10 ms·

Rivian announces 1B gross loss and 600M revenue [pdf]

74 points by giacaglia 4y ago

sinistersnare 4y ago
[flagged]
- abfan1127 4y ago
  you clearly don't live in suburban or rural areas. I've tried to take public transportation in Phoenix. They put stops every 1/4 mi. it takes longer to ride a bus than ride a bike. public transit is just not remotely reasonable.
- gwbas1c 4y ago
  Public transportation is a luxury. It assumes that you can live in a dense area and that your travel needs coincide with bus/train routes. It's very practical for many, and very impractical for many too.
  - PaulsWallet 4y ago
    I ride the bus and I can promise you I don't do it because of luxury. Even if that was true, it would only be true in North America. In the rest of the developed world, public transport extends out into rural areas.
    - rootusrootus 4y ago
      > the rest of the developed world, public transport extends out into rural areas Are you by chance referring to Europe with this comment? I ask because Europe's idea of rural and North America's idea are quite different.
      - tsudounym 4y ago
        Switzerland has villages with only hundreds of people that regularly receive train service. There are states with similar GDP, size and density as Switzerland that do not have any train service. Don't think of the US as a whole, think of the individual states who easily have the budget equivalent of European countries.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      >In the rest of the developed world, public transport extends out into rural areas. I have spent a lot of time in Europe and, once you get away from population centers and even larger towns, public transit can get very hit or miss. OK, maybe there's technically a once or twice a day bus to that rural hamlet but lots of Europeans own cars and, while it's generally easier to get by without cars in areas of Europe, it's not like you can hop on public transportation everywhere. It varies of course. Somewhere like Switzerland (as another poster notes) is generally easier to get off the beaten track by bus or train than a lot of coutries.
    - luckylion 4y ago
      Yeah, if by "extends out" you mean "you can get there, eventually". Not if you mean "you can get there in a reasonable amount of time and you don't need to time it perfectly because you only get two chances a day".
  - tsudounym 4y ago
    What a hilariously American comment. Nearly all American cities were built by train networks that existed in the 1800s. These train lines were ripped out to make way for car infrastructure in the mid-1900s, which was designed to segregate neighborhoods and give giant profits to GM. Even famously car-centric LA with their massive freeways once had the best public transit in the world. https://www.segregationbydesign.com/ https://www.segregationbydesign.com/
    - kelnos 4y ago
      I don't think we're talking solely about cities here; suburban and rural areas can never be sustainably and cost-effectively served by public transit, at least not the kind of areas with densities you'll find in the US. Certainly US cities are very weak on the public transit front, and there's a lot of improvement that can be made there. Even then, though, there are a lot of municipalities in the US that technically are considered "cities" but don't have enough density to make pervasive public transit feasible.
      - tsudounym 4y ago
        Switzerland has villages with only hundreds of people that regularly receive train service. There are states with similar GDP, size and density as Switzerland that do not have any train service. Sprawling suburbs are a giant scam - the cost of providing urban amenities (power, internet, sewage) to these neighborhoods is much higher than it appears. The lines of pipes and power lines in sprawling burbs cost wayyyy more than it would to maintain a transit oriented development full of townhomes and condos.
        frumper 4y ago
        The US has counties with larger land areas than the entire country of Switzerland. Also, we largely don't want to live in townhomes and condos. Update: San Bernardino County is 33% larger than Switzerland with 25% of the population. America is a big place.
    - rocket_surgeron 4y ago
  - majormajor 4y ago
    It's a luxury IFF you live right next to a station and need to go right next to stations and your trains/busses/whatever aren't too crowded. Otherwise it's a necessity for those for whom private transportation is a luxury, and often not a pleasant one. Crammed standing into a crowded box, or transferring a couple of times to take 2 hours by bus to go somewhere you could get to directly in 30min, etc. "Invest in public transportation" is a hard sell in a country where a huge portion of the population is able to afford private vehicles and space to park them, because the level of investment required to even equal the convenience factor of that is very, very, very high. EDIT: even in Europe you don't have to travel that far outside of city centers to find quite a bit of private car ownership. All those European car companies aren't just doing it for shits and giggles, after all.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    You must be American. In fact, insane car and highway infrastructure is actually a luxury. Funny how roads just magically spring up everywhere and they are 'required to live' but god forbid a bus that uses that road, that is luxury. Public subsidy of car infrastructure is far higher then for public transport. > coincide with bus/train routes There is this thing called planning. They put public transport where it is actually needed. Its not like 'ohh luck, they just so happened to build a train here'. If your country has a serious imperative of doing public infrastructure correctly, then the amount of people who can reasonably be reached is very, very high. And good urbanism isn't just density. Look at some railroad towns in the East, they have walkable rural urbanism. You don't need a car to live in such places. Or maybe one car for a whole large family. Sure yes, there is some people who that doesn't include. But lets be fucking real, most people live in cities or in suburban areas. Or in sprawl town loosely attached to some larger metro area.
