Rivian CEO issues strong statement about people who purchase gas-powered cars: ‘Sort of like building a horse barn in 1910’

If you knew that he was referring to the purchase of a $80k Suburban in 2030 would that change your assessment?

So a $77-82k Suburban is good in your eyes then? How come? Why? Oh wait, you didn't read the quote.

A luxury truck with the ugliest headlights on a car today.

I concur, fucken fuckers.

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.

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.

2023 F150 weighs between 4,021 to 5,740 lbs, just as a reference point. All electric vehicles weigh significantly more than their ICE counterparts

Proof that very few read the article

It's still a fair complaint though. What about those of us who can't afford to spend $75,000 on a car?

Also the recharge times are still a deal breaker for anyone who fancies a road trip every once in a while.

Agreed, it's also true that used combustion engine cars can be a great value.

Startup costs need to be softened with a costlier higher margin vehicle. Cannot achieve quality mass production of cars from thin air.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Ah, because the only EVs in the market are Rivian ones.

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.

We can give them a little credit when they speak out against fossil fuels, as a treat.

A Bolt, after all the tax incentives, comes in at around $18k!

I don't own a car anymore and haven't for two years now. I walk everywhere. Around 10 miles most days through the countryside and coast from town to town.

Healthiest I've ever been, I can eat what I want a lot of the time too. I've got basically no body fat and I have a ridiculous amount of energy. I feel constantly refreshed too, before I was lethargic and overweight.

I live in the UK however in a very pedestrian orientated location where I can do this without issue. Or get a bus or train if needed. I have absolutely no idea how it would be possible in a rural area or a car centric city. I guess it wouldn't be, and the people in charge are not willing to change.

Buying any car, electric or otherwise, is 'Sort of like building a horse barn in 1910’.

Let's say that it depend on where you live. In a big city maybe a car can be useless (or less usefull), but in a small town like mine a car is basically the only way to move around since public transportation is really limited.

Real sustainability comes from changing the zoning code to cease outlawing walkability.

Even if you remove all the private cars in a city, you will discover that you will substitute almost all of them with small/medium trucks to deliver all the groceries/products you (end everyone else) need in your life. And I say it living in a small town where I can almost do the day by day chores without using a car.

That would barely scratch the surface, I'm afraid. For quite a lot of America, not owning a car is simply not feasible. I don't have a large friend/family group, but in 4 cases now, we've had to relocate our families a town over because wages aren't keeping up with cost of living. So we all have long commutes now. There are no buses, trains, etc. We were priced out of housing market. When my landlord sold the property and forced my move 5-6 years ago, I could rent and pay 30% more for a smaller place, I could buy for what I was paying if I wanted to move my family of 5 into a two bed with no yard, etc, or I could move a town or two over pay a bit more, and get a decent size house for my family. Today if I had to buy a house, I couldn't even come close to affording the place I live in now, especially not at 7-9% interest compared to the 3.5% I got.

Now I guess you could still say fuck me I should have given up my dogs, moved my family into a shoe box and just walked to save the planet, but even then that's not really feasible. In a town of 60k I moved from, there is only bussing, and even then they don't run often enough to a wide enough range of places that you're not building in additional hours of the day to get where you're going. And they often don't run past 7pm or before 7am. And that's most of America. Even in large cities, public transportation is severely lacking compared to the rest of the civilized world.

Biking in the US should also help be a stopgap, but our whole society is so fucking car centric even that's even not really feasible. Aside from the fact that most of infrastructure rarely has bike lanes or even places to store bikes, its still lacking severely from "I'm just going a few blocks over to the bodega" every few days and is more like "just 5-10 miles to the grocery store." And this is just looking at my tiny little town where I live that is nowhere near as bad as somewhere like Houston, which is far more populous and also even less dense and less traversable by anything that's not a car.

In 2023, saying people shouldn't own cars is either ignorant of the issues around it or just classist. The Rivian CEO saying shit like this, with a starting price of $73k, is just more classist CEO bullshit. We don't even have the charging infrastructure at the moment to support everyone buying electric, not to mention I'd be willing to bet that 50% or more of this country can't even afford the starting price on whatever the cheapest electric is.

I hate armchair urbanists so much it's unreal

To be fair the headline is a bit clickbaity. The quote is referring to someone buying a new Chevy Suburban in 2030. It would be kind of dumb to do that in my opinion, but I also would never buy a new car anyway.

barns are still useful and valuable today. this guy is a moron! he might have said something that made sense, like buying a new horse-drawn carriage. still, didn't it take a couple/few decades for everything to switch over to cars?

I'm on a diesel and the emission zones in the UK are making it more challenging to own one. That said it has 750 miles range, 4 wheel drive, a station wagon, can actually tow stuff without halfing that range and can fill it up anywhere in minutes. It suits my lifestyle perfectly.

That and it cost me £2600.. I wonder what electric car I could get for that.

Considering any new electric cars you buy would have to be made from materials mined and processed, manufactured into a vehicle and then shipped long distances before it even gets to you, keeping your existing car and maintaining it well is possibly better for the environment when the entire life cycle is considered.

80k and it cuts my carbon emissions by less than half. Which might be washed out completely when you consider that a Rivian weighs over 2x what my car weighs.

Electric is the future. But it is a boutique luxury right now. A compact ICE is probably just about as good a choice for the climate as a electric mega truck. Call me back in five years.

I think his analogy is accidentally spot on. ICE cars are going to be around for a while

Yes, people already have modded wheelchair ramps for the F-150 and model Y. It can be done, it has be done, it will continue to be done.

