Rivian CEO issues strong statement about people who purchase gas-powered cars: ‘Sort of like building a horse barn in 1910’::“I don’t think I would have believed it.”
Forgive me, sire; I hadn’t $80,000 to spend on a luxury truck.
You fuck.
If you knew that he was referring to the purchase of a $80k Suburban in 2030 would that change your assessment?
I think you know very well I would never engage with this possibility as a means of self preservation. Good day sir!
So a $77-82k Suburban is good in your eyes then? How come? Why? Oh wait, you didn’t read the quote.
Just because he compared it to a suburban doesn’t mean that the Mitsubishi mirage and used Corollas aren’t a thing.
And sure the Chevy Bolt is 26k, but that’s still 5k more expensive than a new Corolla and has like half the range, and you can fuel the Corolla way faster.
Not with the $7500 federal tax credit, let alone (for CA) residents the tax rebate. It’s not for everyone yet but there’s plenty of people there Bolt is perfect for.
Source: bought one. Is great.
Same. Bolt owner checking in. It’s fucking awesome and was - to me and my family- the obvious choice. It’s not for everyone, but if you can afford it and your lifestyle allows for it, it’s an easy decision.
Slowly but surely EV’s will be the default choice. Prices will continue to fall, infrastructure will improve, and gas will get ridiculously expensive. The tide is changing.
A luxury truck with the ugliest headlights on a car today.
I love the front end of the Rivian.
Whenever I see these razor thin LED headlights on vehicles, my first thought is are those COB chips getting cooled properly?
It just comes across as very sus, a bit like form over function at the expense of headlight longevity
Those aren’t headlights
I’m not even sure what my headlights look like. I never really see them.
And the fucking dangerous high front which is completely unnecessary on an electric car, why is it there. Not even the TESLA FUCKING CYBERTRUCK pulls that shit, say what you will about Tesla, but they understand how the differences between gas and electric cars can be taken advantage of.
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Selling $80k electric cars and making comments like this is sort of like saying ‘let them eat cake’ in 1780
If you read the article you’d see that he said that in the context of buying a Chevy Suburban in 2030. Suburbans start at $77k, so I don’t think his comment is that out of line.
It’s not, of course it’s not.
But we know that legacy Reddit users never even bothered to read the articles anyway. Hurray! I missed-- not.
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I usually dont bother to read articles, because they are seo garbage. I glance at top comments written by true people to verify info instead
Wait wait wait, you mean theres more to this story than the title?
Shooketh.
That context is great, but I haven’t seen any articles about the Chevy CEO saying such astoundingly tone deaf shit. 🤔 maybe the price isn’t what’s inflammatory.
Those trucks/SUVs weigh 8500lbs. Since there is no fuel tax being collected, these monsters are destroying the roads and not contributing to their upkeep. My city is passing laws to significantly increase the registration on these vehicles, according to their annual mileage. I’m all for going electric, but an 8500lb truck is not helping the environment
This is true, but fuel taxes are very low. Most states that are charging an EV “road maintenance fee” (with whatever phrasing they select) are charging way more than an ICE vehicle would contribute in fuel taxes. And while it is true that BEVs are heavier than ICE vehicles, all else held equal, and that road wear and tear is strongly dependent on weight… as I recall reading, the overwhelming majority of road wear and tear is the result of freight trucks and similar vehicles.
I’m all for going electric, but an 8500lb truck is not helping the environment.
The issue here isn’t that it’s an EV in this case. It’s that it’s a truck. I’d wager than >95% of people buying trucks in the US would be perfectly served by a four door sedan or comparable sized vehicle. Trucks have largely become expensive vanity items to act as an external signal of a person’s cultural identity. Contractors and similar that actually use a truck for truck purposes still exist, but they’re comically outnumbered by people buying trucks for no good reason.
My conservative neighbor drives an F-150 (~5,500 lbs) and his wife drives a Tahoe (~5,800 lbs). But he had the gall to complain to me last week about the weight of my Model Y (4,400 lbs). It’s amazing what a little bit of oil and gas propaganda has been able to accomplish.
I don’t think it’s propaganda that EVs are heavy as shit for their size. Automakers are really upfront on that fact. You trying to call it propaganda illustrates your bad faith argument. You’re misusing that word and diluting the meaning.
4400 vs 5800 isn’t much of a difference, considering the sizes of the vehicles you listed. You are essentially driving a midsize truck but without the utility of a truck. Your neighbor has two trucks to your one. The top trim Tacoma weighs the same as your lower tier Tesla. Tesla Model X Standard Range comes in at 5,185 pounds.