    - gwbas1c 4y ago
      > You must be American > But lets be fucking real My friends in Germany complain about how taking public transportation to work takes 2 hours, or 30 minutes by car.
      - panick21_ 4y ago
        And in even more places trying to go threw or across the city takes longer with a car. Public transport is just fundamentally more efficient as a society. If you had said 'some people need cars' that would be one thing, but to act like cars are normal and car infrastructure is standard and normal, and public transit is some sort of luxury that only fancy societies can afford and even then only once they have built their highway infrastructure. A big problem with German public transport for example that right when they wanted to implement West German High speed rail, the unification with East Germany happened and new highway for cars took priority. And after that the EU believed the most important thing was building lots of highway all threw Eastern Europe. Walking, biking and public transport should be the baseline, and if money is left over you can have fancy car infrastructure and parking is the luxury.
- explaininjs 4y ago
  It'd be far worse to have scheduled bus routes and train tracks cutting across the vast wilderness than the occasional electric vehicle cruising through.
  - eppp 4y ago
    Depends on how much energy the train uses. I would guess that the maintenance and supporting infrastructure for the 'occasional' car would dwarf the cost of a railway.
    - rootusrootus 4y ago
      It would be difficult to eliminate the road, however, so that infrastructure is going to exist either way.
  - virgildotcodes 4y ago
    Huh, as opposed to the roads and highways cutting across the vast wilderness that we have now?
    - explaininjs 4y ago
      Not really sure what (if any) claim you're making here. I'm defining wilderness above to be "those areas without sufficient road infrastructure to support heavy vehicles like busses", if that helps clarify.
  - tsudounym 4y ago
    A double track train line can move orders of magnitude more people than a 30-lane highway can. Cars and highways are space inefficient, and highways cause property values surrounding it to decrease due to the pollution and noise.
    - kelnos 4y ago
      You're not really responding to what the parent poster said. We're not talking about 30-lane highways, we're talking about a small one-lane road that only needs to serve tens of people per day. A train route for that is absurd.
- Swenrekcah 4y ago
  I don’t particularly disagree but that’s for governments (local or larger) to do. Car companies are obviously going to produce cars, and the cleaner they can do it the better.
- seedless-sensat 4y ago
  One of their biggest plays are EV delivery trucks (and I see them on my streets). I'm sure someone will chime in about the environmental concerns of Amazon - but Rivan's strategy seems like a decent environmental message to me.
- pedalpete 4y ago
  It isn't an either or scenario, and you're providing an unrealistic expectation. Rivian is making "lifestyle vehicles", pick-ups and SUVs that are off-road capable, but are not not work trucks. There is no public transit out in much of these areas. They also make Amazon delivery vehicles, so you can't expect Amazon deliveries to be made via public transport.
- xnx 4y ago
  In the US, total cost per passenger mile for public transportation is higher than private vehicles. All that extra cost has environmental impact in the form of extra steel, concrete, and salaries.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mbgerring 4y ago
  The entire vehicle fleet needs to be electrified, period. There are areas of the United States where a private 4WD vehicle are a necessity to get to and from home. The only way to eventually retire the vast infrastructure required to deliver fossil fuels to rural areas, and everywhere else, is to electrify the entire fleet. Climate change is a chemistry and engineering problem. You can solve some of the chemistry and engineering problem upstream, through social and cultural changes, but insisting that those changes are the only way to solve the problem is flat-out false, and absolutely repellent to many people that, ultimately, will need to be brought along in the transition away from fossil fuels. Nothing is stopping you from working on the myriad issues that prevent greater adoption of public transportation, and you and the world would be better served by getting to work building the future you want instead of trashing the efforts of people working the problem from a different angle.
- kerpotgh 4y ago
  I don’t want to live in densely populated places cooped up in apartments.
- shagie 4y ago
  Delivery vans are environment saving. The carbon footprint for delivery is less than going to the store. https://sustainability.uw.edu/news/grocery-delivery-service-greener-driving-store https://sustainability.uw.edu/news/grocery-delivery-service-... and https://www.washington.edu/news/2013/04/29/grocery-delivery-service-is-greener-than-driving-to-the-store/ https://www.washington.edu/news/2013/04/29/grocery-delivery-... https://ctl.mit.edu/sites/ctl.mit.edu/files/library/public/Dimitri-Weideli-Environmental-Analysis-of-US-Online-Shopping_0.pdf https://ctl.mit.edu/sites/ctl.mit.edu/files/library/public/D... looks at the total carbon footprint which takes into account packaging too. For buying something from Amazon, the largest part of the carbon footprint is the cardboard boxes and overall, its still more efficient than traditional shopping.
- kelnos 4y ago
  I agree with you that investment in public transit is preferable to private vehicles in many cases, but the primary purpose of a pickup truck is not personal transportation, it's hauling a bunch of bulky, heavy stuff that isn't feasible to bring on public transit. Regardless, public transit cannot go everywhere. Rural and light-density suburban areas can never be adequately and cost-effectively served by public transit. Sure, you can run trains or buses into areas like those, but either you'll have excessively low per-route ridership and unsustainably-high operational costs, or you'll have routes that require people to travel several miles in order to get to a station/stop, which means people need private vehicles anyway. In these cases, you often end up with an overall trip that takes several multiples of the time it would take to drive your own private car. I get that many people might find it acceptable to impose that kind of situation on people (in the name of the environment or whatever reason), but I wouldn't want to live in that world. I use public transit whenever feasible, and only drive when I have to, but there are limits to what I will accept.
