What will we learn 5/17-5/23?

[wdlikatruck]

I think we are now at the stage where we are just looking for a picture of RJ holding a newspaper with today's date.

All kidding aside however, there is some major goodwill/credibility erosion taking place right now. Very puzzling/concerning that Rivian believes this is the best course of action (and very difficult to imagine Rivian would have any other investors if they know that Rivian is somehow hamstrung by Ford).

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[thrill]

You managed to answer your own question when you called it nonsense.
Satire (something not meant to be taken seriously) is not libel.

Satire is creating a fictional CEO and having him make inane statements. Falsely claiming to interested parties that a real world CEO wrote or said something fairly negative that he did not is something other than satire.

 

[LoneStar]

I know this thread was a re-boot of the "Predictions for Thursday" oldie-but-goodie, but I'd say we need a fresh reboot of this one.

 

[cohall]

I know this thread was a re-boot of the "Predictions for Thursday" oldie-but-goodie, but I'd say we need a fresh reboot of this one.

Who knew we had so many lawyer members? I kid. I kid.

Maybe the 'what will we learn threads' just stoke the flames of frustration, and we should move to a what DID we learn thread, and just post our thoughts if/when we learn new details.

 

[MichaelW]

I think we are now at the stage where we are just looking for a picture of RJ holding a newspaper with today's date.

All kidding aside however, there is some major goodwill/credibility erosion taking place right now. Very puzzling/concerning that Rivian believes this is the best course of action (and very difficult to imagine Rivian would have any other investors if they know that Rivian is somehow hamstrung by Ford).

This exactly. There is current state and there is ideal state. What ideal state looks like is subject to debate. In this case, I have to think that however one defines the ideal state of communication at this stage of the game there is a huge gap between what we have now and what we ideally should be seeing. If there isn't a gap and this is what Rivian views as the ideal state, that for me would be cause for concern because it reveals a disconnect between company values and their consumers.

 

[Eager2own]

Satire is creating a fictional CEO and having him make inane statements. Falsely claiming to interested parties that a real world CEO wrote or said something fairly negative that he did not is something other than satire.

Still satire, even if attributed to RJ, when even those apparently claiming it is libel describe it as nonsense and inane comments. If the reasonable person doesn’t believe that’s what RJ’s schedule for posts will be (and this results in harm to RJ or Rivian), it’s not libel. If you still see this as libel, we’ll just have to agree that we disagree on what the bar is for a “reasonable person.”

(Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t find it funny and stated as much right after it was posted... but I also didn’t think RJ planned to post on 12/1 about the Cybertrucks being delivered to customers before Rivian.)

But, all that aside, we should just go back to complaining about lack of info from Rivian — that’s something we can ALL agree on.

 

[cc84]

...(and very difficult to imagine Rivian would have any other investors if they know that Rivian is somehow hamstrung by Ford).

I did find where there is a Ford family member appointed to Rivian's board. This article is a little over a year old. I believe Amazon may have invested prior to Ford.

I don't think Rivian is in any way hamstrung by Ford, but may be acting out of respect for one of its investors/board members. I can understand this, if it were to be true, but it probably isn't. It's only speculation on my part, as I don't understand why there is so little communication and no contact from the Guides, so close to "supposedly" production time.

There are better reasons for the lack of communication, I'm sure. I, as a LE preorder holder, would like to know why. Being I don't, all I can do is speculate. I respect Rivian's decision to not interfere with Ford's reveal, May 19th, if it were somehow true. Until then, I guess we'll just wait and see when more information will appear.

 

[kanundrum]

This should be renamed to Turds/FURDS of the Week

 

[MurryR1T]

This should be renamed to Turds/FURDS of the Week

Best post of the day.

 

[Sean]

What kind of minimum lead time do you think the Guides need to provide to the first order holders?

There aren't that many options and they already stated that config is one of the variables for deliveries. There's plenty of demand vs. production capacity so if you end up wanting to wait for a test drive or a service center to be built, they could happily move on and put you later in the queue. I think the only thing that really need to be coordinated would be the delivery so, a week?

