aldo98229
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- Aldo
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Borrowing a page from Ford, Rivian has been playing fast and loose with the facts. They’ve figured out how to play the stock market like a fiddle by releasing press releases that boost stock price. It’s gotten to the point that it’s really hard to tell what’s fact from fiction when it comes to Rivian.
For instance, TFL was all pissy because Rivian refused to invite them to an “off-road” event, and kept excluding them from their communications. Clearly, Rivian didn't trust TFL to “hold the official line.” Now TFL finally got a Rivian to make videos with, and suddenly they are all lovey-dovey. Hmmm...
Instead of swallowing Rivian’s official “communications,” I prefer to dig into the forums to gauge what actual owners are saying.
Here are various posts by those close to the action —Rivian owners and reservation holders. These are all less than a month old.
“I find it very concerning that we have very few people acknowledging that they received their Rivian, even fewer making any comment on likes/dislikes and even fewer (almost none) complaining about something.
Look at these forums, thousands of posts full of complaints. Do you really think people aren’t going to complain about SOMETHING?”
“I'm assuming all current R1T deliveries come with a nice old NDA you have to sign and/or the fact that there are very, very few actual customer deliveries.”
“I was already a bit pessimistic about Rivian - seemed very vaporware. And this post is a bit disappointing, because even my pessimist expectations might not have been pessimistic enough.
It's going to be years before we see Rivian improve. Tesla is like 10 years old now. And in the past 6 months, the Model Y build quality has been reportedly really good. So......just do the math.
Rivian will get better, no doubt. But this won't be overnight, and it might take years....and even a few vehicle purchases (hardcore Tesla fans are in their 4th-5th vehicle now. It says something when they are finally raving about the build quality).
I had thought Rivian might have less of a learning curve. But they might have no less of a learning curve than Tesla did ten years ago.“
“I'm sorry, anything that is so fragile that it needs an NDA is not a "delivery". "Selling" test vehicles to employees to count as deliveries just makes Rivian look bad.”
“So then how many "customer" vehicles did rivian really get out? I didn't see Sony counting ps5's they sent to game developers to test t as sales before release ?.”
“If they are not counting them as test vehicles and they are actual customer vehicles then rivian should expect that those customers will post reviews in forums. I get that this particular person was not the owner, but if rivian didn't want stuff to come out then they should not have released them as "customer" vehicles until they were satisfied with the release. Unfortunately no matter how well a vehicle is released there will people complaining about something and can be blown out or proportion.”
“How many non-insider deliveries have there been? (Saying “insider” rather than employee to encompass families, former employees, etc.) I know @Iwantatesla got one, and I feel like I saw 1 or 2 more here or Reddit, but as this and the reddit thread show, we can’t be sure that people are who they say.
I have some suspicion (and owners need not answer if they’re not comfortable doing so) that every delivery thus far has some strings attached or arose under special circumstances. We haven’t heard any owner talk about the details of their purchase - like when they first ordered, when they first heard from a guide, what their original delivery date was (if they even had one), or the like.
Of course not everyone posts about deliveries, but it is still quite odd to me that despite “non-employee” deliveries beginning, no longtime members of this forum or reddit have gotten an R1T, or even a more firm delivery date now that we are in the new year (recall that some had Jan-Feb dates from the Thanksgiving emails). And there are no signs of “non-customer” deliveries continuing this year. Feels a bit like the September “deliveries,” where a handful of vehicles went out to satisfy a deadline, but real production continued to lag.
As always, I’d love to be wrong about this.”
“I'm less interested in the discount, more interested in whether they are able to reliably build trucks that are good enough to be delivered to the the general public. If the only difference between an employee's car and mine is the out of pocket cost and access to beta software, it counts as a delivery in my book.
It's not a good sign for production that general public deliveries of the R1T seem to be few and far between this long after "customer" deliveries "started." Nor is it confidence-inspiring that R1S deliveries have apparently been limited to the C-suite.
I'd feel a lot more confident in my May-June R1S delivery date if there were evidence of ongoing general public deliveries or if forum members were at least finalizing orders and getting solid delivery dates. Or, for the R1S, if we were seeing lots of manufacturer vehicles on the road, as we did with the R1T.”
Anyway, the posts go on and on.
After these posts appeared, Rivian announced a miraculous 300% jump in production, and stock price jumped 20%.
You can make whatever you want out of all this. To me, the whole Rivian thing looks and smells fishy.
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