Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid are the three primary EV makers in the United States. How do they stack up against each other?
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How Does Tesla Stack Up Against Rivian and Lucid?
Tesla was founded in 2003, nearly 20 years ago. Tesla has accomplished quite a bit in those 19 years. We'll see when Rivian and Lucid were founded and how Tesla stacks up against them.
Lucid Motor, previously known as Ativa was founded in 2007, just 4 years after Tesla. Rivian was founded in 2009, just 6 years after Tesla. This is much closer to the age of Tesla than you might think. Rivian is Tesla in 2016 and Lucid is Tesla in 2018 to give some perspective.
Tesla made 75,000 vehicles in 2016. In 2018, Tesla delivered around 250,000 vehicles. Rivian will deliver about 25,000 this year and Lucid, about 7,000 vehicles this year. This gives good perspective on where Tesla was during its growth and where Rivian and Lucid are along the same period of time.
Rivian and Lucid are high-risk companies. Each company has not generated positive cash flow yet and there are risk to scaling production and to getting to positive cash flow. These companies do have an advantage over legacy auto makers. They are not restricted by the ICE car debt and overhead of a legacy auto maker.
Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid
Robert Scaringe founded Rivian in 2009. Rivian's primary products are a pickup truck and SUV. Rivian has raised $13.5 billion through a traditional IPO in November, 2021. Rivian as about 14,000 employees.
Lucid Motors has Peter Rawlinson as CEO. Rawlinson served as Tesla's chief engineer on the Model S. He left Tesla before initial production challenges were solved. Lucid began construction of a factory in Arizona in November, 2016. Lucid raised about $4.4 billion through a public SPAC. Lucid has about 5,600 employees.
Rivian and Lucid make only fully electric vehicles and were founded close to the same time. They have similar valuations as well. Ford invested about $5 billion on Rivian as well. Lucid's largest shareholder is the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, at about 60%.
Tesla first started with its factory in Fremont, CA. New factories in China, Texas, and German will greatly boost Tesla's production and value. Elon Musk owns close to 20% in Tesla. The CEO of Rivian and Lucid own a much smaller stake, around .5% for Lucid and 1.3% for Rivian. The incentives are just not there for the CEO's of Lucid and Rivian.
Lucid and Rivian have announced future vehicles, but are currently struggling to reach volume production on their existing vehicles. Tesla also had similar struggles much earlier in its history, but was able to finally get there with the Model 3.
Lucid's prices are quite high and have the option to engineer the vehicle with different materials and components that are more expensive. Lucid has some good engineering, but the prices are 2 to 3 times of a Tesla. But the materials are much more expensive. Higher price means not as many people can get a car. Rivian also needs to reduce the weight of its vehicles, with the Tesla Cybertruck weighing about 30% less than Rivian's R1T pickup truck.
What do you think about the comparison of Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid? Which company will come out on top?
For more information, see this video by Steven Mark Ryan:
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Jeremy Johnson is a Tesla investor and supporter. He first invested in Tesla in 2017 after years of following Elon Musk and admiring his work ethic and intelligence. Since then, he's become a Tesla bull, covering anything about Tesla he can find, while also dabbling in other electric vehicle companies. Jeremy covers Tesla developments at Torque News. You can follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn to stay in touch and follow his Tesla news coverage on Torque News.
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