One of the biggest questions about the electric-vehicle market in the United States is how many startups will survive. This is partly because of the Trump administration’s antagonistic attitude toward EVs, but over the last […]
On March 7 Rivian is expected to unveil a smaller and cheaper sport-utility vehicle called the R2 to compete against the Tesla Model Y. Although such a move could be crucial to boosting the fledgling […]
(EXPANDED FROM 3/12/2021) When Tesla’s Cybertruck was unveiled a few years ago, Electrek commentator Benjamin Winters (2021) dismissed the design as “objectively bad.” When he received pushback, Winters countered by arguing that “I’m an industrial […]
Reuters recently reported that every time Rivian Automotive Inc. sells an electric vehicle, it loses “hundreds of thousands of dollars due to staggering raw material and production costs, their latest earnings statements showed” (Sriram, 2022). […]
Last week Automotive News acknowledged that “there has never been a better time for EV startups.” Even so, the trade journal couldn’t bring itself to fully explain why it has been “at least a century […]
Yesterday I came across a debate on a left-of-center political blog that sounded surprisingly similar to what I’ve seen in auto industry media. A number of commentators were quite skeptical about a rapid transition to […]
The failure of individual automakers is invariably grounded in an inability to maintain adequate economies of scale. However, debates about what is the ideal shape of the American auto industry are heavily informed by competing […]
Elon Musk now admits that Tesla nearly died last summer. The sidelined CEO told Axios on HBO that “the company was bleeding money like crazy” during the Model 3 production ramp up. Musk added that […]
In developing an electric truck, Rivian Automotive has promised to reset expectations about a market segment that has been short on innovation for decades. At least that’s what R. J. Scaringe, CEO of the Detroit-based start-up, told […]
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