The Tesla Cybertruck is perhaps the company’s most striking design – for better or for worse.
“He just shouts ‘nasty-looking truck,'” said Rebecca Puck Stair, a Alberquerque-based location hunter. New York Times in a story this week. The Cybertruck was first revealed in November 2019 with a release date in late 2021. About a year ago, Stair heard about electric car maker Rivian and instead made a deposit for his next R1S SUV.
The ladder represents a segment of the market that is betting on the relative newcomer. Although Tesla’s Angular Cybertruck has attracted media attention, Rivian, led by CEO RJ Scaringe, is opting for a more reserved approach in comparison. The R1S and R1T trucks will leave their factory in Normal, Illinois, this summer, with an equally normal design.
The two cars represent Rivian’s big leap in the electric car consumer market:
- O R1S starts at $ 70,000 and uses a four-engine arrangement, offers a towing capacity of up to 7,700 pounds, can go from 0 to 60 mph in three seconds and has a passage depth of three feet. It can travel over 300 miles per charge with the premium battery option, more than 250 miles in the basic package. The Tesla Model X SUV, by comparison, starts at $ 78,490 with a range of 371 miles.
- O R1T starts at $ 67,500 with specifications similar to the R1S. The main differences are the towing capacity of up to 11,000 pounds and the option of a battery with more than 400 miles of range.
Tesla’s closest competitor, the Cybertruck, starts at $ 39,900 for a single-engine truck. A tri-engine Cybertruck starts at $ 69,900. The base model has a battery life of over 250 miles, a towing capacity of over 7,500 pounds and acceleration times of less than 6.5 seconds. For the tri-engine model, it has a range of over 500 miles, a towing capacity of over 14,000 pounds and acceleration times of less than 2.9 seconds.
Rivian is focusing its marketing efforts in fans of the outdoors. The company is installing electric car chargers in less traditional locations, such as near hiking trails. Scaringe said TechCrunch in December 2020, this strategy means that drivers can decide “whether they want to stop in the middle of the trip for a one, two or five mile hike”.
More money – Investors are watching. On Tuesday, the company announced that it had raised $ 2.65 billion from its last fundraising round, valuing the company at $ 27 billion and bringing total investments to $ 8 billion.
For comparison, Tesla was worth $ 27 billion in December 2016. At the time of writing, it is worth $ 800 billion.
Back to Cybertruck – Musk stated earlier that Cybertruck is angular for a reason. Its body is made of cold-rolled 30X steel, which essentially acts as the car’s exoskeleton. The material cannot be stamped with regular tools, Musk said days after the development, “because it breaks the stamping press”.
It is possible that Tesla could respond if the Cybertruck’s design proved too divisive. In August 2020, Musk said in an interview that “our alternative strategy” is that “we could just make a copycat truck”. He also said that “if we find out that nobody wants to buy a weird looking truck, we will build a normal truck, no problem.”
O Inverse analyze – Rivian was able to find a receptive audience of electric car buyers who were turned off by the Cybertruck divider.
Scaringe made a point of avoiding comparisons with Tesla before, saying Inverse in March 2019 that “it’s not from Tesla that we are turning off the volume … we are turning off the volume of all non-electric vehicles”.
However, make no mistake: both companies want to convert more gas car drivers into EVs. Musk’s goal at Tesla is to produce 20 million cars a year by 2030. The factories in Shanghai and Berlin will produce basic Model 3 and Y cars to reach more consumers than ever before.
In addition to Rivian’s first two electric cars, the company also plans electric delivery trucks for Amazon. Scaringe then plans to reach markets like Europe and China with smaller vehicles that use the components of its predecessors – a plan that bears striking similarities to Tesla.
In this emerging race to attract more buyers, the main beneficiary may end up being the consumer.