I think we can both agree your vehicle is extremely heavy for being a small, low/mid tier passenger vehicle. Some Teslas are not eligible for the $7500 tax credit because they weigh so much.
I like how you can’t respond to this. It really hammers home my argument and calling you on your bullshit. Thank you for the votes, because that means I know you read the comment but have no idea how to respond!
My city doesn’t allow big trucks on our roads. The wear and tear of roads is heavily dependent on weight, as you and I both stated. Weighing 3500lbs more (the weight of a Toyota Camry) than even the largest personal vehicle is a problem which I hope they solve soon.
I’m not sure why people think it’s propaganda that EVs weigh 1.5x or more than a standard sedan. It’s a fact, and it’s easy to find information. The tech crowd wants to call anything that hurts their opinion bullshit, but they refuse to look it up. It’s right there on the manufacturers’ websites. I sincerely doubt the owners of Rivian or Tesla are in on some government “propaganda” to lower their own sales.
I appreciate the votes. That proves you read the comment but have no idea how to respond, because you can’t.
It’s important to read the full quote from Rivian’s CEO before complaining about $75k electric trucks:
“I think the reality of buying a combustion-powered vehicle … is sort of like building a horse barn in 1910,” he said. “Imagine buying a Chevy Suburban in 2030 … what are you going to do with that … in 10 years?”
He’s comparing buying a Rivian truck with buying a Suburban, which has a base price of $57k for the lowest tier configuration (LS) and a $76k price on the High Country configuration.
Proof that very few read the article
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Um…does the CEO know that horses are still a thing and that horse barns (aka stables) are still in use? Also, the invention of the automobile didn’t instantly displace the horse. It was well into the 1920s before they became a regular sight.
Also…there’s lots of reasons to buy gas-powered cars these days. For one, not everyone lives in a home where they can install the necessary charger, so you’d always be on the “hunt” for charging stations, and fuel cars are generally cheaper at this time. Once we see the market flooded with EV cars, the prices will come down and fuel cars will no longer be the norm, but we’re likely a decade or more away from that.
I get what the CEO is trying to say, but it’s still incredibly tone-deaf.
Also the recharge times are still a deal breaker for anyone who fancies a road trip every once in a while.
If your road trips are only once in a while, you easily make up for it in saved time not doing weekly fill-ups.
What, you don’t like spending a quarter of your road trip waiting for “fuel”?
I spent under an hour charging on a 8 hour drive. I barely had time to pee or eat before the car was ready. Have you road-tripped an EV?
8 hour drive averaging 50mph(to be conservative and easy math) for 8 hours is 400 miles. What EV can go that far?
Assuming you charged before you left
Charged midway
Charged when you got there
You charged three times for an hour? Even not counting the first charge, you’ll absolutely need the last when you get there. That’s a min 2 hours charging for an 8 hour trip or about 25%.
there’s a couple EVs that can go that far. I rented a Tesla Model Y Long Range, which cannot. I did not leave with a full charge and didn’t arrive with one either. You don’t need to.
I charged 3 times on the way up the coast, for 15, 10, and 20 minutes. The last one was was only longer because I ran into target to get something.
That’s… 9%.
What car takes an hour to charge?? I used to have a Chevy Bolt, the slowest charging EV you can buy. and it didn’t take an hour.
Go play around with A Better Route Planner if you want to see that assuming 3 hours of charging for an eight hour trip is ridiculous.
Edit: 50mph on the highway is laughable, I was going 80-85mph. It’s a bit over a 500mi drive.
That makes sense. I forgot they charge a lot faster when low and assumed a full charge. I’ve only ever driven a Tesla model 3 once on a business trip. Mostly city driving so no long trips.
No, I don’t have 80k to spend on a “maybe I won’t be too worse off”
it was a rental car lol
though you’d be surprised to learn there’s EVs under $80k! not that anyone can afford new cars anyway.
I bought a used Leaf for $11K about 5 years ago. Best car purchase I’ve ever made. I still have a ICE vehicle for road trips, but man do I like the way electric engines produce power!
Used EVs can be a great deal! I’ve had my eyes out for a good deal on a leaf for ages, but not many pop up in my rural area.
