulfer and a good recharging network is just a glorified suburban commuting vehicle with terrible aerodynamics.
Scaling is tough, it's what Tesla has done pretty well. I don't think these numbers are nuts if the numbers represent proper scaling and investment, people were freaking out about Tesla's losses, but if you looked at the production capacity investment it looked completely rational (although with those numbers the funding can be difficult).
Roadster --> S --> X --> 3 --> Y and scaling production numbers all kept things plausible even if the absolute numbers seemed nuts.
Now Lucid and Rivian need to navigate more uncertain fundraising conditions, but at a certain point they become, at a minimum, acquisition targets for the multitude of large automakers that dragged their feet on EVs like Fiat Chrysler, Toyota, etc, or as a foothold for the chinese EV makers.
Why the Chinese haven't invaded the US market is puzzling. But they are coming.
Rivian has tons of inefficiencies in their system sapping away precious capital
Munro had a video [1] just for a single item, seats, and comparing the Ford F150L vs Rivian on a component-by-component basis, and even accounting for slightly higher luxury setting for Rivian, the over engineering and related cost and supply chain issues is astounding.
That's an under appreciated point. Dealing with inefficiencies is perhaps Elon's greatest strength and why Tesla and SpaceX managed to succeed.
Andrej Karpathy (ex-Tesla head of AI) talked about this recently. "I think Elon is a very efficient warrior in the fight against entropy in organizations". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbxladysbTE
Exactly, Elon might be a nitpicking boss from hell, but it does result in some excellent efficiencies in tesla manufacturing process, from the super bottle to the octovalve, some amazing stuff has come out of it.
Tesla's are consistently at the bottom of reliability ratings and rather infamous for their crap build quality. Obviously they are ahead with Autopilot and their electric drive train. But in terms of building cars they're terrible and way behind leaders like Honda & Toyota.
With Tesla I've understood that it's an onion, each layer having a new adventure.
Where it comes to things engineers can do, Tesla leads the pack comfortably. Seeing as Tesla and SpaceX attract the best and brightest of engineers straight from university, this a resource Elon can comfortably throw at any problem and get amazing results, since he doesn't answer to anyone and give a carte blanche to his minions to work at the problem to his satisfaction. Hence the amazing coolant systems and motors and stuff like that.
but where it refers to things which are to be done by assembly line staff... that requires institutional knowledge, which, like good tea, require time to steep, and that's something Elon is unwilling to wait on, and Tesla suffers as a consequence.
This is not something you can throw money or engineers to fix, (sure to some extent, but...) it takes time for the line workers to get into the rhythm of building things correctly, the first time without error, and further time to build up speed. Elon's impatience hampers this, and the constant changes and tweaks doesn't help.
Tesla had a thermal management system called "Super bottle", which later eveolved into the "OctoValve".
instead of multiple coolant systems as in other cars, they combined them all into one big system, and gain benefits from that. It was a very clever bit of engineering, and octovalve only improved upon it further.
for something like seats, yes, Ford has both its processes, and market understanding pat down (it knows just how luxurious it seats need to be for the segment it's targeting, which material or stitch features are not worth investing on, for example) and can have those seats made in the best possible way.
Rivian is making more luxurious seats, so some costs to account for that is understood, but when you four differently sized plastic pieces for each end of the seat, when one same piece could do, (which means four different supply chains instead of one) it really does show the inexperience of new manufacturers.
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But give a point for the EV side of things too, where old manufacturers are wasting material weight due to legacy frameworks etc (Munro has videos on that too)
Yeah, I think seats are the least of my concerns when buying an EV.
I don't want $5000 added to the price tag for fancy seats. Just give me more battery and power.
I mean sure, if you make 500+ mile trips frequently, by all means, get yourself a custom car seat, but I just want a frictionless experience of getting from A to B (cheaply)
You are talking about the wrong segment of cars, neither Rivian nor its competitor the Ford F150L are trying to capture your segment, if I understand it correctly.
but the issue is about the manufacturing process for the seats.
