VSG
Well-Known Member
Yes. People are always failing to look at this from Rivian's point of view.
They need to get NEW customers, and lots of them. They need to generate buzz, and lots of it.
You don't do either of those by limiting sales ONLY to existing Rivian owners or by selling ONLY to people who happened to know about the R2 two and a half years ago.
There are more first-day reservations than they can ship this year. So what should they do?
Fulfilling ONLY the first day orders made by existing R1 owners would mean failure of the R2 launch and perhaps failure of the company.
You might argue that they will sell the same number of vehicles this year either way, but it's not about what happens in the next few months, it's about how they grow R2 into the future. If you spend the next 6 months to a year delivering only to those first-day R1 owners, then you will exhaust your customer base and R2 sales will fall to zero. If you don't sell to new customers, then anyone who hears about the R2 now or sees one in their neighbor's driveway or is shopping around for a vehicle in this category will basically lose interest when they're told they can't get it for another 1-2 years because they weren't smart enough to know about it two and a half years ago. They'll buy a different vehicle and not consider Rivian again until years down the road when they need their *next* vehicle.
So I don't know what the secret formula is for selecting order invites, but they do seem to be pulling in a lot of new people and a lot more recent reservations. And we can see at least one part of the strategy at work, which is prioritizing only one order per person - if you have reservations for more than one R2 you might get an invite for one while the other is pushed back to the Dec-Feb, that's something that allows more people to buy a vehicle, and the customer base is an important number as well. I'm sure geographical location plays a part as well, for many reasons (SC capacity, shipping costs and times, demographics of potential EV buyers, etc.)
It's clear however that the premise of this thread is wrong. Rivian is far, far from exhausting its list of reservations, and is clearly doing some forward thinking to ensure that its supply of customers grows over the next years. Whether their strategy makes sense to you or not, Rivian has managed to so far do something that few automakers have ever done in at least 50 years - navigate between having an interesting prototype into being full-blown manufacturer. That road is littered with failures and double failures (looking at you Fisker) over the past decades. And since they have shown they can do that, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and say they know better than me (or just about anyone else) what it takes to do that.
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