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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.

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.

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Sparks

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Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

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Of the over $13 billion in loans and loan guarantees that the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office has made under Biden, nearly a third of that funding has been doled out in the month since the presidential election. And of the $41 billion in conditional commitments — agreements to provide a loan once the borrower satisfies certain preconditions — that proportion rises to nearly half. That includes some of the largest funding announcements in the office’s history: more than $7.5 billion to StarPlus Energy for battery manufacturing, $4.9 billion to Grain Belt Express for a transmission project, and nearly $6.6 billion to the electric vehicle company Rivian to support its new manufacturing facility in Georgia.

The acceleration represents a clear push by the outgoing Biden administration to get money out the door before President-elect Donald Trump, who has threatened to hollow out much of the Department of Energy, takes office. Still, there’s a good chance these recent conditional commitments won’t become final before the new administration takes office, as that process involves checking a series of nontrivial boxes that include performing due diligence, addressing or mitigating various project risks, and negotiating financing terms. And if the deals aren’t finalized before Trump takes office, they’re at risk of being paused or cancelled altogether, something the DOE considers unwise, to put it lightly.

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