Rivian's platform approach to electric vehicles helped it raise $3B this year

Tesla didn't start with a mass-market vehicle. They started with an extremely high margin, low volume sports car. They then transitioned to a not-quite-as-high margin, not-quite-as-low volume luxury car. They are currently trying to make moderate margin, high volume sedans with the Model 3, but it's uncertain they can currently sell those profitably.

Selling a car isn't far off trying to sell a medical device.

Failing to bring a product to market in a decade is a failure. Even for autos, you need to ship product eventually.

For amazon the equity investment fell under corporate social responsibility, the alternative would be something like carbon offsets which are a pure loss.

For ford it just means one less competitor, and they might be able to salvage some IP in the fire sale.

If rivian is just a variation on a proven technology whats their competitive advantage? They have zero manufacturing scale, zero experience selling cars, and with the “platform” model no way to differentiate the cars over any other EV (no vertical integration).

The Audi e-tron and the Jaguar I-Pace outsell the Tesla Model X in Europe. The Mercedes EQC will probably also outsell the Model X next year. The VW e-Golf does well in Europe so the Volkswagen ID.3 might outsell the Model 3 in 2020 or maybe 2021: https://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2019/12/europe-november-2019.h...

The Model 3 is outsold by a number of models in China. The Model S and Model X don't make the top 20. Maybe the Chinese built Model 3s will do better next year: https://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2019/12/china-november-2019-up...

Here's another one: https://www.taycanforum.com/threads/drove-home-my-taycan-tur...

1000 a year is pretty good for luxury eco friendly car in 2009.

Rivian cannot sit in the same place. They have to carve out some market segment that loves electric but hates Tesla or get enough funding to stick around for 10 years when Tesla may be vulnerable to competition.

It took them 2.5 years to go from making 2 dozen cars per week to 1000 per week.

However - I am interested in neither the rivian and the tesla for their beds -- what I really want is the skateboard from the rivian and the ability to custom build the car I want on it -- if this takes off we can get back to the boutique still car shops of the 20s and earlier.

Since the body of the CyberTruck gradually raises to the roof line, you can’t easily reach into the bed close to the rear window.

and I access from the side more often than I use the tailgate.

Infact my current Truck is a Regular bed, and the one before it was a FlairSide ... I miss my FlairSide that is my one big disappointments in Ford that they stopped making Styleside and FlairSide Beds

I haul every day small items, and home improvement supplies, and other things like that

Sports gear, camping equipment, portable chairs, anything soft that can go on top of other luggage, all go over the side, over the back, however it's most convenient.

More importantly though, is that a lot of this gear is removed from the truck over the side, especially at the beach or on the mountain or at a trailhead, where I'm parallel-parked and can't easily remove items out of the back.

As oft stated, the slope of the bed's walls makes side-loading difficult. This may not seem too significant day-to-day given the bed's volume, but if you're doing commercial work (construction, professional moving, etc), you'll get a lot of items that don't properly fit in the bed's volume. Even the cladding like on the Chevy Avalanche can be obnoxious, if not impossible to work around with some loads.

The body also doesn't look as ammenable to aftermarket modifications as its competitors. Standard racks and bed rails won't be compatible with it, which are pretty much standard mods for any contractor.

On the more elaborate side, you couldn't replace the back end of the vehicle with a domain-oriented work box.

I think a more utility-oriented cybertruck would have gone cab-over like an Isuzu elf, and used a more raditional, if elongated bed-design.

The tonneau cover and specs are nice, but it needs to function more as a modular platform, and have traditional rear end if it wants to compete broadly in the "practical pickup" space.

Great as a lifestyle vehicle, I expect your average truck owner will get more than enough utility from it, and it'll be a dream off-road. But I don't think most of the critiques leveraged against it are being made from the mindset of a consumer who only occasionally needs the pickup portion of their vehicle.

Major benefit is the car is "topped off" every morning, so charging time is practically zero most of the time.

You can not believe that is "been out long enough" to factor in Resale values and longevity?

The Average Scrap age for a car in the US in 2014 is about 15 years, and the Average age of all light vehicles in operation on the reads as of 2014 was 11.4 years old and was expected to raise to 12 years by 2018 but I could not find data to confirm that

This means the VAST majority of cars in operation are aging used cars that are older than even the oldest Tesla on the road today.

Get back to me when the Model S reaches the decade mark and see if the Cost the the batteries exceed the value of the Car, and the real test will be if the low end Model 3 can maintain a 15+ year life span on the road

because if the EV scrap date is a full 5+ years quicker than a ICE car that is going to be a problem not only for sales but also all of the environmental calculations that make it "green"

ICE Manufacturers are targeting a 15year life span for cars, if EV can not do that economically we are going to have problems

The Toyota Prius have TERRIBLE resale value as the age largely due to the replacement costs of the batteries