Another SLOW Month in Non-Tesla Murrkin EV News

Lucid have actually delivered some vehicles to customers! I don't know how many.

 

So what do you think, is Lucid currently delivering units at a faster pace than Rivian?

Rivian has said they will deliver 1,000 units in 2021, so I think the only question about that is, how late in 2022 will the 1,000th unit be delivered? (I'm highly confident that they can do it before January 1, 2023.)

Seriously, though, I wish Rivian and Lucid well. And Bollinger, and Farraday Future and Fisker, and... I was about to say "and Nikola too," but it's really hard to wish those assholes well.

But someone has to crush Tesla.

Another question: Musk has always said, in media interviews, that he wishes nothing but success for anyone making EV's, and that Tesla want to do everything they can to help all of those other EV manufacturers.

So my question is: am I actually the only person on Earth who sees that Musk is completely full of shit when he says those things? Does no-one else have the computing power in their brain-grease to see that, if Tesla was actually helping even a little bit, the combined deliveries of all non-Tesla Murrkin EV-only manufacturers would currently be a lot higher than a few hundred? (Not counting aftermarket conversions, which I would guess number in the thousands in the US alone by now.)

 

Am I the only one on Earth who suspects Tesla of actual illegal interference with other EV manufacturers? Not just everyday hardball business-as-usual dirty tricks, but actual completely illegal sabotage? Answer me! Am I the only one? I did a Google search, tesla sabotage of other ev manufacturers, all I got were some stories from 2018 about Musk yelling that someone had sabotaged Tesla, no doubt to divert from the latest horrible thing he himself had done. FEAR MY SUPER-POWERED AUTISTIC BRAIN-GREASE, MUSK! You fool all these others. Not me.

I'm Officially Predicting: Rivian and Lucid Will NEVER Deliver

For just a moment I thought Lucid had actually beat Rivian in getting one of their vehicles into the hands of an actual customer. I saw the partial headline: "CEO Peter Rawlinson Delivers Lucid Air..." And I thought: What? Lucid is making deliveries?! And Rawlinson himself dropped off the first one in person?! That's class! (Assuming that Rawlinson then actually left and let the customer have the vehicle to him- or herself.)  

But no: The entire headline reads: "CEO Peter Rawlinson Delivers Lucid Air Production Keynote Address." 

 

Actual customer ownership of a Rivian or a Lucid remains just a dream. It'll never happen. That's right: I said: NEVER. That is my official prediction concerning when both of these companies will deliver vehicles: never. But they'll continue to make big splashy headlines on every other conceivable topic, of course... 

PS, Sep 2023: I was wrong, of course. Rivian is closing in on 6 figures of light trucks and SUV's plus who know how many bread trucks sold to Amazon and others, and Lucid makes AND SELLS very nice cars that'll do a standing 1/4 mile quicker than anything else that costs less than 7 figures.

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.

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.