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Sparks

Rivian Is Having a Normal One

The electric vehicle maker has delivered another 15,500 cars since June. Yet trouble is brewing.

Robinson Meyer •
10/02/2023
A Rivian plant.
Heatmap Illustration/Rivian

After a slow start, production at the electric truck maker Rivian is revving up. The company announced today that it made 16,304 new vehicles in the third quarter of 2023 and delivered about 15,500 of them.

That’s about 2,000 vehicles better than Wall Street analysts were expecting, according to CNBC, and it puts Rivian on target to beat its goal of shipping 52,000 vehicles this year. Rivian’s consumer vehicles — the R1T, a pickup, and R1, a three-row SUV — go for about $80,000 a pop. The company also makes delivery vehicles for Amazon. This quarter, Rivian made all its vehicles in its factory in Normal, Illinois, although it’s received the go-ahead to build a second facility in Georgia.

We won’t learn more about the company’s financials until next month, when it unveils its full quarterly earnings. But just because Rivian is shipping expensive trucks doesn’t mean that it’s making money off them. From April to June, the company lost $30,000 for every vehicle that it sold, The Wall Street Journal reported today, and R.J. Scaringe, its CEO, is now “rushing to slash expenses and slim down operations.” The company made nearly 14,000 vehicles in the second quarter and lost $1.19 billion.

Earlier this year, Scaringe told me that Rivian was still trying to rebound from rolling out its production vehicles amid the pandemic. “I don’t think you could have designed a more complex environment to do that in,” he said. “The supply chain catastrophe that was 2022 was our launching ramp here. And then managing the build-out of a large, 5,000-plus person workforce to produce vehicles in our first plant, in the middle of a pandemic, was also really hard.”

Rivian’s stock fell 2.55% in trading today, while the S&P 500 was essentially flat.

Robinson Meyer profile image

Robinson Meyer

Robinson is the founding executive editor of Heatmap. He was previously a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covered climate change, energy, and technology.

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Sparks

Don’t Look Now, But China Is Importing Less Coal

Add it to the evidence that China’s greenhouse gas emissions may be peaking, if they haven’t already.

Matthew Zeitlin •
05/09/2025
A Chinese coal worker.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Exactly where China is in its energy transition remains somewhat fuzzy. Has the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases already hit peak emissions? Will it in 2025? That remains to be seen. But its import data for this year suggests an economy that’s in a rapid transition.

According to government trade data, in the first fourth months of this year, China imported $12.1 billion of coal, $100.4 billion of crude oil, and $18 billion of natural gas. In terms of value, that’s a 27% year over year decline in coal, a 8.5% decline in oil, and a 15.7% decline in natural gas. In terms of volume, it was a 5.3% decline, a slight 0.5% increase, and a 9.2% decline, respectively.

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Blue
Sparks

Rewiring America Slashes Staff Due to Trump Funding Freeze

The nonprofit laid off 36 employees, or 28% of its headcount.

Katie Brigham •
05/08/2025
Surprised outlets.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Trump administration’s funding freeze has hit the leading electrification nonprofit Rewiring America, which announced Thursday that it will be cutting its workforce by 28%, or 36 employees. In a letter to the team, the organization’s cofounder and CEO Ari Matusiak placed the blame squarely on the Trump administration’s attempts to claw back billions in funding allocated through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.

“The volatility we face is not something we created: it is being directed at us,” Matusiak wrote in his public letter to employees. Along with a group of four other housing, climate, and community organizations, collectively known as Power Forward Communities, Rewiring America was the recipient of a $2 billion GGRF grant last April to help decarbonize American homes.

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Sunrun Tells Investors That a Recession Could Be Just Fine, Actually

The company managed to put a positive spin on tariffs.

Matthew Zeitlin •
05/08/2025
A house with solar panels.
Heatmap Illustration/Sunrun, Getty Images

The residential solar company Sunrun is, like much of the rest of the clean energy business, getting hit by tariffs. The company told investors in its first quarter earnings report Tuesday that about half its supply of solar modules comes from overseas, and thus is subject to import taxes. It’s trying to secure more modules domestically “as availability increases,” Sunrun said, but “costs are higher and availability limited near-term.”

“We do not directly import any solar equipment from China, although producers in China are important for various upstream components used by our suppliers,” Sunrun chief executive Mary Powell said on the call, indicating that having an entirely-China-free supply chain is likely impossible in the renewable energy industry.

Hardware makes up about a third of the company’s costs, according to Powell. “This cost will increase from tariffs,” she said, although some advance purchasing done before the end of last year will help mitigate that. All told, tariffs could lower the company’s cash generation by $100 million to $200 million, chief financial officer Danny Abajian said.

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Green