- cypress66 4y ago
  You will eat the bugs. It's the only environmentally friendly option.
itsmemattchung 4y ago
How does this company — or any company, for that matter — continue operating in the long term with that much significant (i.e. 1B) gross loss?
- bdcravens 4y ago
  The ratios are different, but Uber lost over $2B last year, and overall, has lost $9B. Tesla didn't turn a profit for 8 years, until 2020, and from 2016-2018, regularly had 12 trailing months of $1B losses or more.
  - cj 4y ago
    Worth mentioning the thing that likely motivated TSLA to be profitable is that it’s a requirement to be considered for inclusion in the S&P 500 index.
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      I don't really think that is worth mentioning. Tesla always wanted to be profitable, to get their they need a high margin mass production vehicle. Since they had that, the Model 3, they have been profitable. The Model 3 was always the plan.
- martythemaniak 4y ago
  You raise money, you spend that money to make a factory, then you sell whatever the factory makes for a profit, then you pay back your investors.
- tpmx 4y ago
  If there's belief in the company/product they will get more investments. If not they'll eventually run out of money.
- serial_dev 4y ago
  Tesla's market cap is approximately 644,59 billion USD now. Apparently, trying to reproduce that success is worth a couple of billions to some people.
fnordpiglet 4y ago
“We make the Amazon delivery vehicles that Amazon gets at cost so we are a cost center that manages to offset our expenses by $600M further optimizing the weighted cost per delivery vehicle for Amazon.”
- tomcam 4y ago
  Can you translate that for me?
  - post_break 4y ago
    They sell the delivery trucks at cost, we're going to try to make that cost lower so we won't lose money on each one sold.
    - juice_bus 4y ago
      Is "cost" set at the original date of the agreement? Otherwise lowering cost wouldn't help. (or this is a joke I'm whiffing on...)
      - johntb86 4y ago
        Currently the price is approximately equal to the cost, but presumably there's nothing in the contract with Amazon saying that if Rivian's costs go down then the price to amazon goes down.
        fnordpiglet 4y ago
        Except for their 22% ownership stake
    - tomcam 4y ago
      Thank you
mushufasa 4y ago
"We generated negative gross profit of $(1,000) million for the fourth quarter 2022. For fiscal year 2022, we generated negative gross profit of $(3,123) million. Gross profit for the fourth quarter 2022 was impacted by a lower of cost or net realizable value (“LCNRV”) of inventory charge and losses on firm purchase commitments of $920 million as of December 31, 2022 compared to $95 million as of December 31, 2021. We expect to continue to incur these charges throughout 2023 but anticipate the total charge will decline as we drive down cost of goods sold per vehicle by lowering material, production, logistics, and other costs. We forecast reaching positive gross profit in 2024 and therefore expect that by the end of 2024, we will no longer have material LCNRV inventory charges and losses on firm purchase commitments associated with our Normal facility."
- uptownfunk 4y ago
  Are these at all related to supply chain or inflation issues?
- mattlondon 4y ago
  "negative gross profit" ... that is corpspeak for "loss" right? I guess don't say "The L-word" is some attempt to paint a rosy picture? "This is not use losing money! We're making a negativeprofit by investing!"
  - alexb_ 4y ago
    No, it means that the column for gross profit is negative. Loss is used many times in different columns on the consolidated balance sheet.
    - RC_ITR 4y ago
      You are incorrect. 'Loss' is a perfectly acceptable GAAP term for negative profits on the P&L, it's just that 'Gross Loss' is so rare, nobody really uses it. You can even look at the 10-k and see they say 'Net Loss' instead of 'Net Income.'
  - draw_down 4y ago
mbgerring 4y ago
The financials may not look good right now, but the vehicles are extremely good. They’re already way out in front of the EV truck segment, and the big automakers have a huge gap to make up to reach the same level of quality. I wouldn’t be surprised if they manage to turn this around and become profitable.
- giobox 4y ago
  In isolation, sure, but this space is going to get so fiercely competitive so quickly (on the order of years, but that is fast for the car industry!) and ASPs for electric trucks will come down. Rivian are still generally only selling ~six-figure trucks today (the priciest configs ship sooner of course) and not making money at it. How good the vehicle is becomes irrelevant if you can't make it at a price people want to pay. I still think Rivian can get there, but there is so far to go. They only delivered ~20k cars in 2022.
  - bink 4y ago
    I'm not sure it's fair to say the priciest configs ship sooner. They're really only delivering two trucks right now, the quad motor, large pack versions of the R1T and R1S. The dual motor configs are cheaper but were only introduced recently. The max pack versions have been for sale for awhile and none of have been delivered, but they're also the most expensive. They did raise prices around 1 year ago but I've seen no evidence that they've prioritized orders for those who purchased after the price increase or who equipped more expensive options (options like tents and racks are shipping separately).
    - giobox 4y ago
