“EV start-ups have raised money, floated and set up factories; all they need to do now is make the vehicles,” wrote a Financial Times reporter in a recent deep dive into the challenges facing new firms looking to seize the opportunities of electrification and its seemingly lower entry costs than for ICE car making.
Few exemplify the point like Rivian, the American electric truck maker that has been backed by Amazon and at one point had a stock-market valuation double that of Ford (another early investor); yet has made so far fewer than 1500 vehicles and warned recently that it’s unlikely to have made more than 25,000 by year’s end.
That’s some way short of the 50,000 originally forecast, hampered, it said, by supply shortages in the wake of the pandemic.