Rivian would have five different plastic pieces, for say, the underside of the seat, all requiring individual painting, whereas Ford has learnt that that piece could be one single textured molded piece, ready to go, so that is process engineering, and neither effect the luxuriousness of the seat, but there are still cost savings to be had.
Because the battery is what should be driving the value of the EV for me, the customer.
When the battery starts losing capacity, a larger battery will still have more miles, for longer, than a smaller one. The length of the trip has nothing to do with it, btw, only the total amount of miles driven in the expected lifetime of the vehicle.
The second biggest cost factor in an EV is the electric drivetrain.
As a customer, I want the manufacturer to spend the most amount of money on the parts of the car that get me from point A to point B (which are battery and drivetrain), not something frivolous like a $5000 car seat, when a $500 one is 99% as good.
If you use the car for 100k miles, you’ll spend anywhere from 70 to 270 straight 24 hr days sitting in that seat, depending on your mix of average speeds. (60 to 15 mph for these examples)
I can’t imagine a more sure fire way to hate past you than having bad and/or unergonomic seats. But hey, we all have different priorities.
If I am spending $75k on a vehicle it better have fancy seats. What you are describing is a budget EV, in that case then yes, don't add fancy seats. But in this price range luxury is expected.
I've been seeing a ton of Rivians around town recently so they are shipping cars. They just need to keep ramping up and hoping the higher interest rates are not causing too many cancellations. Their backlog is still 1yr+ though.
I don't see how this company or other smaller EV companies can compete at the scale a lot of investors think they will be at in the next few years.
Tesla had first to market advantage as well as autopilot to put them at the front of the market, but these companies don't have any of those advantages.
How are they going to compete in the market against Tesla, Ford, VW, GM, Daimler and other big auto companies who are going to be flooding the market with their EV over the next years and out scaling them do to having massive amount of cash, infrastructure, and supply chains already built. While Rivian will be stuck spending massive amount of cash to build infrastructure and supply chains all while playing catch up.
Ford is already outselling Rivian trucks and SUV with their Lighting, and Mach-E models all while being a profitable company.
Rivian is already valued at over half the value of Ford. Where do investors see the growth?
It's a really well designed piece of hardware, with actually innovative features that have done a great job separating itself from the existing stalwarts making boring, me-too cars that happen to be electric. If they can manage to bring that innovation down to a sub-$60k offering, they'll be able to pick off sales from cars like the Mustang Mach E that nobody seems to love but is in high demand, presumably due to its low price for those looking for a cheaper way to get away from combustion without spending a fortune.
They were also new enough to the market that they were able to draw a lot of excitement from investors before everybody else started competing tho, so your point is definitely fair, and it's probably become more of a gamble than originally anticipated.
Ford's "boring, me-too cars that happen to be electric" strategy on the F-150 Lightning was absolute genius. The F-150 has been the best-selling truck since 1977, and the best-selling vehicle since 1981. Why would one ever mess with that?
GM is taking a different approach on the Silverado EV. Still looks like a normal truck, but it's been designed around the electric powertrain. So we'll see who wins that race.
I'm sure I'm not the only person in the world that just wants a normal car or truck, but electric.
I agree. The F-150 Lightning is perhaps the polar opposite of the Mach-E. It's practical, and has literally dozens of smart choices made that leverage the utility of electric without them feeling remotely like tech demos.
If you extend the boring -> practical line out to "exciting," that seems to be where I mentally position the Rivian right now. It does largely feel like a tech demo, but one that is carefully considered, if somewhat less utilitarian.
While I agree that it will be difficult for smaller EV startups to compete against the whole market, this line always stands out to me:
> Tesla had first to market advantage
There is nothing that makes Tesla a monopoly.
At the time the Ford Model T was itself in Tesla's shoes, it used to come in only one color. Competitors quickly filled in for unmet market demand and introduced lots of options. Just like Ford, Tesla will not be able to meet the demands of every consumer, irrespective of their current production capacity.
