> 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.
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?