I can very much recommend a dacia spring. I think this is one of the most affordable way of transportation. But I live in Switzerland, we have a great charging network and our distances aren’t to far. After paying 5500 CHF upfront, i pay monthly 200 CHF for power and leasing fee (170 + 30). After 3 years I can buy it for 10000 CHF or just give it back. Buying the car directly is about 20000 CHF. Just make sure that you order fast charging as well.
My Chevy Bolt cost less than half that, and that was new with most of the bells and whistles. I drove over 200 miles on a single charge yesterday. Longer road trips are doable with a tiny bit of planning and multitasking. When you’re charging, do all the things you do on a road trip anyway: take a leak, grab a snack, give your mind a quick break.
My car is also the 2nd worst major EV for road trips (after the Nissan Leaf). The Volkswagen ID.4, for example, is a little more than half your $80K number and charges about 2-3x faster than the Bolt.
It’s also pretty awesome to not have to go to gas stations as part of your ~weekly routine because you charge at home and it costs next to nothing.
Agreed, it’s also true that used combustion engine cars can be a great value.
What he actually meant to say was:
“I’ve got my head so far up my ass that I think everybody should be spending $100k+ on a truck regardless of their need or financial circumstances. I’m also incapable of doing my job, which is why my company can’t produce enough units, even though it’s largely a solved supply chain problem. This is how I cope with my shitty existence on this planet.”
CEO of an electric car company recommends that people drive electric cars.
Doesn’t really seem like much of a headline.
The statement might be more significant if it was a CEO of a car company that made diesel/petrol cars who said it.
It’s more the tone deafness. Most people couldn’t afford either a car or a horse barn in 1910 just like most people (in America anyway) can’t afford an electric car.
I just looked up the price for a Rivian truck and holy shit is this guy for real? Lmao. Just another out of touch CEO virtue signaling. If he really felt this way he would make them affordable lol
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It depends where you are and what market segment you’re looking in. In NZ you can buy a fully electric MG ZS EV (7 year warranty) for almost the same price as a base model Toyota Camry.
A new Renault Zoe is about 23 000€, which has a driving range of about 400km. Second hand they go for about 10 000€.
Yeah, there are many luxury EV brands, but those aren’t the only ones existing.
Well maybe if this guy sold an electric car that people could afford, they would buy it
Startup costs need to be softened with a costlier higher margin vehicle. Cannot achieve quality mass production of cars from thin air.
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The comment is taken out of context if you’d maybe read the article. It’s a comparison between a Suburban and Rivian who are in the same bracket.
Yeah, so, how much is one of those Rivian trucks, exactly?
$73,000?
Yeah, fuck off. That’s more than the median annual gross income for American workers. It’s all good and well to tout a slightly more sustainable form of transportation–still not nearly as sustainable as busses or trains!–but when you’re pricing it well outside what most people can rationally afford, you’re not helping the situation.
Average transaction price for a new vehicle in the U.S. is already at $48k. Plenty of electric models are below the average price by now.
The fact is, if you’re considering buying a new car, you’re already on the richer side. So this message is mainly aimed at those richer Americans considering a $73,000 F-150, that they might want to consider a $73,000 Rivian instead.
Even in that instance the Lightning is a better deal.
All these products have to come to market in order for prices to eventually come down. People need to see that they have viable options to gasoline cars.
In Norway, more than 80 percent of new cars sold are electric. There are many other options that don’t cost $73,000. Rivian is just one option.
IIRC, Norway also offered substantial tax incentives to people that bought electric cars. IIRC, the fed. gov’t did the same in the US, and car companies responded by raising prices by the amount of the incentive.
and it’s only $40,000 to repair a bumper dent! such value!
https://www.thedrive.com/news/rivian-r1t-fender-bender-turns-into-42000-repair-bill
Ah, because the only EVs in the market are Rivian ones.
That’s true but you have to consider how much of the car market is made up of used cars. When I was last shopping for cars (4 years ago) there were hardly any EVs in my budget and the ones that were, were 10 year old Priuses. Most people frankly don’t have the income to buy anything more than a gas car. (Market for EVs may have changed since my experience). The way I see it is the CEO is making a good point while also shitting on poor people.
The first response from Google shows me several late model used Nissan Leafs for around $15k. Those didn’t have much range but plenty for most people’s day to day
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I believe that from his comment (“what are you going to do with that in 10 years”), he was implying buying new cars. I see nothing odd in buying used ICE cars, but I wouldn’t dish out for a new one at this point.
Now if you buy a used car for 10k now, you’ll probably have a harder time getting value out of it in 10 years vs. EV.