      If you can't make money on the highest margin configs (and they can't yet), you certainly don't prioritise selling the lower margin models. This is a fairly common practice for a new model line from an auto-maker and Rivian are no different. The reason I point price out at all, competition is already available for less in places (F150 Lightning), and more electric trucks are due to launch shortly - not great if you can't turn a profit on six figure models let alone considering lower priced offerings to compete.
alexb_ 4y ago
4th quarter consolidated balance sheet (in millions) so you don't have to click through and look through it: > Revenue: 663 > Cost of Revenues: 1,663 > Gross Profit: (1,000) Operating Expenses (Totals 795): > R&D: 402 > Selling, general, administrative: 393 Loss from Operations: (1,795) Interest income: 99 Interest expense: 33 Other net income: 6 Loss before taxes: (1,723) Remember, all of these are in millions. So Rivian managed to lose 1.7 billion dollars in 3 months. That comes out to nearly 19 million dollars lost every single day.
DoesntMatter22 4y ago
Tesla is in big trouble...
greenthrow 4y ago
The vehicles are so good. I hope they are able to get through this and become profitable.
rootusrootus 4y ago
Financial experts: Do they break it down in a way that shows the COGS for each vehicle produced? Has that dropped a significant amount from a year ago?
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  To answer my own question, the numbers suggest COGS-per-vehicle has increased since last quarter, not dropped. Rivian is burning a lot of money every time they product another vehicle.
realworldperson 4y ago
[dead]
legitster 4y ago
I'm still pretty optimistic on Rivian. Building an auto manufacturer from scratch is pretty up there as one of the hardest/most expensive business challenge that exists. The fact that they have survived through the "burning money" stage to get to the other side at all is pretty powerful. All the examples of car startups that failed only did so because they struggled to drum up sales in their day (DeLorean, Fiskar, Tucker, etc). On the other hand, I am seeing Rivians EVERYWHERE. They are selling them as fast as they can make them. On top of that, they seem to be doing a great job of releasing new models pretty quickly and skipping over the years of QC problems that plagued early Tesla. If there's actually consumer demand for the car, and the marginal costs to manufacture are favorable - you can probably ignore all of the sunk development costs. SOMEONE would want to carry on the business. But we will probably see all parties involved eating or writing off as much of the debt as possible right now that they are transitioning to cash flow.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  It seems, though, like they are not at all through the 'burning money' stage. The marginal costs to manufacture appear to still be in the neighborhood of 3x the price of the vehicle. They seem optimistic they can turn that around this year, but promises are easy.
  - legitster 4y ago
    The cost per vehicle (all expenses total/ # of vehicles) may be 3x the sale price, but the marginal cost (the cost to produce one more car to sell) is still less than the sale price. An important distinction. Otherwise selling cars would cost them money.
    - rootusrootus 4y ago
      COGS per vehicle is still way more than twice the average selling price. Yes, selling cars costs them money. They have to figure out how to make the manufacturing process use fewer and cheaper parts, less labor, etc. It is a difficult problem because scaling only offers incremental improvements to COGS.
dbg31415 4y ago
I think these look great, but I can't see them replacing combustion engines for all the things people who drive trucks in the country need. Like... I'm not going to load this up with fence posts and go out for a 12 hour day... plugging in the fence post digger to the battery... I'd be afraid that since I can't just toss in an extra gas tank that I'd be walking home. And I can't see this pulling a horse trailer across the Great Plains stopping every 300 miles to recharge for several hours. (But I know North Dakota did finally get a Tesla charging stating!) Just feels like it's not quite setup for "real" use. I can totally see some suburban guy using this to go camping. But... even that, like I don't want to leave this parked at the trail head for a week, when I'm hiking. I bet the battery would hold a week, but like what if it didn't? I couldn't just bum a jump from another camper. One of the joys to being out in nature, is being away from "it all" -- including being away from the population density required to make charging stations viable. I think that's always going to be a fundamental flaw with electric "adventure" vehicles. Cool to look at. Promising tech. But EVs are still "toys" in my mind.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  People still livin in a fantasy world where most trucks are used by farmers to put up fence posts. Its hilarious. Every single stastic and analysis shows that the waste majority of truck drivers barley ever use trailer and haul stuff in the extreme minority of case. And even then they mostly haul locally. > But EVs are still "toys" in my mind. By that definition, most F-150 are toys. The reality is there is a 2 million a year truck market and EV trucks are totally reasonably for 70% of that market and that is growing fast.
  - dbg31415 4y ago
    Look, I think that it's fair to say most people don't need trucks. If you haven't driven on a gravel road, or haven't towed anything in the last year... you don't need a truck. But I legit spend a month a year on my family ranch... I still have relatives who live out there full time. 20,000 acres, nearest neighbor is 10 miles away, nearest gas station is 30 miles away, nearest grocery store is 70 miles away. There aren't a lot of ranchers left, but it's not a fantasy for them. They need stuff that works. I don't know why you find that hilarious. And for that matter... CA and TX both have energy production issues. We can't keep our homes powered during a blizzard, or during August, and I have serious doubts that adding more EVs to the grid will be sustainable. Love to be proven wrong, but all the EVs come across as "rich man toys" to me still. Would the light stay on if everyone had a Tesla to virtue signal in?

