Rivian will be tested in the coming months when Tesla launches the Cybertruck.
The Irvine, Calif-based electric pickup, SUV, and van manufacturer gained instant notoriety when it beat all the big legacy automakers — General Motors, Ford, Dodge — to market with an electric pickup in 2021.
And its vehicles are in demand. Rivian announced rising production and delivery totals for the third quarter earlier this month. And it had the highest growth rate of any car manufacturer in California — the nation’s largest EV market — in the first six months of 2023, according to figures released for new vehicle registrations by the The California New Car Dealers Association (CNCDA).
But Tesla, the 800-pound gorilla of EV manufacturers, is getting ready to introduce the Cybertruck. With interest expected to be sky high in the upcoming pickup, Rivian won’t walk away unscathed, according to Edmunds.
The competition
When addressing Tesla’s challenge to Rivian’s R1T pickup and R1S SUV, CEO RJ Scaringe said recently that the Cybertruck won’t compete directly with Rivian products.
“If you were to think of…the Venn diagrams of customers, there’s probably not a lot of overlap [with Cybertruck buyers],” he said at the Code 2023 conference last month.
I asked Ivan Drury, Edmunds’ director of insights, about this.
“That sentiment might hold true for now, but mostly would be due to Cybertruck being out of sight, out of mind for consumers at the moment as awareness has dropped off significantly given lengthy production delays,” Drury told me in an email.
Drury said that the Tesla Model Y is currently the second most cross-shopped vehicle against both Rivian R1T and R1S on Edmunds if you remove interbrand shopping.
“That vehicle is technically in a very different class than either of Rivian’s offerings. It is far more reasonable to assume Cybertruck will become the number one cross-shopped vehicle on Edmunds once it launches,” he said.
Damon Bell, Senior Research Editor, Cars.com, agreed that Rivian is underestimating the impact.
“There might be more overlap than RJ Scaringe implies,” Bell told me.
Bell pointed to the similarities of the two companies. Both trucks come from “disruptor” companies and “both vehicles are perceived to be innovative in ways that trucks from established rivals aren’t,” he said.
Rivian: lagging edge pricing
Not surprisingly, price will sway many customers when choosing between a Rivian or Tesla.
The Rivian R1T pickup ranges from $73,000 to well above $90,000. The R1S SUV is typically several thousand dollars more than a similarly-equipped R1T.
(Rivian claims that its upcoming R2 platform will bring down prices significantly, to as low as $40,000. But that platform isn’t due until 2026.)
The original Cybertruck pricing released in 2019 was:
- Single Motor RWD with 250+ miles of range, $39,900
- Dual Motor AWD with 300+ miles of range, $49,900
- Tri Motor AWD with 500+ miles of range,$69,900
Even if the Cybertruck is initially priced well above these old figures — let’s say at around $50K — a large price gap could still impact Rivian.
Edmunds Drury said that selling pricey EVs to elite buyers may have worked before but the market has changed.
“Staying at the upper boundaries of what most consumers can pay caps the potential for seeing these units on the road at high volumes,” he said.
“While it may seem like manufacturing vehicles for the upper echelon of consumers can drive brand visibility and offer more production-budget flexibility, perhaps this approach would have been better suited for the early EV adoption phase, rather than the near-mass market level EVs are beginning to sell at now,” Drury said.
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