American EV Carmakers Are Still Losing Billions Of Dollars Every Quarter ... goal for 2022 was 20,000 vehicles,” writes the news site.
www.theautopian.com
Lucid is losing money, Rivian is losing money, Tesla is treading water in China, but at least the Italians are trying to make an EV.
Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday.
Lucid Lost $670 Million Last Quarter
Lucid Group, maker of the slippery
Lucid Air electric sedan, posted up some big numbers this quarter. On the revenue front, it pulled in $196 million, which trounces the $232,000 it made in the same quarter in 2021. The other big number? A net loss of $670 million, per
Automotive News. Making cars is hard.
The numbers are extra bleak because, as
Automotive News notes, Lucid now says it’ll meet its production goals despite supply chain issues. That’s a good thing, right? Well, not when the big goal is to produce 6,000 to 7,000 cars. “The automaker’s original production goal for 2022 was 20,000 vehicles,” writes the news site.
The same Automotive News piece has a quote from the company’s CEO sort of explaining what’s going on:
Lucid CEO Peter Rawlinson said on Tuesday’s earnings call that the automaker continues to struggle with supply-chain issues but expects to meet its 2022 production guidance despite the challenges.
“In fact,” Rawlinson said, “even now we are experiencing a challenge with one particular item that will lead to a very temporary timeout for the [production] line.” Rawlinson did not name the item in short supply but said the downtime would be used to implement changes that would ultimately increase production.
That isn’t at all crpytic.
At the moment Lucid only has the one car and, according to the company, about 34,000 total reservations. An upcoming SUV, the Gravity, is going to debut next week before the LA Auto Show.
Rivian Expected To Lose About $1.7 Billion, With A ‘B’
Electric truckmaker Rivian is poised to announce big numbers today as well, but those big numbers will be of the negative variety. In Q2 of this year the company posted a loss of $1.7 billion. What’s the guess for this quarter?
According to analysts it’s about $1.7 billion. From
Automotive News:
When the automaker reports third-quarter earnings on Wednesday after the market close, financial analysts are expecting revenue of about $552 million on improving deliveries of its adventure vehicles, but also another net loss similar to Rivian’s $1.7 billion loss in the second quarter.
This doesn’t mean the trucks aren’t good. By most accounts, the
trucks are very good. The engineering that goes into them
is also impressive.
[Editor’s Note: If you want to read the most detailed, tech-heavy review of the R1T, check mine out. It’s a great truck. -DT]. It’s extremely tough out there for established OEMs with longstanding supply chains and Rivian is ramping up a new car and a new brand out of thin air. Making cars is hard.
If there’s good news for Rivian it’s that the company’s
Electric delivery vans are being delivered to Amazon as expected.
As Electrek reports:
According to Amazon’s
latest update, the Rivian EDV rollout is progressing as planned, with over 1,000 fully electric delivery vans debuting in more than 100 US cities this holiday season. A few of the newest cities you may be able to spot one of these EDVs in are Boston, New York, Las Vegas, and Pittsburgh.
Has anyone seen one on their neighborhood?
Tesla Trying To Woo Chinese Buyers As Musk Sells Stock
Tesla is the most established of all electric automaker startups
[Editor’s Note: I think we ca stop calling it that now. -DT] and even it’s having some issues, particularly in China
where deliveries have been on a roller coaster ride and competition has gotten stiffer.
To try to compete in China it looks like Tesla aims to give people a break on their insurance. I’ll let
Reuters explain how this works:
The U.S. automaker previously offered an insurance incentive of 7,000 yuan ($970) for orders between Oct. 1 and Dec. 30. But on Tuesday Tesla said the incentive for November was raised to 8,000 yuan and reduced for December orders to 4,000 yuan.
“As long as you like it enough, pick up Tesla immediately!” Tesla said in its official Weibo account when announcing the policy change.
The insurance incentive is a cash rebate offered to buyers to buy insurance from Tesla’s partner insurers.
Tesla having more competition is clearly good for buyers, though a little challenging for Elon Musk. The CEO of Tesla and now Twitter appears to have told people in August that he was done selling shares; now it’s November and, per CNBC, he
just sold $3.95 billion worth of shares. I hope he got an insurance discount.
