Rivian’s Identity Crisis
Last month, Rivian’s software chief did some press to talk up the company’s AI assistant. It was some of the worst PR to hit my radar in quite a long time. Rivian yet again allowed its controversial CarPlay stance to lead headlines, and its agentic AI vision didn’t make sense. The company positioning Rivian as an agentic vehicle tells me that it does not know where its next marginal customer will come from. In finding a root cause for such a shortcoming, Rivian is suffering from an identity crisis.
Rivian is a niche car company that gets more press for its anti-CarPlay stance than anything else that it does. The company has shipped just shy of 165,000 vehicles over the past four years. That’s roughly equal to the number of vehicles Toyota sells in five days. High vehicle pricing has hurt Rivian’s accessibility. Even after considering Rivian’s internal sales forecast for the lower-cost R2, Rivian expects to ship just 62,000 to 67,000 vehicles this year. Given high vehicle pricing, Rivian has squandered what may have been the opportunity of the decade, the chance to pick up curious Tesla owners interested in EVs but frustrated by or upset with Elon Musk getting into politics. The miscalculation is up there with Peloton selling in-home fitness equipment yet not being able to take full advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic that caused every gym to be closed.
On the software and services front, last July, Rivian moved from its own in-house mapping solution to a highly customizable Google Maps solution. Rivian came up short on its goal to do more of the software and driver/passenger compartment experience themselves.
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