VW To Invest Up To $5 Billion In EV Maker Rivian (reuters.com) 63
Volkswagen today announced it will invest up to $5 billion in U.S. electric-vehicle maker Rivian as part of a new, equally controlled joint venture to share EV architecture and software. Shares surged 40% in extended Nasdaq trading after the announcement. Reuters reports: The investment will provide Rivian - known for its flagship R1S SUVs and R1T pickups - the funding it needs to develop its less-expensive and smaller R2 SUVs that are set to roll out in 2026, CEO RJ Scaringe told Reuters. Volkswagen will initially invest $1 billion in Rivian and a further $4 billion in investments later, the companies said. The partnership will help Volkswagen accelerate its plans to develop software-defined vehicles (SDV), with Rivian licensing its existing intellectual property rights to the joint venture.
Re:And the real reason (Score:4, Informative)
Volkswagen, that infamous Chinese company... Sorry to fact check you but all of VW's EVs are made in Europe and are unaffected by tariffs. The only affect these tariffs have on the VW group is that they are partial investors in SAIC Motors who were looking at spreading into Europe. This investment in Rivian has zero impact on any of this.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/1... [nytimes.com]
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What do you mean "not for long". The "In-China, For-China" strategy is about building a local business in China, not about building in China for Europe.
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Thought you were talking about Volkswagen, not CUPRA. But since you want to talk about the entire Volkswagen group yeah, they do have one or two vehicles in the literal hundreds of models they manufacture that are built on an export / import basis. But that remains a completely insignificant portion of their business and having one model built in China *For China* also exported to the EU doesn't affect them much.
In fact they are affected far more by the value of SAIC Motors and their desire to enter the EU
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VW used Chinese made batteries in European cars, and has opened its own battery factory in China to supply the domestic market there.
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Yes but that alone does not qualify for tariffs, and that alone has no impact on the investment in Rivian. I know it's a virtually impossible concept to grasp but not literally every story on Slashdot is related to "OMG CHINA!"
Interesting (Score:3)
Rivian needs to learn how build efficient EV's, both in terms of building them cheaply and in terms of their mileage. But high customer satisfaction is a barrier many other EV makers that can build relatively efficient EVs have yet to crack. So maybe efficiency is easier than customer satisfaction. Either way it's nice to see a company with real potential survive the inevitable derailment of the hype train into "now we actually need to make money" territory.
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For pickup trucks, why not just make it easy to add extra batteries in the pickup bed so those who plan or like long trips can add batteries if needed?
Thus, you could exchange cargo size for range.
Even a sedan could have a trunk-battery option that does similar. Not everyone likes driving-based vacations.
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Dropping one would probably ruin it. I remember hearing about swappable battery packs long ago but nobody has figured out a way to make it happen yet. Between how expensive and fragile they are a
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The average EV battery is 1000 pounds. Even a tiny extension of 10% of the typical battery would be way too heavy for people to safely handle. I could handle 50 lbs if it was well designed but I don't know if most folks could. If they had 50 lb extension packs I would need to wrangle 20 of them to double my range.
Dropping one would probably ruin it. I remember hearing about swappable battery packs long ago but nobody has figured out a way to make it happen yet. Between how expensive and fragile they are and how tough they are to swap I am doubtful anything like this is in the cards until we get some huge advances in battery tech.
Tesla actually does something like this in the CyberTruck. The 50 kWh battery pack sits in the bed and weighs 600 pounds. It is not user-swappable, but Tesla can install or remove it. (I'm sure they'll charge you for the service in both directions.)
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Then market the car to gorillas. Solved!
It's a Pickup truck for Gorillas. (Score:2)
>> market the car to gorillas.
Already done. It's a Pickup truck.
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Only on paper. Tesla has a design, released computer renderings, and makes it available as part of a preorder. But has a single range extender pack been shipped yet? I'll tentatively keep that one in the same category as "full self driving" until demonstrated otherwise.
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Only on paper. Tesla has a design, released computer renderings, and makes it available as part of a preorder. But has a single range extender pack been shipped yet? I'll tentatively keep that one in the same category as "full self driving" until demonstrated otherwise.
That's fair. They're expected to actually become available later this year. But presumably they've built at least a few. :-D
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I'm sure there's more to worry about than just the weight too.
Most of the batteries are actively cooled, which likely would mean a need to drain the battery somewhere and then refill it, and the seals between those 50lbs packs would need to be tight.
I think Tesla very early had some swapping demos (or my brain is decrepit with age), but quietly stopped talking about it when batteries got bigger (as in energy stored), and the need for more protection for them became clear.
The structural battery pack concept
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You're thinking of A Better Place, whose battery swap approach never took off. However, NIO has had some success with its approach much more recently.
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For pickup trucks, why not just make it easy to add extra batteries in the pickup bed so those who plan or like long trips can add batteries if needed?
It's not that easy. The battery system in an EV is a combination of batteries, cooling system, recharge system, and monitoring system. If you wanted to add a new battery pack in the bed you'd have to connect it to the regenerative recharge system and balance the charges among both battery packs. Cooling would need a separate cooling loop as the one in the main battery system is sized for that heat load. That means a separate heat exchanger in the bed of the truck.