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Not only the cost, but there’s also the issue of infrastructure. I as well as many others in my city don’t have a garage and park either on the street or on a parking pad in the alley. I wouldn’t imagine a power cord running to a vehicle lasting very long because of the scrap prices of copper. We’ve got a long ways to go.
Please pay for my apartment complex to install charger plugs in our garages then.
I’m totally onboard with EV’s, I just can’t have one right now.
If you just have a regular plug in the garage, it works. I thought that I would have to get a special outlet put in, but after plugging in at night for a couple months I realized there was no need. Figure about 5 miles per hour recharge. I have an older used Leaf that was relatively cheap.
I have outdoor parking :/
I don’t have any electrical plugs in my garage. The best I can do is commandeering a 60 watt bulb socket with one of those adapters that turns it into a socket. Also, I don’t think the apartment complex is rigged up to charge tenants for the cost of running that bulb and garage door opening either. So they probably would be pissed if I started charging a full EV in there.
They won’t even notice. Unless you live in an electric supply desert, charging an EV 0-100% is ridiculously cheap.
A giant electric “luxury” truck is still a giant “luxury” truck. Buying one over the other is like buying a cruelty free synthetic beaver cap over a cap made from an actual beaver. Yes it probably is better, but you are still wearing an ass on your head.
It’s 2023, most people live in urbanized areas where a truck is similarly ridiculous, especially the modern “luxury” models. Those that actually use their vehicles for hauling things at a farm want real work trucks and tractors (regardless of engine type) with lower and longer beds.
If they had decent range ones for just a bit cheaper…
It’s minimum like $30k right now and that’s just too much for most
Plus a lot of people still don’t have anywhere to charge them.
Otherwise I’d have liked to have gotten one
A Bolt, after all the tax incentives, comes in at around $18k!
Really? Can you actually get them at MSRP in any decent amount of time?
And is that federal? I thought Chevy ran out of their tax incentives…
Not as of last January when I tried to buy one. I was able to test drive one and found it acceptable but it was the only one available, it was significantly over MSRP (it was Premier trim, so >$35k) and I could order one but they flat out told me I’d be waiting a minimum of five months.
GM did run out, but the rules changed in 2023, so there is no more cap. GM and Tesla get the incentives again.
But the problem is. It’s a bolt.
At that price that seems like an alright car. It’s just a bit slow to fast charge.
Am wondering if the new ones can actually fit someone who is 6 feet tall in the back seat without them having to hunch over
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That’d be fine if I didn’t have 3 kids with car seats! I need a soccer mom vehicle.
Sometimes those little cars can have more room than you realize. My wife used to drive a prius c and it had more room than my mid sized sedan. Not sure about the bolt, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it has plenty of room when the motor takes up less room than a gasoline engine.
I buy what my meager wage allows me to afford…
Make an EV that competes on price with a Corolla and I’ll be there.
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Yeah, big words from rivian. Trucks that cost more than a luxury SUV.
Even then. My Corolla cost under $15k brand new off the lot. It’s not the base model either. The base model for the 23 Corolla is almost $22k. Car prices are insane.
The only new car still sold in the US for under $20k is the Mitsubishi Mirage, and even that model will likely be phased out in the next few years. I also wouldn’t recommend buying one, as, speaking from experience, it tends to roll over in a slight breeze.
Weird, I’ve had one for years and it hasn’t flipped over once.
20k is way too much for one, but I bought mine new for 14k. It’s an economy car, not a Mercedes, not a sports car. And they’re 100% better if you get one with a manual transmission.
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still use plenty of fossil fuels from coal plants
This is disingenuous as fuck and you know it. Updates to the grid are by far the most effective means of limiting carbon release. Tying engines to the grid maximizes gains in solar, wind, etc that not doing so does not.
There is no serious plan for climate change mitigation that does not involve EVs.
I own a gasoline car. I was being too flippant. I would point out that our car centric culture is inefficient no matter how you swing it. I agree it’s a part of solving climate change, but cars of any type are still a problem, we need to massively overhaul our urban transit and get away from cars in urban areas.
In the end all transit only accounts for 15% of the overall problem. Our spread out infrastructure caused by car convenience has many other negative externalities though, like the increased need to maintain more roads, electric loss over longer distribution, heating and cooling in large single family homes made possible by cars bringing you to your job while living way out in the suburbs (arguably way more serious than the cars themselves), etc. The suburban experiment was an environmental disaster, and I say this as someone that lives in a large house in the suburbs currently pumping out AC, so I’m not judging.
