The situation is even worse than expected with only 57K vehicle production for 2024 – no growth, production cuts, workforce cuts, hardly breaking even at gross levels.
Here is the company’s outlook, which inspired no confidence.
“For 2024, we expect our total deliveries to be derived from our existing order bank as well as new orders generated during the year. Our full year targets rely on an improvement in order rate driven by our planned go-to-market strategies. The conversion of our existing order bank to sales can be impacted by several factors including delivery timing, location of order, monthly payments, and customer readiness. Our order bank has notably reduced over time as deliveries more than doubled in 2023 versus 2022, and we have incurred cancellations due to macro and customer factors.”
Conference call, filled with underwhelming guidance and management’s approach to addressing the current challenges, the business model was questioned – do they even need a new plant? The sheer magnitude of the projected shortfall and the apparent lack of more decisive action is also baffling.
There is a lot of risk in the current market environment, particularly given the required $5 billion investment in conjunction with the new Georgia plant to facilitate the production of Rivian’s mass-market R2 vehicles.