Many automotive industry analysts are afraid to address the elephant in the room when it comes to electric vehicles (EVs). Virtually no one wants to buy them. The only reason this experimental toy market appears to exist at all is because of government subsidies propping the industry up with your tax dollars. If you took the government subsidies away, the EV market would collapse overnight. Nothing illustrates this better than the Rivian boondoggle, which is losing tens of thousands of dollars on every electric pickup truck it sells.
Rivian is supposedly the standard-bearer for the electric pickup truck industry. The Wall Street Journal calls the company a “trailblazer.” This is an odd nickname when you consider the difficulty that its flagship R1T trucks have traveling on trails, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
The R1T has an average selling price that exceeds $80,000. This means that even with government subsidies, most of the buyers need to be at least upper middle class. At its initial public offering (IPO) in 2021, investors rushed to dump $12 billion into the company’s coffers. They ultimately had $18 billion in the bank when their production facilities went online. The company, which still hadn’t produced anything other than a prototype machine, surpassed some established carmakers in its valuation.
The honeymoon quickly ended. In two years, Rivian has never managed to get its manufacturing above one-third capacity in its plants. It only managed to build 12,640 electric trucks during the second quarter of this year. Despite being the top electric pickup truck, Rivian has burned through $9 billion in cash in the last two years, without ever getting close to its goal of delivering 50,000 vehicles per quarter.
Oh, and to top it all off, Rivian is losing $33,000 on every one of its trucks that it sells for $80,000. The “trucks” cost over $110,000 apiece to build, thanks to so many of the parts and materials needing to be sourced from Communist China.
Another dark cloud over the electric pickup truck market is the fact that electric trucks suck. One buyer who spoke to Breitbart News was excited after watching Rivian’s marketing materials, which showed the R1T easily gliding through deep snow. He loved his new R1T, right up until it got stuck in a couple of feet of snow. That’s when a safety feature disabled the vehicle completely, and he couldn’t turn it back on. He notes that customer service was not very helpful.
The R1T also can’t compete when it comes to carrying out tasks that men with healthy testosterone levels like to use trucks for. Want to tow your camp trailer to your favorite fishing spot in the mountains? Good luck with that! Need to haul heavy equipment to a construction site? Then you’d better hope that it’s only a few blocks away.
The more work that an electric battery is required to do (and we’re using the term “work” in the physics sense, not the labor sense), the faster it burns through its energy capacity. When it’s unloaded, the industry-leading R1T gets 2.08 miles per kilowatt-hour (kWh) in field tests. When towing a 7,000-pound camp trailer, it suddenly gets 1.05 miles per kWh. That effectively cuts the range of a full charge in half. If you have to tow the trailer up a hill, its range suddenly drops to 0.66 miles per kWh.
To make matters worse, many users have reported that the Rivian can’t calculate mileage properly once it is towing something heavy. That results in drivers being stranded far from a charging station and needing a tow truck to come get their expensive toy with a dead battery.
This is the industry leader in the electric truck market. Keep that in mind when Joe Biden says he wants to force everyone into electric cars.
