Hacker News Reader

Comment by leesec | Hacker News Reader

Honestly this is a good move, I just have a quick question:

Does anyone anywhere have video footage of a Rivian actually being driven? Like, not in a commercial, someone genuinely driving it. I just want to know if they are anywhere close to having a production vehicle. If they have a single production vehicle that does what they say, then OK they "just" have to figure out scaling up the manufacturing.

If they don't have a single vehicle, they are years and years away, to the point that Tesla truck may beat them to mass market.

They have great marketing though.

View on HN

The Tesla truck will almost certainly beat them to mass market. Look how long it took Tesla to scale up production -- the Model S shipped in 2013. It wasn't until 2018 that Tesla built their 200,000th vehicle. Rivian hasn't yet shipped a single truck to customers; they're in for a long and difficult road ahead building out their production lines.

All that said I do hope Rivian is successful. I would absolutely buy an electric pickup truck.

Ford may come before Tesla. They have a much more developed assembly process. https://electrek.co/2019/09/02/fordl-electric-f150-market-20...

Tesla took so long for production because Charlatan-In-Chief didn't want to use any of the lessons learned about Auto Manufacturing the past 100 years and decided to do it his way.

Charlatan-In-Chief also assumed he knows more about A.I and Robotics than many who warned him about his 'Alien Dreadnought' vision.

Rest assured people who are focused on building mass cars won't have the same hubris

Charlatan-in-Chief is putting spacecraft into orbit and yet here you are in an internet forum posting a barely-reasoned critique of his work?

Let alone that it lands...

If there's one thing I love about people calling Musk a 'charlatan' who build his company on 'government subsidies' and 'fairytales' it is that you can just reply with a video of a double 80m orbital booster landing vertically after putting a massive payload into orbit.

And having achieved that in just about ten years after putting their first craft into orbit. And their first commercial launch was only in 2013.

SpaceX is successful because Charlatan-In-Chief is completely hands-off and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_Shotwell is making sure he stays like that.

At Tesla, he is perfectly playing the role of a Used Car Salesman. Rising price up, prices down, making false promises

https://youtu.be/u0-pfzKbh2k?t=25

The irony of criticising entrepreneurial risk taking on HN. Especially considering thus exact approach has lead to all his successes, which are innumerable.

Leaving knowledge on the table out of arrogance is not the same thing as entrepreneurship. Although i am as surprised as you that someone on HN managed to make the distinction.

Isn't it though. Copying an existing process would not be called entrepreneurship. Sure you can have one new aspect and everything else is the same. But the fundamental driver behind entrepreneurship is the thought that there can be a better way.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

~ George Bernard Shaw

I think a valid criticism of CIC is that he should have staged all his new tech instead of trying to do it all at once, like he himself has said. If you look you can find real things to be critical of him about.

> If they don't have a single vehicle, they are years and years away, to the point that Tesla truck may beat them to mass market.

StreetScooter, a DHL subsidiary, managed to ramp up the production of electric delivery trucks much quicker. They also sell to third-parties (mostly in Germany I suppose).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreetScooter

I think those will only work well in a very urban environment. The amazon warehouse is about 23 miles from my house. 50-60km range or even 100km will not work from home deliveries. 100km seems a little short even for USPS.

Was it quicker? 10,000 per year is a milestone that Tesla hit in 2013.

Tesla exists since... 2003? They started as a research initiative in 2010, things became only serious business wise when Deutsche Post acquired them in 2014.

Anyway I'm not even sure why exactly we're talking about Tesla. I thought they were going to produce a semi, not a delivery truck?

Trucks will presumably stay at lower rates than cars. A Tesla truck would also have lower production rates than the Model 3. So 10,000 for a company with much less funding doesn't sound too bad.

You must be thinking of somewhere else. Top selling vehicles of 2019 in USA:

1) Ford F-series

2) Dodge Ram

3) Chevrolet Silverado

https://focus2move.com/usa-best-selling-cars/

> You must be thinking of somewhere else.

Indeed. The Amazon order is for delivery trucks (the same kind of car as produced by StreetScooter), not pickup trucks nor semis or whatever else people in this thread have been talking about.

I'm not sure making a single vehicle is harder to build than a large scale plant is... but I did find this via a quick google search: https://www.rivianforums.com/threads/preproduction-rivian-r1...

I wouldn't assume it's not a submarine commercial though...

Yeah I've seen this, it also looks like a submarine commercial to me. What I'm more interested in is it's specs. Can it really charge as fast as they say? Does it really have that range and acceleration?

I've seen the shell of one in person, but it just seems to me if you actually could make an electric truck go 0-60 in 3 seconds and last 400 miles you would just make a video of it doing that instead of making a marketing video of putting a grill in its "gear tunnel".

EV acceleration is directly proportional to how much current you can pull out of the battery pack, which is directly proportional to the number of battery cells, which is directly proportional to overall range... On paper, yes those numbers are feasible.

Wrong. Acceleration is driven by voltage, current dictates top speed.

They're a little wrong, mostly by conflating current (amps) and power (watts) because of standardized cells, all with the same voltage.

This post is worse. It's easy to get any voltage you want out of a big battery pack. And it's pretty easy to convert between voltages. The hard part is sustaining whatever max voltage your motor can accept, which is a matter of power. If your motor is big enough, and your electronics are at least competent, the limiting factor is the power your battery can supply.

Edit: Like, a Model S battery supplies about 330 volts and rearranging the battery cells in a simple way would make it supply 4000 volts at lower current. You could replace the coils in the motors to accept that newer voltage and get very similar performance but with significantly higher chance of electric shock.

Sorry then. My experience is with ebikes where more voltage gives you more torque. More amps - more top speed. But maybe the dash reports it differently and from POV of a controller.

If anything, it's the opposite; for a given motor winding, more voltage will increase the top speed, and high-load draws more current. That's why electric motors can burn out if you stall them.

The reality is more complicated when you can vary the motor design, Kv, etc.

For constant resistance, voltage is proportional to current so "acceleration is directly proportional to how much current you can pull" is equivalent to "acceleration is directly proportional to how much voltage you can pull". I don't think it's particularly helpful to bluntly tell someone they're wrong like this.

(Disclaimer: not an expert)

This is exactly backwards.

Rivian disguises their trucks as F-150s for real world testing, so good luck finding a video not made by them.

Building a prototype is the easy (and fun) part. Scaling production is much harder. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-says-building-fact...

I think this is true if the prototype is known to be possible. It's not in the case.

What do you mean it's not known to be possible in this case?

I mean their trying to build something no ones ever built before and may be currently impossible.

They are wintering testing in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. Looks pretty legit to me.

https://electrek.co/2019/08/31/rivian-r1t-winter-testing-tie...

Is this common practice? I assume they’re being built closer to the arctic.

But if they want to do winter testing in August they have to go to the hemisphere that is experiencing winter.

It's not THAT hard to drop in batteries and motors to some 3D printed body and have it move around.

The basic design paradigm (skateboard) of EVs is basically established, new EV companies are systems integration and supply chain (esp. battery) setup... well, probably motor design now too, but it's not like people don't know how to make electric motors.

I'm surprised Amazon didn't go with Zenith Motors. They've got a good electric cargo van and a barebone chassis/cab. In my area, I've been seeing a dozen of them boppin' down the road (Northern Cali).

I could not find a single video of a 3rd party test drive. Only commercials, and walk-arounds.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com