After launching not one but three products (R1T, R1S, and Commercial Van), Rivian lost over $139,000 on every vehicle built in the third quarter of 2022.
Since then, Rivian has made drastic progress in cutting costs. In the first three months of the year, Rivian lost $38,784 per EV built, an improvement of over $100,000. However, that number is still up from the $32.5K and $30.5K losses in Q2 and Q3, 2023.
“per vehicle” losses are a weird metric. Each truck does not cost them 130k more than they are selling it for. That number is just the total revenue/vehicles sold. That “per vehicle” loss includes things like buying expensive machinery, buildings and various other investments in their infastructure.
For decades Amazon also did not turn a profit, but it was because they poured that money back into their infastructure instead. It would have been a super weird metric to say that amazon lost $.000000003/widget sold.
Once those investments are done, their numbers will flip drastically, as long as they dont overextend and they survive as a company. The recent 5 billion investment from Volkswagen should help there.
It’s always a bit misleading to have profit per vehicle depend so directly on number of vehicles. I’d like to see manufacturing cost, in addition to overall cost including development
