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

Tesla is still growing fast, has extensive self owned infrastructure in charging and service that will be very profitable and is a huge, huge asset. Tesla is competitive with European car makers in Europe, a market GM has dropped, and Ford mostly so relaying on VW MEB to stay in it at all. Tesla is competitive with car makers in China as well. GM and Ford have very little chance of even establishing their EVs seriously there. In fact the opposite, cars from China will compete with them in the US.

In the meantime the car industry has historically high level of access production capacity. Lots of old ICE and engine plants running below capacity, closing them is hard and costly. At the same time they have to do 10s of billions of new investments in new facilities.

At the same time the ICE sales are going down, lower economics of scale, access manufacturing means seriously negative margin. And that right around the time when anybody with half a brain will realize that buying and ICE car will be a bad investment and resell value will be low. This will collapse resale value of ICE cars and that impacts their financials.

Battery materials are a limiting factor already, and there is no physical way all the announced car makers plans can actually happen. Yes, mining is expanding, but not as fast as battery manufacturing and EV demand. Those companies that did not planned for this for the last 5 years will run into massive issues.

> It’s taken them a decade to get a dealer network built.

Meanwhile Ford and GM and co are literally in a war with dealerships over service. VW is literally suing its dealers and the auto lobby are launching a large scale lobbying effort to prevent the dealers lobbying effort. This could potentially cut 100s of millions away from the already thin profits of the car makers.

Literally every other car maker would kill to be in Tesla position.

> Their repairs timeline sound just as horrifying as their competitors.

Maybe be true or not, but on service, current car makers only maybe 20% of the money, the rest goes to dealers. Tesla will earn 100% of the money.

Its not well understood, but parts are a huge reason why traditional OEMs are profitable at all. Tesla meanwhile has very few old cars on the road, and many new cars under warranty. Despite that, Tesla service business is already profitable, and that is before millions of cars will go off warranty in a few years.

Again, literally every single car maker would love to be in Teslas situation.

One last point, if you insist on comparing how many cars they make. Look at the trendlines, not just a single year.

But they have the advantage that the IPO at the exact right moment and have absurd amounts of cash to burn.

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.