Plenty of industrialized nations have a vested interest in their automotive industries and will do whatever it takes to help them along and grow to be competitive. Vehicle production is a national security interest. It supports factories and workers, keeping them fresh and knowledgeable. It provides great domestic jobs, domestic goods, and export potential. In times of war or other pressing need, these factories can be shifted to other types of production. Countries will ensure that their automotive industries survive.
This will not be a single company market. This will not even be a 10 company market. You'll see fifty auto companies competing and producing EVs.
Tesla may remain the market leader, but they will not dominate the market.
Exactly! Not only that, but "second movers" like Rivian have some advantages too. They don't have to build out their own charge network to support coast to coast travel. They don't have to invent their own charge standard because the industry one was limited to 50KW.
That also have lots of intangible benefits. In the early days of Tesla, reviews focused heavily on range and the lack of charging. Rivian reviews have been able to focus more on the vehicle, since people are more accustomed to EVs now. I see far fewer "oh noes, where will a customer charge" stories in the vehicle's reviews.
The challenges that are similar are all around scaling the business. Launching a car company is hard. Rivian is exceptionally well capitalized, though.
There are two big barriers to large-scale vehicle production that make disruption in the sector very difficult.
(1) huge capital investment required at scale — $billions
(2) regulation compliance — you have to follow the rules or you can’t sell in the US. You have to follow a different set of rules in Europe. This is expensive and time consuming.
The only way you could say that there will be dozens of whole-vehicle EV companies is if one or more of them are producing white label versions of the same vehicle for other companies.
The government, if it wanted to, could incentivize electric car production more directly than they have been so far, and with even more dollars. But it’s still going to be an easy business in which to lose vast sums of money.
The best case scenario is that VW, Toyota, etc get their shit together on software, whether separately or collectively.
I’m guessing you’re looking at market cap and not enterprise value when you are comparing Rivian to Ford. Market cap is about supply and demand based on a very limited number of shares changing hands, don’t confuse it with an actual company value.
Ford is no more profitable on its EV investment than Rivian. They just have a massive balance sheet to hide the R&D expenditures.
The way that Rivian competes is by making a better product. Versus Ford, GM, VW etc. that’s not really asking very much. There’s plenty of room in the market if their product is awesome. Mostly, IMO, that will come down to software expertise.
>The way that Rivian competes is by making a better product
Or they can sell an image like Toyota Jeep, Caddilac, etc. do with certain product lines (that said, all these OEMs have other product lines that compete on merit) and spend all their money on marketing and astroturfing.
Some of it might be a gold rush to "capture the next iphone" moment, but you have to understand, if govt are really seriously about banning ICE cars... then not having the weight of MASSIVE legacy systems hanging around your neck might have a value of its own.
It's not just about being a cassette manufacturer in the era of CDs, it's the possibility of govt banning cassettes all together.
True. I suppose it could be considered "context" for the headline, since readers are more likely to know Tesla than Rivian, although that's also true for Ford.
Wikipedia lists both the model X and Y as "crossover SUVs", though to my sedan-buying eyes the X looks like a standard SUV and the Y doesn't. Not sure what to say. Wikipedia says SUV, my eyes say SUV.
The need for the "crossover" qualifier says it all, IMO. It's a slightly taller station wagon, not something I'm going to take 10 miles down pock-marked forest roads.
What a strange idea to build an el camino (unibody pickup) for a flagman ev by a company... It is not a good pickup. It is not a good SUV. Why? Because Ford sells a lot of pickups? But Ford pickups are actually useful as pickups, Rivian is not.
They're ramping up production which will take time to see revenue. What I question most is whether the company culture has a sense of urgency needed compete compared to Tesla.
They’re selling retail as fast as they can produce them. Same for producing fleet vehicles. Their cash flow is all about their slow production and delivery right now.
It baffles me that they didn't come up with a better plan for getting a second factory online. If anything kills them, it will be the time taken to get to their second generation, high volume products.
Independent car companies don't survive without getting to hundreds of thousands of units a year. Tesla couldn't be profitable with less than 350k/year.
Yes, they are supply and production constrained; not demand constrained. Like most players in this industry in the current market they actually struggle to satisfy demand. That can only be fixed over time by investing in production capacity and supply chains.
