I personally would rather just get an ultimate luxury vehicle at that price point or a suped out Porsche.
- I do not want to buy another ICE vehicle - I want a vehicle with robust offroad capability - I want a vehicle with excellent performance in terms of acceleration and ride - I want a vehicle with premium interior fit and finish - I do not want a full size truck - I'm not particularly price sensitive
When you look at the competition at the 100k price point, it hits a nice sweet spot for those constraints. I think there is a significant market there to address. Telsa's cybertruck might be interesting but the Rivian is far closer to traditional styling and imho, looks and drives great. There is a lot to like there if they can scale their company and the product is certainly worth 100k. I would buy it again.
My wife and I are weird, we live deep in San Francisco, and drive 2 cars, one of which is a big diesel pickup. Wait - hear me out.
The city is great, but we need to get away. We've found the most cost effective way to do so in Northern California is to own and use the hell out of an RV travel trailer. We use out truck not to commute, not to run errands, but to drive hundreds of miles in a sitting towing a 10,000lb trailer. We can drive 300 miles towing our trailer, almost 600 without towing anything. I don't commute in it, we do this once to three times a month and it's far less expensive than buying a cabin/property or going to hotels/air bnbs.
In our use case a Rivian, Cybertruck or Lightning would be absolutely useless. If you need to drive more than 100 miles to get "out there" it's a useless vehicle. For people that use their trucks to do real stuff they're useless. If I didn't do these things, regularly tow 10k lbs hundreds of miles, I wouldn't have a truck.
I desperately wanted to go the EV route, waited even. But they just don't fit the use case for folks that actually use their trucks for more than grocery getting. They're like Range Rovers.
[Edited to add] The F150 Lightning might out-compete the Rivian on utility. but can't compare performance wise. That's probably the closest comparison vehicle.
Is it the standard PR-IPO move to dump the risk onto the general public and get an exit for everyone early?
That's a fair question. They are somewhere between 10-15 years old at this point. They've been working toward a goal for a long time (long before they were on anybody's radar). You'd think they spent that time well.
But perhaps the feeding/funding frenzy over the last few years has ruined their roadmap. Their S-1 said that a tiny subsidiary of Ford is building the vehicle bodies and major components for them. Once they develop a proper stamping line at the factory they can take over and do it themselves (at quite the cost savings). Has that happened? I haven't found any mention of this in any SEC filing. Instead (?), while their Illinois factory is running at 15% capacity, they enter into an agreement to develop an even larger factory in Georgia.
EDIT - I did some map work. Their current factory is on the western edge of a 150,000 person very cheap metro area. It's about 30 minutes east of a 500,000 person very cheap metro area. Assembly line worker availability is going to be quite high. The site is a few miles from the confluence of 3 interstates; the road heading north has an interchange with I-74 (east/west) and the road going southeast has an interchange with I-55 (north/south). There is a Norfolk Southern rail line/rail yard adjacent to the property with a spur directly to the factory building. It connects to a Union Pacific line less than 5 miles away. This is a great location! At the county GIS site, you can see that their factory property is about 500 acres, most of which is empty parking lots and grass. Immediately to the east there are 200 acres of land held in a numbered trust (you'd have to go to court to find the real owner). To the west, you can see that Rivian already owns 380 acres of farmland. This isn't even close to the situation Tesla was in in Fremont. There is almost limitless room for expansion. Building a new factory site nowhere near their suppliers makes no sense at all.