There's a lot of comments saying a month but that's way overstating it to me. It might get there towards the end of '21 and into '22 but for the first batches I don't think they are planning on contact that far out. I think at this point they want all the other stuff to be ready like the app and insurance before they reach out because without those, its an incomplete experience and as annoying as it is, they still have time before "June"

---
All that being said, I wish they'd produce some sort of estimated production timeline so the rest of us would have some idea on how long to wait and be able to plan somewhat around what to do with current vehicles, etc.

"Can't underdeliver if you never promised in the first place"
-RJ, probably

 

[timf]

What kind of minimum lead time do you think the Guides need to provide to the first order holders?

The guide contacts should reasonably start at least 2-4 weeks before delivery. The short end would be for people located relatively close to the factory. Generally speaking, production is the fastest part of the process once all the parts are in place. Shipping is a bigger variable and depends on the availability of trucks and/or rail cars. I'm guessing with the low initial production volumes they won't even bother using rail and will ship everything by truck.

The guide contact process will probably work something like this:
1. Rivian takes the data already collected from the configurations we have saved and creates a tentative production schedule based on the most popular configurations.
2. Guides contact people in serviceable locations whose configurations match the ones they've decided to produce first, offering them a delivery date.
3. If the customer confirms the order, that's great. If the customer declines the order, they go to the next person on the list. If the customer decides to change something on the order, it might push the delivery date back until they can schedule that configuration for production, or they might adjust their production schedule to accommodate the change.
4. If they are unable to fill all the available production slots, they might jump back up the list to people they skipped over due to having non-matching configurations, offering them either the ability to change their configuration to prioritize delivery, or schedule production of their configuration farther down the line.

 

[STLBlues76]

What kind of minimum lead time do you think the Guides need to provide to the first order holders?

There aren't that many options and they already stated that config is one of the variables for deliveries. There's plenty of demand vs. production capacity so if you end up wanting to wait for a test drive or a service center to be built, they could happily move on and put you later in the queue. I think the only thing that really need to be coordinated would be the delivery so, a week?

There's a lot of comments saying a month but that's way overstating it to me. It might get there towards the end of '21 and into '22 but for the first batches I don't think they are planning on contact that far out. I think at this point they want all the other stuff to be ready like the app and insurance before they reach out because without those, its an incomplete experience and as annoying as it is, they still have time before "June"

---
All that being said, I wish they'd produce some sort of estimated production timeline so the rest of us would have some idea on how long to wait and be able to plan somewhat around what to do with current vehicles, etc.

"Can't underdeliver if you never promised in the first place"
-RJ, probably

I agree, a week should be more than enough time. I mean, you can walk into a car dealership and get financing and a trade-in done in less than 2 hours. Do not understand needing more than a week.

 

[LoneStar]

I'm voting (hoping) for Rivian to be doing the opposite of giving way to Ford's reveal tomorrow. Rivian could make initial Guide reach-outs tomorrow and put the EV bloggers into a tail-spin chasing all the "leaked" info from those early owner-to-be contacts.

 

[SANZC02]

I'm voting (hoping) for Rivian to be doing the opposite of giving way to Ford's reveal tomorrow. Rivian could make initial Guide reach-outs tomorrow and put the EV bloggers into a tail-spin chasing all the "leaked" info from those early owner-to-be contacts.

The other option is to steal the thunder with some big announcements on Friday to catch everyone wanting to report on the latest, make Thursday's news old news.

Problem is without announcing it, no one is really waiting for it. Definitely a lot of missed opportunities here from a marketing perspective to get the name out in the general public. Look at all the free press Ford generated having Biden drive around on the tarmac. I've seen that on three news channels already. Just type Biden and Lightening in any search engine and it is flooded with the coverage.

Going stealth when in development is great, once you are ready(?) to start selling the product, not so much.

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