Rivian decimates staff to put a brake on spending Amid continuing losses, Rivian is laying off 10 percent of its salaried employees and a limited number of hourly folks in an attempt to reduce its expenses. CEO RJ Scaringe shared news of the layoffs during a conference call with financial analysts yesterday as he delivered the automaker's figures for the fourth quarter of …
...or 3,855 kilograms for our non-American friends.
This gross vehicle weight means you can't drive one on a category B car license in Europe, and possibly elsewhere.
It was a bit short-sighted on Rivian's part not to build some small cars that people outside of the US might want to drive but meh...
you need to start big and expensive because you can't build a new car company selling 20k vehicles to teenagers. america has made 2 new car companies. what of europe? microlino? what does europe know about starting a new company from scratch? those croats are making electric supercar.
when vw starts scout brand in america, they won't be starting with a compact vehicle. because they need profits.
"you need to start big and expensive because you can't build a new car company selling 20k vehicles to teenagers."
You must not have read the article.
TL:DR: Rivian's in trouble... the "big and expensive" thing hasn't worked out for them lol
Also I didn't mention 20k cars for teenagers...
There is only one new car in the US that costs < $20K, a Mazda, and that's being discontinued.
Average cost of a new vehicle in the US is $49K. We're trapped here because a lot of the US needs cars because of a lack of transport infrastructure. What this means is that the average age of cars in the US is increasing, its 10 years or so now, since people on the whole don't have the $700+ per month "average car payment" to burn and we don't have the sorts of regulations that force usable cars off the road (usually in the name of reducing emissions).
Focusing on expensive but profitable SUVs leaves manufacturers vulnerable to inexpensive competition. We have tools in the US to restrict competition and especially imports from places like China** so I don't expect any relief soon.
(**Its OK for manufacturers to import components or even complete vehicles and resell it at a decent markup but direct competition.....not allowed.....)
"or 3,855 kilograms for our non-American friends."
Nearly 4t.
Does it come with a turret with a choice from various calibre cannon?
Australians love their big diesel SUVs and their ilk but having the choice of 4t battery box isn't likely to change that.
If the company goes bust, the vehicles may become very, very big paperweights.
So is anyone going to buy them with that a feasible scenario?
You can fix and drive an ICE vehicle even if the manufacturer went bust forty years ago. Some city councils will tax you to hell and back for doing it on their turf, but at least it works when you turn the key in the ignition. Anything requiring a home server call is inherently less resilient.
What? Struggling to see even a vague, tangential reference to the OP's comment.
The ICE can still be fixed, even it if means stripping one or more donnor cars to do so. Whether it's economic to do so is a different matter. But if the car requires a connection to the mothership to function, when that mothership crashes ithe car is immediately a massive paperweight.
No idea if this is actually something Rivian's need in order to function, however.
Yep. Even a "connected car" with a nobbled ECU, you can still get a third-party replacement ECU and get it going again. One hell of a faff, but I know people who have done it.
Good luck making an after-market EV inverter and BMS that fits more than one make/model. Controlling a 400V traction motor is not like driving a hobby brushless motor. Especially if it's something like a Synchronous Reluctance motor.
The battery too will have potentially hundreds of microcontrollers inside, all running secure firmware, that aren't going to talk to anything non OEM-approved
Nah, would not be a problem. Seimens has been selling traction motor controllers for EV conversions for years. They may even be providing support for the EV makers. It's possible that not all the features wouldn't work but you could debrick the car enough to be just a car.
I think you are underestimating just how tightly-integrated EVs are. Take a look at the various teardown videos on the u-bend of EV motors. Motor and power electronics are usually packaged in the same cast aluminium housing, due to cooling, cabling reduction and EMC requirements. Usually the differential is part of this single package, too. Often you can't even access the motor phase wires without opening the shell and breaking the gasket on the motor's cooling loop. The drive unit is a single monolithic component with 400V DC supply, CAN bus, coolant in/out, and output shafts for a pair of wheels.
I would expect that converting an ICE car (with a nice spacious engine bay and open transmission) would be much easier than de-bricking a bricked EV by trying to replace the motor control board. You'd need to replace the entire driveshaft/differential/motor/controller module, and get something that can fit into the same tightly packed space as the original. No use going to a scrapyard, because the electronic components will be keyed to the original serial number etc.
The Siemens kits that you describe will be for "standard" induction or PMSM (with a feedback sensor) only. I doubt they would drive SynRM or the wacky Tesla IPM-SynRM motors, but I could be wrong. Nevertheless, I would challenge anyone to be able to rip out the drive electronics of an EV and jack onto the motor phases and be able to drive it.
I wouldn't say unfeasible, more like impractical at this time. Whichever way you look at it, trying to force EV uptake by banning sales of ICE vehicles when there is the HUGE question mark over how we deal with EV battery packs when they are end-of-life is just plain stupid and doesn't help anyone. I've never been in a position to buy a new car and would almost certainly never do so even if I was due to the depreciation associated with buying a new car, but I'd also be highly skeptical of buying a seven or eight year old EV if there was a potential multi-thousand £/$ bill attached within the next five years or so. Add to that the reliance of these EV's on phoning home to the manufacturers mothership for everything and the always present risk of that being arbitrarily removed and bricking my car, and there is just no incentive for me to even consider looking at an EV.