74 points by giacaglia 4y ago

sinistersnare 4y ago

[flagged]

abfan1127 4y ago
you clearly don't live in suburban or rural areas. I've tried to take public transportation in Phoenix. They put stops every 1/4 mi. it takes longer to ride a bus than ride a bike. public transit is just not remotely reasonable.
gwbas1c 4y ago
Public transportation is a luxury. It assumes that you can live in a dense area and that your travel needs coincide with bus/train routes. It's very practical for many, and very impractical for many too.
- PaulsWallet 4y ago
  I ride the bus and I can promise you I don't do it because of luxury. Even if that was true, it would only be true in North America. In the rest of the developed world, public transport extends out into rural areas.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    > the rest of the developed world, public transport extends out into rural areas Are you by chance referring to Europe with this comment? I ask because Europe's idea of rural and North America's idea are quite different.
    - tsudounym 4y ago
      Switzerland has villages with only hundreds of people that regularly receive train service. There are states with similar GDP, size and density as Switzerland that do not have any train service. Don't think of the US as a whole, think of the individual states who easily have the budget equivalent of European countries.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    >In the rest of the developed world, public transport extends out into rural areas. I have spent a lot of time in Europe and, once you get away from population centers and even larger towns, public transit can get very hit or miss. OK, maybe there's technically a once or twice a day bus to that rural hamlet but lots of Europeans own cars and, while it's generally easier to get by without cars in areas of Europe, it's not like you can hop on public transportation everywhere. It varies of course. Somewhere like Switzerland (as another poster notes) is generally easier to get off the beaten track by bus or train than a lot of coutries.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    Yeah, if by "extends out" you mean "you can get there, eventually". Not if you mean "you can get there in a reasonable amount of time and you don't need to time it perfectly because you only get two chances a day".
- tsudounym 4y ago
  What a hilariously American comment. Nearly all American cities were built by train networks that existed in the 1800s. These train lines were ripped out to make way for car infrastructure in the mid-1900s, which was designed to segregate neighborhoods and give giant profits to GM. Even famously car-centric LA with their massive freeways once had the best public transit in the world. https://www.segregationbydesign.com/ https://www.segregationbydesign.com/
  - kelnos 4y ago
    I don't think we're talking solely about cities here; suburban and rural areas can never be sustainably and cost-effectively served by public transit, at least not the kind of areas with densities you'll find in the US. Certainly US cities are very weak on the public transit front, and there's a lot of improvement that can be made there. Even then, though, there are a lot of municipalities in the US that technically are considered "cities" but don't have enough density to make pervasive public transit feasible.
    - tsudounym 4y ago
      Switzerland has villages with only hundreds of people that regularly receive train service. There are states with similar GDP, size and density as Switzerland that do not have any train service. Sprawling suburbs are a giant scam - the cost of providing urban amenities (power, internet, sewage) to these neighborhoods is much higher than it appears. The lines of pipes and power lines in sprawling burbs cost wayyyy more than it would to maintain a transit oriented development full of townhomes and condos.
      - frumper 4y ago
        The US has counties with larger land areas than the entire country of Switzerland. Also, we largely don't want to live in townhomes and condos. Update: San Bernardino County is 33% larger than Switzerland with 25% of the population. America is a big place.
  - rocket_surgeron 4y ago
- majormajor 4y ago
  It's a luxury IFF you live right next to a station and need to go right next to stations and your trains/busses/whatever aren't too crowded. Otherwise it's a necessity for those for whom private transportation is a luxury, and often not a pleasant one. Crammed standing into a crowded box, or transferring a couple of times to take 2 hours by bus to go somewhere you could get to directly in 30min, etc. "Invest in public transportation" is a hard sell in a country where a huge portion of the population is able to afford private vehicles and space to park them, because the level of investment required to even equal the convenience factor of that is very, very, very high. EDIT: even in Europe you don't have to travel that far outside of city centers to find quite a bit of private car ownership. All those European car companies aren't just doing it for shits and giggles, after all.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  You must be American. In fact, insane car and highway infrastructure is actually a luxury. Funny how roads just magically spring up everywhere and they are 'required to live' but god forbid a bus that uses that road, that is luxury. Public subsidy of car infrastructure is far higher then for public transport. > coincide with bus/train routes There is this thing called planning. They put public transport where it is actually needed. Its not like 'ohh luck, they just so happened to build a train here'. If your country has a serious imperative of doing public infrastructure correctly, then the amount of people who can reasonably be reached is very, very high. And good urbanism isn't just density. Look at some railroad towns in the East, they have walkable rural urbanism. You don't need a car to live in such places. Or maybe one car for a whole large family. Sure yes, there is some people who that doesn't include. But lets be fucking real, most people live in cities or in suburban areas. Or in sprawl town loosely attached to some larger metro area.
  - gwbas1c 4y ago
    > You must be American > But lets be fucking real My friends in Germany complain about how taking public transportation to work takes 2 hours, or 30 minutes by car.
