Rivian, Electric Vehicle Manufacturer

There is a community of electric vehicle enthusiasts on the Internet -- we refer to electric vehicles as EV's, and we call conventional vehicles ICE, which stands for internal combustion engine -- and next to Tesla, the EV company which which is generating the most excitement in the EV community may be Rivian. Rivian was founded in 2009, and it hasn't sold any vehicles yet. The R1T,

a pickup truck, and the R1S, an SUV, are scheduled to go on sale in 2021, or at least that was the schedule. I don't know whether the coronavirus pandemic will delay the debuts of the R1T and the R1S.

Some of you may be thinking that it is taking Rivian an awfully long time to actually start selling, but the thing is, it generally takes a very long time for large automotive companies to get started. For example, Tesla was founded in 2003. The Tesla Roadster and Model S, both made in relatively limited quantities, were introduced in 2008 and 2012, respectively. The Model 3, Tesla's first truly mass-produced vehicle, was first delivered to buyers in 2017.

Speaking of Tesla, Rivian has been making headlines by hiring former Tesla employees, but, according to this story from electrek from July 2019, Rivian had by that time hired more employees from McLaren, Ford and Faraday Future, an EV startup which has been having financial problems.

Speaking of Ford, Rivian has received a large financial investment from Ford, which has announced that it plans to manufacture electric trucks of its own using Rivian's platform. That same platform will also be available to other automotive manufactures who want to make their own EV's around it.

Speaking of large investments in Rivian, Amazon has invested over half a billion dollars in the company, and committed to buy 100,000 of their vehicles by 2030.

I'll give you a moment to shake off being stunned by the news that Amazon signed a contract to buy 100,000 vehicles from one company. Yeah, Amazon is big.

All set? Okay, onward -- obviously, Rivian is also moderately big solely by virtue of that deal with Amazon, and the deal with Ford is also huge, both for the money involved and for the fact that Ford will be building electric Ford trucks based on Rivian platforms. But another big factor in the excitement in the EV community about Rivian is that some people who write or make videos about EV's full-time have seen Rivians up close at car shows and been very impressed, and a privileged few have taken test drives and been very, very impressed, and some have announced that they're going to buy their own Rivians.

Suggested retail price? Something like $65-75,000 and up, depending on the options. Wait, wait, come back! Remember I just told you about Amazon committing to buy 100,000 of these? Is Amazon known for losing money? No. You save a lot with an EV, compared to ICE, in fuel and maintenance costs. A lot. And more, the more miles you drive. Before you just walk away, saying that EV's cost too much, without actually doing all of the math including the expenses of running an EV compared to running an ICE vehicle, ask yourself again, very seriously: is Amazon known for losing money? And while you're at it, look into all of the other large companies, and governments and so forth, who are buying EV's. (Not to mention all the utility companies building huge solar and wind installations.) Oh, they're all schmucks? Yeah, sure they are. They're the schmucks.