I'd bet the conversion companies could almost as easily convert the phev Pacifica as the gas only Pacifica.

I think the charging port thing is slowly resolving Type2/CCS seem to be winning. Most chargers I find that are relatively new support both type 2 and chademo. In a few years I don't think you will need to consider this and if buying today I'd stick with type 2.

I also heard that since the electric grid is designed to handle peak loads, it is over specced for today's needs and there is a lot of time during which it could be updated before we get closer to its limits. I also had these thoughts but in practice most people charge overnight when a bunch of daytime devices are off. We might not use 7kW at home during the day, but businesses use a ton of electricity during the day. AC when is hot heating when it's cold, PCs and monitors during the day, lights even though its daytime and that is before you get to a lot of power intensive specialist equipment that isn't used at night typically, like hospital diagnostic instruments etc etc etc.

I also wouldn't judge everyone on Teslas track record. It is clear other car companies are going now slowly and taking more care. Rivian may be a bit different being a new comer but that is certainly true of the established manufacturers.

The UK was replacing their old streetlights with LED, which frees up a lot of electricity.

And at the same time put chargers in every street pole they replaced.

Those apartments can charge there.

-- a friend of mine just got a Tesla, despite living in a townhouse where he can’t charge. He goes out to charge on weekends, similarly to how he fills the tank in his gasoline car. It’s not as convenient or cheap as being able to just plug in, but it is a reasonable thing to do

— how do you think apartments and condo complexes will get charging infrastructure? It won’t just appear and landlords/associations have no incentive to spend the money. The only way this happens is when EV adoption gets wide enough for them to see they’re losing money without it

— who cares about a charging port? Adapters are cheap

— Tesla’s quality issues are old news, that I don’t think is true anymore. Yes, they had issues scaling up, and discovering what other car companies already knew about mass manufacturing, but I believe they worked it out and are more similar to other manufacturers

— Tesla may dominate th EV market in the US, but every car company has an EV, with dozens more models coming ou in the next year or two. If you don’t like Tesla’s try something else. Personally I’m not sure I can afford a Tesla but an interested in seeing whether GM can deliver on their announced pricing for Equinox and Blazer

The infrastructure just isn’t there yet. If you live in apartments, where will you charge it?

You're right, but not in the way you think.

The real issue is that if you live in an apartment, you shouldn't need or want a car to begin with. The fact that so many people seem to think they do is a gigantic flashing neon clue that we've fucked up the zoning code and managed to build the apartments wrong in such a way that they're not in a walkable area despite being dense.

The infrastructure change we need is to be ripping out the parking lots, not installing EV chargers in them!

Oh, and you get to change your battery in 3 years for $20k because it's worn out.

There are some big problems that get glossed over that you learn about when you own one, unless you've done enough research to know when people are blowing sunshine up your ass.

Ok, that will be $150,000.

Cant afford a horse either. Double screwed.

Maybe. I remember when I built my computer in the mid 2000s (in high school) and saw something about magnetic RAM and how it would be a huge game changer. I thought about holding off so I didn't build something that would immediately be like buying something that runs on vacuum tubes in the age of transistors, but decided I wanted the computer sooner than later, it would still be useful, and who knows what would really happen with this magnetic RAM buzz. 20 years later, magnetic RAM has not, in fact, changed the game.

Even if Toyota does pull a rabbit out of its hat and they build a bunch of cars in 10 years, that 10-year-old car built today won't be particularly attractive anyway.

Range really isn't a big deal. Pretty much any car will get you from one charger to the next, the question is how long you'll have to wait to charge. On most cars, 30 minutes of charging will give you a couple hours of driving. Keeping in mind that you can leave home on a full charge and arrive at your destination on nearly nothing, charging overnight, it's not bad at all.

Oh, and check Plugshare. You'd be surprised how many DC fast chargers are out there. You've probably passed by some and not even noticed. There are a few deserts out there (looking at you, Wyoming) but they're building up FAST. A year ago there was a 135-mile stretch kinda near me without anything along the way. Now there are two on that stretch.

The only people who will be cut off are the petrol junkies.

EV's are getting cheaper by the minute, and the second hand market is growing intensely.

$42,000 rear bumper

Yikes! Are you supposed to just throw the truck away when someone hits it?

In my state the minimum legal auto insurance coverage is something like $25k per vehicle. So it's very possible, at least here, that your rivian gets a parking lot bump from Jim-Bob in his 30 year old Civic, and his insurance just won't cover it. And if he's driving around in a car that's old enough to run for congress that's covered by minimum liability, Jim-Bob probably doesn't have any money you could sue him for. I doubt they would garnish wages over a traffic accident, either.

How many of us keep horses?

Meanwhile gas starts at $8.34 per gallon where I live, while I can charge my car for $0.42 per kWh.

The Rivian R1T's towing capacity is 11,000 pounds, so you can absolutely tow with one. The question is if you're talking about a trailer around town or a large camper cross-country. The former should be no big deal, you can always charge at home and start your day off full, but admittedly you'll be stopping to charge a lot more with the latter.

That said, most people don't carry campers cross-country, let alone frequently

Even if an EV is 100% powered by coal power plants, it would still produce 40% less Co2 per kilometer than an ICE.

ICE are just that inefficient.

If the EV was powered by 100% solar panels, that would rise to 90% less Co2 per kilometer.

And before you start with "EVs are more polluting to produce", know that EV's still would pollute less than an ICE after about 25 000km.

Most cars easily drive 4 times that in their lifetime.