Rivian (NASDAQ: RIVN), the troubled EV company, went public on November 10, 2021. After a good deal of excitement, the stock is down 87% since then. Whatever hope new Q2 unit sales brought, the company is still on the ropes and is unlikely to get off them.
Rivian just announced it delivered 12,194 vehicles to customers in the second quarter. Its outlook for the year is for that total to be 65,000 to 70,000. It appeared its new R2 model, which is its least expensive vehicle, helped sales. RJ Scaringe, the CEO, commented: “This quarter we began external deliveries of R2. I believe R2 will be a game changer for our customers and a driver of Rivian’s long-term growth and profitability.” There is sparse evidence that this is true.
Rivian’s trouble is that, for a start-up which early investors believed was a hot stock, revenue growth is mediocre. It was up only 27% in the quarter to $1.66 billion. It posted a crippling loss of $837 million, although that was better than the astonishing loss of $1.12 billion in the year-ago quarter.
Investor anxiety about the future was heightened by a management decision earlier in the year. “In July, Rivian sold 86.25 million Class A shares in a follow-on equity offering to raise approximately $1.3 billion for general corporate purposes including the funding of certain equity contributions and reserves associated with the Department of Energy loan for the construction of the company’s Georgia plant,” the company said. No investor wants to see dilution.
The face of the matter is that Rivian unit sales would need to “hockey stick” into the hundreds of thousands for the company to break even.
Rivian still faces two hurdles it is very unlikely to overcome. The R2 may help sales, but the rest of its model line is extremely expensive. The R1S has three models. Two have sticker prices well above $100,000. The same is true of the R1T. EV sales priced at that level will be extremely difficult to sell.
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Additionally, Rivian is a US company, selling models in the US. While China is the world’s largest EV market and EV sales are up in the EU, the US is in trouble. Here, according to Kelley Blue Book estimates, 247,226 EVs were sold in the second quarter. That was down sharply year over year for a third consecutive quarter, with a 20.5% decrease from the same period in 2025. No evidence that it will get better anytime soon.
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