Rivian Is Worst-Performing Car Stock of 2024

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Nov 12, 6:35AM EST

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Rivian Is Worst-Performing Car Stock of 2024 — © g-stockstudio / Getty Images

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Rivian Automotive Inc. (NASDAQ: RIVN | RIVN Price Prediction) is the worst-performing car stock this year.
Investors worry that the struggling EV maker will not survive as a public company.
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CNBC made a list of car stocks ranked by stock performance in 2024. Of the 14 companies listed, Rivian Automotive Inc. (NASDAQ: RIVN) was at the bottom, with a share price down 55%. General Motors Co. (NYSE: GM) topped the list with a 55% gain. The second worst-performing stock was that of another small electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer. Lucid Group Inc. (NASDAQ: LCID) shares dropped 48%.

Rivian went public in November 2021. Its share price topped $100, which gave it a market cap of $86 billion. That is about double Ford’s market cap today. Ironically, Ford was one of Rivian’s early investors. Recently, though, Rivian’s shares dropped to $11 a share.

Investors have worried that Rivian will not survive as a public company. Like many companies that post significant losses, it is in a race to become profitable before it runs out of cash.

Difficult problems have hit Rivian this year. The most troubling of those is that supply chain issues have caused the EV company to cut back production. It described the problem, which is key to one of its engines, as “acute.”

Rivian’s production and delivery numbers are shockingly low for a company that relies on unit growth to profit. For instance, Rivian produced 13,157 and delivered 10,018 vehicles in the third quarter. At the same time, it cut guidance for annual production to between 47,000 and 49,000 units.

Another sign that Rivian cannot solve manufacturing problems was its third-quarter revenue. It fell to $874 million from $1.34 billion in the same quarter a year ago. The company posted a net loss of $1.10 billion, compared to $1.37 billion the year before.

Finally, Rivian operates in an EV market where demand is well below what was expected just a year ago. EV sales were supposed to climb in the United States as drivers switched out of gasoline-powered cars. However, that did not happen in 2024.

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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.