I don't treat Rivian as an actual mass automaker. Given their ability to recruit employees
= Given their ability to pay several hundred people (actual serious automaker = tens of thousands of people)
Being able to recruit people means that you have enough money to offer them a paycheck. That's it. Give me a couple hundred million dollars and I'll recruit all sorts of "serious people" from any industry of your choice.
and raise funds from serious people
Like essentially every other auto startup whose corpses now litters the annals of automotive history.
I give them a good shot at becoming a real automaker
Even if it's true that they're being given a valuation of a couple billion dollars, that means that
the market sees it as an order of magnitude more likely that they'll fail than succeed.
Most of those automotive startups that failed in the last 80 years tried to make ICEv to outcompete established ICEv players
Virtually every single automaker that's tried to break in has tried to do so through some "untapped niche". In recent years, these have often been EV companies, and yes, these have generally died too. Fisker? Aptera? Imperia? Electric Car Corporation? Micro-Vett? Lightning Car, probably? Faraday, soon enough? Lutz-backed VIA Motors is on life support, I guess. I could keep going. It's a giant wall of failure.
Automotive News, the trade journal of record, says...
What part of a request for a reference did you misunderstand? Let me be more explicit: A link. Actually cite what you're referring to.
(Also, saying "the trade journal of record" is a stretch)
ED: I
think I've found what you're referring to:
GM, Amazon in talks to acquire Rivian stake, report says
"ALJ has agreed to provide almost $500 million in funding, Sumitomo invested an undisclosed amount, and Standard Chartered provided debt financing of $200 million."
1) Does not say
closed all of that funding
2) Almost $500M != $500M
3) Says nothing about what they've spent so far (most sources say they've spent half of what they've raised so far - perhaps you've forgotten that they've been around for much of a decade and even bought an abandoned auto plant)
Example:
PressReader.com - Connecting People Through News
Now, perhaps everyone else is wrong and Automotive News' ambiguous wording is right, and the $450M was just ALJ and "undisclosed amount" is actually some huge figure. Even that wouldn't materially change the picture.
Tesla spent roughly $400M to launch Model S
1) I literally just pointed out how abnormal Tesla's success was. Expecting everyone and their cousin to be able to repeat it is just silly. Not remotely in accordance with history. Tesla pulled it off because the market was empty at that time (announced June 2008, unveiled March 2009). Not "empty of (insert particular class of electric vehicle here)".
Empty of *virtually all electric vehicles*. Which let them get away with putting out what would be, let's be honest, a pretty unrefined product by today's standards. And even then, the vast majority of startups who tried to get into said empty market with electric vehicles died. What Tesla pulled off was
extraordinarily exceptional.
2) Even the federal loan for building the Model S was larger than that ($465M).
Look, I wish Rivian well. But I'm not going to pretend that a startup with a couple prototypes stands more than a 1 in 10 chance of making it into the big leagues.
Which is why it's being valued at only a couple billion dollars. And only at that by said companies that are thinking about investing. And only if said report is actually accurate. You seem to want me to pretend that any nobody who closes a couple rounds of funding can just walk on up and be the next GM or Tesla. Sorry, that's not the real world. I'm not going to do that.