No, sort out an industry-wide method for addressing the reprocessing of dead EV batteries which does not lumber the end used with a massive additional cost and I might be interested, otherwise I'm sticking with my thirteen year old diesel Estate car which can easily take me and four other people with all our stuff 600 miles in one go without having to work out an itinerary including multiple overnight stays when going to and from our destination because of having to recharge. And no, I won't be turning the fucking heater and stereo off and hypermiling to be more 'efficient' and increase range either.
Even before everyone has a battery pack we'll have exhausted generation and network capacity.
But electric motors are a great idea, nothing to stop manufacturers moving toward turbines to power them rather than direct transmission: separate power generation from power transmission. However, we normally have to wait for the industry to decide when they've had enough subsidies from plan A before they propose plan B.
they are already recycling now today electric vehicle batteries.
only the misinformed have a problem with disposal of batteries. in my family we have a decade old tesla built battery that has nearly same performance as new after 80k miles.
again, reprocessing is already happening now, you just don't know about it.
feels good repeating fossil industry bs doesn't it? add in some techno-troglodyte bs and you're a well rounded luddite!
So, one can only assume that the plan is to phase out the concept of ordinary citizens having their own transportation.
The way to reduce congestion apparently, is not to build roads, but take the riff-raff off of them.
In the "good old days", only the landed gentry could afford their own horse and carriage, let alone a motor-car. For the rest of them, there's the omnibus.
The battery issue has pretty much been solved, but lithium is not part of the solution. Graphene alumium ion batteries will last well over 7000 recharge cycles vs lithium's 1000 cycles before degradation becomes noticeable, and when it does reach EOL they recycle into aluminum and graphene. Plus they don't have the slow charge times, temperature sensitivity or fire risks that lithium has. If the charging infrastructure is in place, charging aluminum batteries won't be much different than stopping for a tank of gasoline.
You can't easily recycle graphene into graphene, unfortunately. You can recycle it into low-purity amorphous carbon black, but that's not very valuable. Graphene is produced by separating single layers of graphite, and graphite has to be mined. Sure, synthetic graphite/graphene is possible, but it is much more expensive than mining it. China recently banned exports of graphite, because it is a key mineral in the manufacture of batteries, for which they want to protect their dominance.
Aluminium has a lower electrochemical potential than Lithium i.e. it produces less than half the voltage per cell. Not a show-stopper, but it makes it harder to be the front-runner in a competitive market. Power density will be lower, so fast charging is certainly not going to be vastly improved as you claim. Even if they tolerate high temperatures under fast-charging conditions, that just means that fast charging is going to be inefficient.
The only sensible way to "own" an EV is through a lease for the first few years of its life. You don't want to be funding a battery replacement out of your own pocket as the second or subsequent owner.
Depreciation is insane too, as companies like Tesla slash prices and burn owners who thought they were making an investment rather than buying a car. In fact, leasing companies in Europe are demanding money back from EV makers as the cars' values plummet (Tesla Model 3 and the Audi e-tron are the worst value apparently):
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2024/02/22/761780.htm
Sadly, half or more of my acquaintances consider a new car purchase (ICE or EV, doesn't matter) to be an investment. Not downvoting you -- yes you are right and yes they are morons -- just pointing out that we are surrounded by gullible fools.
Or maybe I'm merely revealing that I hang out with dummies.
A mass-produced car is never an investment opportunity (except in very limited cases). Only a gullible moron would believe otherwise.
It's just that most of the gullible morons crying about their car's value these days happen to drive Teslas, but I've no doubt that some ICE drivers have buyer's remorse too.
Losing money on building and selling the cars isn't an obstacle if your accountants are creative enough.
The big trick is harvesting subsidies you barely/don't qualify for and selling all those tasty regulatory carbon credits. Plus keeping your stock pump running.
Get it right and you can last long enough to get to a point where you can start nominally generating profit from actual sales.
Sad really as Rivian looked fairly realistic in how it operated, certainly compared to some other EV startups which have turned out to be just a shell wrapped around aspirations and happy thoughts, with a real business nowhere to be found.
So, they’re burning $10bn a year to build 57000 vehicles?! That’s $170k per vehicle. That doesn’t appear to be R&D, just what it’s costing them per vehicle to build and sell. Because allegedly the vehicle is ready for prime time.
First, 57k vehicles per year barely needs a factory to build it. They employ 16000 people. That’s 3 vehicles per worker per year. You can literally coach-build cars at 10-20 cars per worker per year, and half a dozen sports car companies within a hundred miles of me do exactly that.
Secondly, when they did their sums of “is this a business”, they seem to have forgotten they’d need showrooms. They’ve only just opened 11 showrooms….as an afterthought, and astonished that touching and test-driving the cars is something buyers would want to do before parting with money. They’ve not got a realistic plan for this, nor costed it.
Three years of selling cars behind it
Well, selling a truck1 and an enormous SUV, and probably a lot more of the former. But I suppose you can call the latter a "car" if you're feeling generous.
I will admit that Rivian honestly are in a financial crunch, and aren't just laying people off to reward the execs, like Google and Cisco and that lot. I'm sure that's no comfort to the folks who are out of a job, but at least it's a bit less vile.
1Not a truck I'd use, mind, since I wouldn't be throwing lumber and gravel in the bed of an $80K pickup, or taking it off-road, particularly not one loaded with far too many electronic systems and questionable software. But it looks and drives like a truck.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