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      And in even more places trying to go threw or across the city takes longer with a car. Public transport is just fundamentally more efficient as a society. If you had said 'some people need cars' that would be one thing, but to act like cars are normal and car infrastructure is standard and normal, and public transit is some sort of luxury that only fancy societies can afford and even then only once they have built their highway infrastructure. A big problem with German public transport for example that right when they wanted to implement West German High speed rail, the unification with East Germany happened and new highway for cars took priority. And after that the EU believed the most important thing was building lots of highway all threw Eastern Europe. Walking, biking and public transport should be the baseline, and if money is left over you can have fancy car infrastructure and parking is the luxury.
explaininjs 4y ago
It'd be far worse to have scheduled bus routes and train tracks cutting across the vast wilderness than the occasional electric vehicle cruising through.
- eppp 4y ago
  Depends on how much energy the train uses. I would guess that the maintenance and supporting infrastructure for the 'occasional' car would dwarf the cost of a railway.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    It would be difficult to eliminate the road, however, so that infrastructure is going to exist either way.
- virgildotcodes 4y ago
  Huh, as opposed to the roads and highways cutting across the vast wilderness that we have now?
  - explaininjs 4y ago
    Not really sure what (if any) claim you're making here. I'm defining wilderness above to be "those areas without sufficient road infrastructure to support heavy vehicles like busses", if that helps clarify.
- tsudounym 4y ago
  A double track train line can move orders of magnitude more people than a 30-lane highway can. Cars and highways are space inefficient, and highways cause property values surrounding it to decrease due to the pollution and noise.
  - kelnos 4y ago
    You're not really responding to what the parent poster said. We're not talking about 30-lane highways, we're talking about a small one-lane road that only needs to serve tens of people per day. A train route for that is absurd.
Swenrekcah 4y ago
I don’t particularly disagree but that’s for governments (local or larger) to do. Car companies are obviously going to produce cars, and the cleaner they can do it the better.
seedless-sensat 4y ago
One of their biggest plays are EV delivery trucks (and I see them on my streets). I'm sure someone will chime in about the environmental concerns of Amazon - but Rivan's strategy seems like a decent environmental message to me.
pedalpete 4y ago
It isn't an either or scenario, and you're providing an unrealistic expectation. Rivian is making "lifestyle vehicles", pick-ups and SUVs that are off-road capable, but are not not work trucks. There is no public transit out in much of these areas. They also make Amazon delivery vehicles, so you can't expect Amazon deliveries to be made via public transport.
xnx 4y ago
In the US, total cost per passenger mile for public transportation is higher than private vehicles. All that extra cost has environmental impact in the form of extra steel, concrete, and salaries.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mbgerring 4y ago
The entire vehicle fleet needs to be electrified, period. There are areas of the United States where a private 4WD vehicle are a necessity to get to and from home. The only way to eventually retire the vast infrastructure required to deliver fossil fuels to rural areas, and everywhere else, is to electrify the entire fleet. Climate change is a chemistry and engineering problem. You can solve some of the chemistry and engineering problem upstream, through social and cultural changes, but insisting that those changes are the only way to solve the problem is flat-out false, and absolutely repellent to many people that, ultimately, will need to be brought along in the transition away from fossil fuels. Nothing is stopping you from working on the myriad issues that prevent greater adoption of public transportation, and you and the world would be better served by getting to work building the future you want instead of trashing the efforts of people working the problem from a different angle.
kerpotgh 4y ago
I don’t want to live in densely populated places cooped up in apartments.
shagie 4y ago
Delivery vans are environment saving. The carbon footprint for delivery is less than going to the store. https://sustainability.uw.edu/news/grocery-delivery-service-greener-driving-store https://sustainability.uw.edu/news/grocery-delivery-service-... and https://www.washington.edu/news/2013/04/29/grocery-delivery-service-is-greener-than-driving-to-the-store/ https://www.washington.edu/news/2013/04/29/grocery-delivery-... https://ctl.mit.edu/sites/ctl.mit.edu/files/library/public/Dimitri-Weideli-Environmental-Analysis-of-US-Online-Shopping_0.pdf https://ctl.mit.edu/sites/ctl.mit.edu/files/library/public/D... looks at the total carbon footprint which takes into account packaging too. For buying something from Amazon, the largest part of the carbon footprint is the cardboard boxes and overall, its still more efficient than traditional shopping.
kelnos 4y ago
I agree with you that investment in public transit is preferable to private vehicles in many cases, but the primary purpose of a pickup truck is not personal transportation, it's hauling a bunch of bulky, heavy stuff that isn't feasible to bring on public transit. Regardless, public transit cannot go everywhere. Rural and light-density suburban areas can never be adequately and cost-effectively served by public transit. Sure, you can run trains or buses into areas like those, but either you'll have excessively low per-route ridership and unsustainably-high operational costs, or you'll have routes that require people to travel several miles in order to get to a station/stop, which means people need private vehicles anyway. In these cases, you often end up with an overall trip that takes several multiples of the time it would take to drive your own private car. I get that many people might find it acceptable to impose that kind of situation on people (in the name of the environment or whatever reason), but I wouldn't want to live in that world. I use public transit whenever feasible, and only drive when I have to, but there are limits to what I will accept.
cypress66 4y ago
You will eat the bugs. It's the only environmentally friendly option.