Luckily, they have plenty of cash in reserve to survive the next few years. So, if they start addressing those issues, their revenue situation should improve as their production volume stabilizes.
They've been missing their production targets by a fairly large margin. Ultimately if they can actually build the trucks they should be in a decent spot, but that is apparently difficult.
Except that the DOE loan was for 465m. If they lost 1.7m in the quarter then the DOE loan wouldn't even be 1 month of operations. Even with inflation, the loan they received wouldn't touch the losses rivian has been having.
I do love their trucks and hope they succeed though
I know it’s a lot to ask of the general populace, but self-reflection is key here. I’m smart and confident. But I know that I would be a terrible person to give a $465m loan to.
Money is our economy’s way of rewarding those of us with outsized skills. It’s far from perfect, but it’s the best we’ve got. Is Tesla and Elon the best place to put that $465m? Maybe, maybe not. But it was the best we had at the time, and I certainly don’t see anyone better than him now.
That is indeed a lot to ask of the general populace.
But I don’t think even a majority of the populace had an issue with it anyway - it’s always the fringe extremists that get most of the press, they tend to be a lot more quotable than the ‘meh, I guess that’s fine’ folks.
GM and Chrysler needed them to stay alive. Other companies (including some banks) just took them because why not, the future was uncertain. It turns out Tesla didn't actually need the loan so they paid it back early.
Because at the time (2009 ish) auto companies were all getting bailout "loans" and many of them from the major auto corps were not paid back. Tesla got a fraction of what they did, and paid it back 9 years early and with interest.
See: PPP program, a near-trillion dollars of "Loans" that were not paid back.
Why isn't the numerous instances of federal bailouts in thousands of other companies NOT a talking point if Tesla's is? Savings and Loans, Mortgage crisis, airlines, etc.
If you don't think having a premier EV manufacturer in the US when the Chinese are otherwise poised for total domination of the sector isn't an economic national security issue, then I don't know what to tell you.
The PPP was multi-trillion, not near-trillion. And yes, there were a lot of issues with the PPP. That seems to have been fairly unique (thank goodness)
The other federal bailouts aren't talked about often on HN, because they are not tech companies. And most of those conversations feature the talking point "they paid back the loan" as well. I have no idea why it's important.
I'm fine with the government subsidizing EV manufacturing industries. That's not the question. The question is "why is it important they paid the loan back?"
Its not so much that they paid them back, but that they paid them almost 10 years ago. That wasn't because they had tons of money, that was because the loan wasn't worth the problems it was causing.
Most of the time that the DOE loan is brought up, the context is the implication that Tesla and SpaceX are parasites that only survive on taxpayer bailouts. So "they paid the loan back" is a pre-emptive counter-strike against that narrative. Probably unnecessary in this case.
Another note about Rivian's later arrival to market is that it will have a harder time selling regulatory credits to other automakers. This profit center is decreasing over time but has averaged about 300M/Q. This is far from making up a 1.7B loss, but shows how Rivian doesn't have some of the first mover tailwinds.
Additionally, while Rivian is a premium vehicle and may presumably attract a substantial number of cash buyers, increases in interest rates can't help sales.
The article seems to want to pain as negative a picture as it can, taking the position that the Mercedes partnership may be a negative because Rivian cautiously (and properly) caveated the investment as not factored into their operational capital flow, when ninety percent of the companies I've seen would be fundraising on that fundraise. without shame and without looking back.
As for treating their initial reservation holders better, I don't think the CEO will ever be forgiven for the way he sprang the price increase on them, regardless of his quick about face on the matter. The company most assuredly could do better communicating actual useful information instead of warm and fuzzies with nothing actionable.
And finally, they need to come-to-Jesus quit shipping at a rate that doesn't allow absolute quality of assembly and requiring multiple service center visits. Whomever convinced the CEO that shipping anything to be repaired later did the company absolutely no favors.
I don't see many companies trying to build a multinational manufacturing operation from scratch these days, much less starting just before Covid kicked everyone's asses. Rivian will, eventually, be fine.