Recharging would take twice as long to g
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Rivian needs to learn how build efficient EV's, both in terms of building them cheaply and in terms of their mileage.
I would agree on the price part, but Rivian is coming out with more economical models. As for the "fuel efficiency", it's hard to get a direct comparison. Combing multiple sources, the R1T and R1S are near the top of the list for efficiency in their class. I can find example SUVs that beat out the R1S but they're smaller, less powerful, and/or not AWD. I'm not saying I wouldn't want to see more efficient options, but it appears to be more a design balance and not an actual efficiency issue.
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In other Rivian news [carscoops.com] (yesterday):
Rivian has streamlined its manufacturing process by eliminating 100 steps from battery production, removing 52 pieces of equipment from the body shop, and cutting over 500 parts from the designs of the R1T and R1S.
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Out of interest, which companies do you have in mind when you say "high customer satisfaction is a barrier many other EV makers that can build relatively efficient EVs have yet to crack"?
My sense is that a few legacy OEMs have built some duds, but most EV models are well-liked by their owners.
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Tesla's "full self driving" isn't viable. In fact it's a massive liability as people who paid for it 8 years ago start joining class action lawsuits and expecting their cars to get upgraded for free as promised. The basic premise of it working with only cameras is flawed, and Tesla will never release a working version that you can actually rely on to do what they claimed it would way back in 2016.
Google's cars don't need to map every area in great detail. You may be confusing them with Nissan and Cadillac's
Wow (Score:2)
Yeah, I hadn't even *heard* before that Rivian has somehow managed to have emissions problems on EVs, let alone at a level that would require VW's assistance to cheat their way out!
hawk
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Sacrilege! This is 'Murica, home of extra bacon, road trips, and fake cowboys! Walking and trams are for effeminate commies!
Driving is Freedom (Score:1)
America has gotten so horribly addicted to roads, parking garages, and driving everywhere
We are not addicted to it, it's simply that so many Americans recognize the tree freedom a car offers a person.
Not having a car anywhere on Earth is a chain around your existence. Those above would seek to keep you confined to a city area so they can properly milk you.
Yeah I like riding a bike sometimes myself, it's pretty handy and easy in some cases. But I would never want to be without personal transport with signi
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What a ridiculous load of self-important horseshit that parent post is.
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Why do you want to take the outdoors out of America?
Outdoors IN (Score:2)
Is Outdoors IN in America or is Outdoors Out in America, or is Outdoors Out of America ?
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I've also been in parts of the world with excellent mass transportation that took me within a kilometer of anywhere I wanted to visit.
I wish the mass transit was better here so that I had an option. I'd like to be able to meet up with friends, have a few drinks, and not have to drive home.
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>> Not having a car anywhere on Earth is a chain around your existence.
That is not the case.
For example, in urban Japan, having a car is a very painful and useless chain around your existence.
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You do know that you spend monthly or yearly on road taxes, ownership taxes, maintenance, insurance, heavily taxed fuel (in Europe) and yearly (non-free) mandatory checks to determine if your car is roadworthy or not. If deemed unfit, you will get a quote for the required repairs, tire change and what not and you'll have 2 weeks to make those repairs. And you'll need to pay for re-testing. Fails again and you have to go and buy another car, with all the hassle that comes with that while getting rid of your
Re: driving everywhere is the problem (Score:2)
Rivian's R1S/R1T is a real, genuine off road vehicle. It can do things that make off road ICEVs cry. Try watching some videos about it so you don't embarrass yourself further. I think the R1T is terribly ugly (the upper area of the bed has some really weird curves that only work on the R1S) but there's no denying the capabilities. EVs have dramatically finer control and that pays off
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Rivian's R1S/R1T is a real, genuine off road vehicle. It can do things that make off road ICEVs cry.
EVs have dramatically finer control and that pays off
I expect plug-in hybrid trucks to come along to bring the advantages of fine control electric motors on each wheel and the ability for a fast refill of liquid hydrocarbons for long distance, towing, off-grid use, and/or more. Perhaps the biggest benefit would be lighter weight from not needing the batteries, beneficial for when sinking in mud or something is a problem. If they need the weight for traction on firm ground then that is trivial to add with blocks of steel, tanks of water, just bringing more s
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>> I expect plug-in hybrid trucks
Obsolete Technology. Not gonna happen.
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>> I expect plug-in hybrid trucks
Obsolete Technology. Not gonna happen.
If it's stupid and it works then it is not stupid.
Call it a bad idea if you like but with things going as they are in finding the materials we need for making all the batteries we need for a shift to all BEV from where we are now then this is a problem that will continue for decades. People will need new cars and trucks before then. People will want the performance advantages that electric propulsion gives them. We can get there with electric hybrid vehicles. You can call this stupid but it works.
Re: driving everywhere is the problem (Score:2)
The problem with a hybrid is that you have to drag around both powertrains. This is already irritating for road vehicles, it's even worse off-road where weight REALLY matters. Not just for mileage reasons, but also for recovery. It takes more truck and/or winch to recover a heavier vehicle.