itsmemattchung 4y ago

How does this company — or any company, for that matter — continue operating in the long term with that much significant (i.e. 1B) gross loss?

bdcravens 4y ago
The ratios are different, but Uber lost over $2B last year, and overall, has lost $9B. Tesla didn't turn a profit for 8 years, until 2020, and from 2016-2018, regularly had 12 trailing months of $1B losses or more.
- cj 4y ago
  Worth mentioning the thing that likely motivated TSLA to be profitable is that it’s a requirement to be considered for inclusion in the S&P 500 index.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    I don't really think that is worth mentioning. Tesla always wanted to be profitable, to get their they need a high margin mass production vehicle. Since they had that, the Model 3, they have been profitable. The Model 3 was always the plan.
martythemaniak 4y ago
You raise money, you spend that money to make a factory, then you sell whatever the factory makes for a profit, then you pay back your investors.
tpmx 4y ago
If there's belief in the company/product they will get more investments. If not they'll eventually run out of money.
serial_dev 4y ago
Tesla's market cap is approximately 644,59 billion USD now. Apparently, trying to reproduce that success is worth a couple of billions to some people.

fnordpiglet 4y ago

“We make the Amazon delivery vehicles that Amazon gets at cost so we are a cost center that manages to offset our expenses by $600M further optimizing the weighted cost per delivery vehicle for Amazon.”

tomcam 4y ago
Can you translate that for me?
- post_break 4y ago
  They sell the delivery trucks at cost, we're going to try to make that cost lower so we won't lose money on each one sold.
  - juice_bus 4y ago
    Is "cost" set at the original date of the agreement? Otherwise lowering cost wouldn't help. (or this is a joke I'm whiffing on...)
    - johntb86 4y ago
      Currently the price is approximately equal to the cost, but presumably there's nothing in the contract with Amazon saying that if Rivian's costs go down then the price to amazon goes down.
      - fnordpiglet 4y ago
        Except for their 22% ownership stake
  - tomcam 4y ago
    Thank you

mushufasa 4y ago

"We generated negative gross profit of $(1,000) million for the fourth quarter 2022. For fiscal year 2022, we generated negative gross profit of $(3,123) million. Gross profit for the fourth quarter 2022 was impacted by a lower of cost or net realizable value (“LCNRV”) of inventory charge and losses on firm purchase commitments of $920 million as of December 31, 2022 compared to $95 million as of December 31, 2021. We expect to continue to incur these charges throughout 2023 but anticipate the total charge will decline as we drive down cost of goods sold per vehicle by lowering material, production, logistics, and other costs. We forecast reaching positive gross profit in 2024 and therefore expect that by the end of 2024, we will no longer have material LCNRV inventory charges and losses on firm purchase commitments associated with our Normal facility."

uptownfunk 4y ago
Are these at all related to supply chain or inflation issues?
mattlondon 4y ago
"negative gross profit" ... that is corpspeak for "loss" right? I guess don't say "The L-word" is some attempt to paint a rosy picture? "This is not use losing money! We're making a negativeprofit by investing!"
- alexb_ 4y ago
  No, it means that the column for gross profit is negative. Loss is used many times in different columns on the consolidated balance sheet.
  - RC_ITR 4y ago
    You are incorrect. 'Loss' is a perfectly acceptable GAAP term for negative profits on the P&L, it's just that 'Gross Loss' is so rare, nobody really uses it. You can even look at the 10-k and see they say 'Net Loss' instead of 'Net Income.'
- draw_down 4y ago

mbgerring 4y ago

The financials may not look good right now, but the vehicles are extremely good. They’re already way out in front of the EV truck segment, and the big automakers have a huge gap to make up to reach the same level of quality. I wouldn’t be surprised if they manage to turn this around and become profitable.

giobox 4y ago
In isolation, sure, but this space is going to get so fiercely competitive so quickly (on the order of years, but that is fast for the car industry!) and ASPs for electric trucks will come down. Rivian are still generally only selling ~six-figure trucks today (the priciest configs ship sooner of course) and not making money at it. How good the vehicle is becomes irrelevant if you can't make it at a price people want to pay. I still think Rivian can get there, but there is so far to go. They only delivered ~20k cars in 2022.
- bink 4y ago
  I'm not sure it's fair to say the priciest configs ship sooner. They're really only delivering two trucks right now, the quad motor, large pack versions of the R1T and R1S. The dual motor configs are cheaper but were only introduced recently. The max pack versions have been for sale for awhile and none of have been delivered, but they're also the most expensive. They did raise prices around 1 year ago but I've seen no evidence that they've prioritized orders for those who purchased after the price increase or who equipped more expensive options (options like tents and racks are shipping separately).
  - giobox 4y ago
    If you can't make money on the highest margin configs (and they can't yet), you certainly don't prioritise selling the lower margin models. This is a fairly common practice for a new model line from an auto-maker and Rivian are no different. The reason I point price out at all, competition is already available for less in places (F150 Lightning), and more electric trucks are due to launch shortly - not great if you can't turn a profit on six figure models let alone considering lower priced offerings to compete.

alexb_ 4y ago

4th quarter consolidated balance sheet (in millions) so you don't have to click through and look through it: > Revenue: 663 > Cost of Revenues: 1,663 > Gross Profit: (1,000) Operating Expenses (Totals 795): > R&D: 402 > Selling, general, administrative: 393 Loss from Operations: (1,795) Interest income: 99 Interest expense: 33 Other net income: 6 Loss before taxes: (1,723) Remember, all of these are in millions. So Rivian managed to lose 1.7 billion dollars in 3 months. That comes out to nearly 19 million dollars lost every single day.

