Rivian Falls Apart

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Dec 12, 8:30AM EST

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Rivian Automotive Inc. (NASDAQ: RIVN | RIVN Price Prediction) recently gave up on a promising deal with one of the world’s premier car and truck companies. It had a partnership to make vans with Mercedes-Benz Vans. The arrangement was only three months old. It is an example of how badly Rivian has struggled to find direction as management gropes toward a future that likely is no longer there.
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Rivian is barely in business. It delivered 6,584 vehicles in the third quarter. Management celebrated. Of course, there is a reason. Rivian might have yet to deliver any. While it has 114,000 reservations for its R1 truck, all these are subject to cancellation. These should not give investors any confidence.
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Rivian has another distinction. It lost $1.7 billion last quarter. That loss level is usually only posted in bad quarters for the world’s largest car companies. Rivian did it as one of the smallest.

Rivian faces several buzz saws. The most powerful of these is the Ford F-150 Lightning. It is the electric version of the top-selling vehicle in the United States. This is a distinction the F-150 has held for decades. Ford likely has at least 6 million of these on the road, giving it a massive customer base to which to market the Lightening.
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Elon Musk’s Tesla will start production of the company’s Cybertruck in a year. Tesla’s brand and spot as the world’s top electric vehicle company give it strong leverage with potential customers.
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Rivian’s other challenge is that every major car company will have an electric pickup on the road within two to three years. While each may only have a modest market share, the avalanche of models will overwhelm Rivian, if it is still around.

Wall Street already has passed its judgment. Rivian’s stock trades near $26, down from a 52-week high of $121.64.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.