One obvious solution is to tow a generator. It can be separated for recovery, while rock crawling for fun, etc. This is not a good solution for common everyday use, but would work fine for overlanding, where range is an i
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The problem with a hybrid is that you have to drag around both powertrains.
If you believe that then you have a very limited definition of what it means to have a hybrid electric vehicle. There's more than one way to produce an electric hybrid. If one is only expected to burn fuel on long stretches of interstate highways then that can make the power train very simple and light, as opposed to one that would expect to operate on only battery power rarely.
This is already irritating for road vehicles, it's even worse off-road where weight REALLY matters.
Then why are hybrids so popular? Have people not yet realized the problems? I doubt it. Some will not know what problems hybri
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the problem with a hybrid is that you have to drag around both powertrains.
If one is only expected to burn fuel on long stretches of interstate highways then that can make the power train very simple and light
People keep saying that, but as it turns out, it's not true. When you make an ICEV light, it's loud, or it's fragile, or it's highly polluting, or it takes frequent maintenance, or usually it has a combination of these things. You can make an electric motor and/or generator surprisingly small, but the set of motor, speed controller, and speed controller and maybe also motor cooling system[s] become more and more massive as you need more power, to say nothing of the battery.
If you're going to fully exploit t
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If it's stupid and it works then it is not stupid.
If it's more expensive and it works then it is obsolete...
Re:driving everywhere is the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you actually seen one in person? In 2024 I've been seeing a lot more of them on the roads and was surprised that they are not in fact gaint vehichles, they're closer to a light pickup like a Tacoma or a Ford Ranger. Seeing them up close if it wasn't $80k it'd definitely be high on my list of daily drivers.
I do fully agree on public transit but fact is in America we have a truly uphill fight as we just did not design our cities for mass transit and people like their cars and suburbia so we gotta meet those people where they are and to me the case to make is that EVs are kindof the perfect suburban vehichle. Less emissions is still less emissions.
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Great - Rivian is the primary manufacturer of a large pickup truck being marketed to guys who haul nothing but the new couch their wife buys at Costco. Large vehicles for no reason other than sustaining suburbia and a dwindling manhood.
This sounds like hating the player than the game. Big trucks sell well. EVs sell well, or at least did up until months ago. If someone wants to make it big in the EV market then it is best to feed an existing market. Rivian could make sedans, or SUV/CUV type vehicles, but that would put them in direct competition with very similar and well recognized Tesla products. Then there's popular sedans and such from Nissan, Toyota, Ford, GM, BMW, and more. If they started in that market then I suspect that the
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To my understanding a lot of (Western)Europe's infrastructure was blown up because of war efforts. In the U.S.A. Municipalities' willingly removed all public transportation for roads that cars could use. Don't know which way is worse.
People in Europe were poor afterwards, so had to rely on public transport working well, to build up wealth and prosperity again. The U.S.A had a big influx of money and workforce that came back, so the focus was to provide for that influx was to build more houses in suburbs and
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Being a bit nitpicky, but do people who can afford a Rivian truly buy sofas at Costco? This would be a very odd combination of high- and low-end big-ticket purchases in the UK.
Stoked (Score:2)
To me the R1T is how the Cybertruck should have looked.
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I won't go that far in terms of Cybertruck critique, although calling it divisive is fair (consistency!).
Rivian has mad a big cost-cutting initiative and with this investment they really have some great opportunities.
Re:Stoked (Score:5, Informative)
The Rivian also doesn't get totaled when it drives through water. https://electrek.co/2024/06/24... [electrek.co]
26 miles on the odometer and the water level not even above the door frame. Apparently in a Cybertruck you have to enable the special water mode and wait 10 minutes while it pressurizes the battery pack, which lasts for 30 minutes.
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...but when there is a shark, like 10 feet away...
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There's a shark repelling mode for that :)
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People have found that even the car wash can destroy Teslas. There was a couple in Scotland who had theirs written off because rain destroyed the battery, because apparently the Model 3 isn't suitable for use in typical Scottish weather.
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It seems Tesla isn't alone there - a Hyundai in Canada was deemed a total loss [citynews.ca] after minor damage.
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Yeah thinking about it to me it would have been smarter to keep the Cybertruck more a limited run type vehichle. If you said "we're only making 10,000 of these" and charged like $150k they'd be an instant collectors item and then you release a more traditional truck as a mainstream offering. The first one I saw was "neat" but i've seen like 2 dozen of them now, it's goofiness is going from charming to just plain goofy.
I really liked that concept design they originally showed that mimiced the look of the
The most common Rivian vehicles I see ... (Score:2)
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The electrification of the light commercial sector cannot come fast enough for me, for exactly this reason. Van engine noise is really horrible.
R3 looks like an Audi A50 anyway (Score:1)
Over $60k for used R1T pickups (Score:2)
Solution to VWs software debacle? (Score:2)
https://www.msn.com/en-us/auto... [msn.com]
VW has proven that they are clueless about software (and probably also about EVs).
Investing in Rivian where they get software and EV expertise is a good move for them and gives Rivian needed cash.