DoesntMatter22 4y ago

Tesla is in big trouble...

greenthrow 4y ago

The vehicles are so good. I hope they are able to get through this and become profitable.

rootusrootus 4y ago

Financial experts: Do they break it down in a way that shows the COGS for each vehicle produced? Has that dropped a significant amount from a year ago?

rootusrootus 4y ago
To answer my own question, the numbers suggest COGS-per-vehicle has increased since last quarter, not dropped. Rivian is burning a lot of money every time they product another vehicle.

realworldperson 4y ago

[dead]

legitster 4y ago

I'm still pretty optimistic on Rivian. Building an auto manufacturer from scratch is pretty up there as one of the hardest/most expensive business challenge that exists. The fact that they have survived through the "burning money" stage to get to the other side at all is pretty powerful. All the examples of car startups that failed only did so because they struggled to drum up sales in their day (DeLorean, Fiskar, Tucker, etc). On the other hand, I am seeing Rivians EVERYWHERE. They are selling them as fast as they can make them. On top of that, they seem to be doing a great job of releasing new models pretty quickly and skipping over the years of QC problems that plagued early Tesla. If there's actually consumer demand for the car, and the marginal costs to manufacture are favorable - you can probably ignore all of the sunk development costs. SOMEONE would want to carry on the business. But we will probably see all parties involved eating or writing off as much of the debt as possible right now that they are transitioning to cash flow.

rootusrootus 4y ago
It seems, though, like they are not at all through the 'burning money' stage. The marginal costs to manufacture appear to still be in the neighborhood of 3x the price of the vehicle. They seem optimistic they can turn that around this year, but promises are easy.
- legitster 4y ago
  The cost per vehicle (all expenses total/ # of vehicles) may be 3x the sale price, but the marginal cost (the cost to produce one more car to sell) is still less than the sale price. An important distinction. Otherwise selling cars would cost them money.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    COGS per vehicle is still way more than twice the average selling price. Yes, selling cars costs them money. They have to figure out how to make the manufacturing process use fewer and cheaper parts, less labor, etc. It is a difficult problem because scaling only offers incremental improvements to COGS.

dbg31415 4y ago

I think these look great, but I can't see them replacing combustion engines for all the things people who drive trucks in the country need. Like... I'm not going to load this up with fence posts and go out for a 12 hour day... plugging in the fence post digger to the battery... I'd be afraid that since I can't just toss in an extra gas tank that I'd be walking home. And I can't see this pulling a horse trailer across the Great Plains stopping every 300 miles to recharge for several hours. (But I know North Dakota did finally get a Tesla charging stating!) Just feels like it's not quite setup for "real" use. I can totally see some suburban guy using this to go camping. But... even that, like I don't want to leave this parked at the trail head for a week, when I'm hiking. I bet the battery would hold a week, but like what if it didn't? I couldn't just bum a jump from another camper. One of the joys to being out in nature, is being away from "it all" -- including being away from the population density required to make charging stations viable. I think that's always going to be a fundamental flaw with electric "adventure" vehicles. Cool to look at. Promising tech. But EVs are still "toys" in my mind.

panick21_ 4y ago
People still livin in a fantasy world where most trucks are used by farmers to put up fence posts. Its hilarious. Every single stastic and analysis shows that the waste majority of truck drivers barley ever use trailer and haul stuff in the extreme minority of case. And even then they mostly haul locally. > But EVs are still "toys" in my mind. By that definition, most F-150 are toys. The reality is there is a 2 million a year truck market and EV trucks are totally reasonably for 70% of that market and that is growing fast.
- dbg31415 4y ago
  Look, I think that it's fair to say most people don't need trucks. If you haven't driven on a gravel road, or haven't towed anything in the last year... you don't need a truck. But I legit spend a month a year on my family ranch... I still have relatives who live out there full time. 20,000 acres, nearest neighbor is 10 miles away, nearest gas station is 30 miles away, nearest grocery store is 70 miles away. There aren't a lot of ranchers left, but it's not a fantasy for them. They need stuff that works. I don't know why you find that hilarious. And for that matter... CA and TX both have energy production issues. We can't keep our homes powered during a blizzard, or during August, and I have serious doubts that adding more EVs to the grid will be sustainable. Love to be proven wrong, but all the EVs come across as "rich man toys" to me still. Would the light stay on if everyone had a Tesla to virtue signal in?