But plugging in your personal tank isn’t really solving the problem. It’s just ignoring it. Cars are the problem no matter the fuel source, because of the impact they have had on how we spread out and grow our consumption… We need multi use zoning, dozens of train lines in every city, bike infrastructure, work at home, massive reduction in fossil fuel based power plants… A reordering of society around alternatives to spreading out, a massive worldwide effort of urban densification. As well as a massive effort to hold corporations accountable for their energy use as well. That and we need to stop having so many fucking kids, the world can’t support this level of consumption forever.
Not disingenuous. True. Grid power is still dirty so electric cars are still dirty. Probably about a 50% improvement in carbon emissions based on the most common fuel mix in the US for an e car.
Clean transportation by car is a luxury that we do not yet have.
You don’t engineer for what you currently have. You engineer for where you want to be.
Renewable energy is the fastest growing segment of the energy market by a mile, growing exponentially.
I don’t have my numbers at hand, but renewables account for something like 80+% of new energy growth in the US.
Yes. The OP is about how TODAY it is silly to use ICE. Today it is silly to pretend that electric cars are clean. They will be at some point. At that point, I will agree with the obnoxious CEO from the article. Today, he is wrong, very heavy (7-8k lbs) coal powered trucks are not clean.
Make them smaller!
Purchasing EVs sends price signals. Big trucks are in demand, and it’s easier to cater to demand than shape demand when you’re an emerging market.
Seriously the epa doesn’t even bother to rate mpg in vehicles that approach rivian weight. An f250 probably gets a combined 15mpg. It weights 6k lbs vs the rivians 7k. if your only seeing a 50% cut in emissions with the switch to electric. A rivian truck is pretty much the same as an ICE car that gets around 30 combined.
There are a million reasons that drive them to make these monsters. But the climate isn’t one. I don’t care about the market forces. I care about cutting CO2 emissions. These vehicles do not help that mission today. The CEO is wrong. His vehicles don’t make sense TODAY except as a luxury product for rich people to signal their virtue. That’s it.
I don’t care about market forces
Then you are not serious about impacting climate change.
The rivian truck (I call it “froggy”) is actually a pretty small pickup truck, by american standard … have you seen a F150? (including the electric “lightning” version)?
in before, “but I need my enormous vehicle because once every 13 years I haul 3 2x4’s and am too dumb to use a roof rack or rent a truck for the day!”
I win!!!
My enormous eletric vehicle (plug-in Rav4) is powered from my home solar panel system, and I use it to transport my dogs to the park a couple of times a week.
I’m completely guilt free!!!😃
Rivian truck
It’s like buying a small house!
A small house for 74,000? Lol, you’d need at least double that in the Northeast part of America.
I was being facetious
Even a subcompact automobile takes up an entire traffic lane and an entire parking space, and providing such spaces is what ruins cities.
The future is designing our cities for walking, biking and transit, not replacing our disastrous car sewers of gasoline cars with disastrous car sewers of electric cars.
Completely agree, people are not zooming out enough to understand the real problems. Our spread out car centric infrastructure has externalities past just the fuel issues on the cars themselves. Our car centric culture is largely responsible for a huge boom in energy consumption outside of just driving. There is a huge cost to spreading out beyond cars. I think the biggest is our trend in occupying larger and larger single family homes and larger and larger office spaces which require heating and cooling (Which is a little more than double the environment cost of cars iirc). One of the benefits of densification is that you often share a wall with someone else that is also heating and cooling and there is far less energy loss. Those energy costs far exceed our transit issues, but are directly related, in that cars allow density to reduce and therefor people to consume more energy at home and their place of work. And if people are still unwilling to densify then we need to greatly increase the energy efficiency of single family homes and businesses by 4 fold. Better insultation, better windows, better appliances, across the board.
The thing that bothers me about the communication around electric cars is not that they are an improvement, because they most certainly are a good stop gap to one of our many issues, but people like to singularly focus on car fuel type like it is the focal point of climate change when it really is urban and suburban car centricity that is a much larger issue. Electric cars wont stop climate change, they only slow it down a little. Countries like Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland, etc are far closer to becoming carbon neutral partly because car centricity is not a focus in these places, people live closer together and use all types of transit that supplement each other. And yet no one would claim any of those places are unpleasant to live, far from it they are some of the most desired places to live in the world. We need to start modeling the rest of the world off of the design improvements those countries made over the last 60 years.
Man I can haul 3 2x4s in my Camry
