Can Rivian Deliver?

Rivian said to their customers that they would deliver R1T's, electric pickup trucks, and R1S's, electric SUV's, to them in 2020. They missed that deadline. But they said they'd start deliveries in March 2021. March came and went and still, no customers had Rivians. Rivian said: June. Then they said: July. 

Then they said: in September, 2021, they would begin deliveries. 

In August I saw that Rivian had announced something. Was it something to do with deliveries? No, it was about some talks they'd had about selling vehicles in Europe. Then a couple of days ago I saw they had announced something. Had they actually delivered a vehicle to a customer?

 

No. They announced that customer-ready vehicles had come off of their assembly line. Not the sort of thing companies usually bother to make press releases about...

Yeah, yeah, yeah, making cars is hard. That's not the question I'm asking. I'm asking a much more specific question: can Rivian take R1T's which have already come off of the production line, and deliver them to customers who paid $1,000 for a spot in line like 4 years ago, by the end of the month? Seems like a pretty simple operation. So simple that a chimp like me could make it happen. But that's not the question either. The question is: can Rivian do it? Sure, they can get an order form Amazon for 100,000 trucks. They can get billions of dollars of capital from Ford.

I couldn't do either one of those things. But that's not the question. The question is, can the guys running Rivian pull their heads out of their asses long enough to deliver one God-damned truck to somebody who's going to pay for it, by midnight Pacific time on September 30, 2021?

I say: no. Because while they may be geniuses at lots of other things, they have proven themselves to be very, very, very bad at this one particular thing: delivering.

When you're the away team and you're holding on to a one-run lead in the bottom of the 9th with 2 men on and 2 out, and the pitcher on the mound is tired, and you look to the bullpen, you may see someone there who is brilliant at all sorts of things, and a really swell person too. But at that moment, if he's not good at delivering, all of those other really nice qualities don't seem to matter quite as much, somehow. If there's another guy in the bullpen who's a despicable human being, and really ugly, too, and has unbearable body odor, BUT, he's a closer, he's more the sort of guy you're looking for. At that moment. In that situation. Maybe not in life in general, but in that specific situation.

I don't want any of those Rivian guys anywhere near my bullpen when we're the away team and we're up by one with two out and two on in the bottom of the ninth. Why?

Because they don't deliver. What is needed, at this point, at Rivian, is somebody with a semi who will load a pickup on it and take it to a customer. This specific thing, at this moment, for Rivian, is important. And I'm saying they wouldn't recognize that guy if God Almighty Himself pointed down  at him from Heaven and said in an Earth-shaking voice, "That's your guy. Him. Right there." Nope. Rivian is going to be much too busy with another press release about plans to break ground for a factory in Berlin, to even notice our Lord God Almighty talking to them about something much more simple and prosaic and boring, but also more important, AT THIS MOMENT.

 

I sincerely hope I'm wrong.