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According to foreign media reports, Tesla CEO Elon Musk (Elon Musk) said in an interview with Tesla Silicon Valley owners Club (Tesla Silicon Valley Owners Club) that American electric vehicle startups Lucid and Rivian have a bankruptcy trend, unless they can significantly cut costs, otherwise Lucid and Rivian, two American electric vehicle start-ups will go bankrupt.

If you find the biggest common ground between Lucid and Rivian, two American electric car start-ups, it may be that Musk's vision of the two companies is "unfriendly" because of high valuations and extremely low delivery, both electric car companies have been insinuated by Musk on social platforms.

Founded in 2009 and headquartered in Irvine, California, Rivian was originally an American Mainstream Motors car manufacturer specializing in sports cars. In 2010, the founder renamed Mainstream Motors to Rivian and transferred it from a sports car to a pure electric pickup. At the 2018 Los Angeles Auto Show, Rivian launched pure electric pickup truck R1T and pure electric SUV R1S, in which pure electric pickup truck R1T was widely favored and invested by Ford, Amazon and other well-known companies. Bezos also personally promoted it, which is also the incentive to promote its skyrocketing share price.

In the American market, pickups are much more popular than cars and SUV. According to 2021 data, the top three car sales in the United States are Ford F-Series, Dodge RAM and Chevrolet Solode. all three models are pickups, with sales of 726000, 569000 and 530000 respectively, while Toyota's RAV4 ranks fourth with 408000. At the same time, under the wave of new energy vehicles, electric pick-up trucks have also become the tipping point of the American car market, such as GM's GMC Hummer EV, Ford's Fmur150 Lightning, Tesla's Cybertruck and so on. From this point of view, Rivian took the lead in the launch of pure electric pickup truck R1T seems to be in the forefront of the market.

On November 1, 2021, Rivian was listed on NASDAQ with an offering price of $78. It rose to $119.46 in intraday trading and closed at $100.73, with a total market capitalization of $85.9 billion. On the same day, founder RJ Scaringe revealed in an interview that Rivian must grow rapidly to produce at least 1 million electric vehicles a year by 2030. Rivian's long-term plan is to build four assembly plants around the world, with a second plant in the United States in addition to the existing one in Normal, Illinois, and one in Europe and one in China.

Since then, Rivian's share price has soared, from $100.73 on November 1 to $172.01 on November 16, with its market capitalization rising from $85.9 billion on November 1 to $149.4 billion on November 16. As of November 16, Rivian's market capitalization is second only to Tesla's US $1.0592 trillion and Toyota's US $261.8 billion, surpassing Volkswagen and BMW to become the third car company in the world by market capitalization. However, Rivian shares have plummeted since Nov. 16, falling to $27.30 a share in the previous session, while Ford had no choice but to sell its stake and leave at a loss as results and prospects came under pressure.

It is understood that Rivian's Normal plant in Illinois currently has an annual production capacity of about 150000 vehicles, but the global chip shortage has had a significant impact on the normal production and delivery of Rivian. According to the financial report, Rivian produced 10515 vehicles and delivered 920 vehicles in 2021, compared with 2553 vehicles and 1227 vehicles in the first quarter of 2022.

Compared to Rivian,Lucid 's background, it is full of legends. Lucid, formerly known as Atieva, was founded by Xie Jiapeng, a former vice president and director of Tesla, and Wen Shiming, a former Oracle executive. At first, it focused on the research and development of battery, electric control and electric drive technology. It was positioned as the core system provider of new energy vehicles, which can be simply understood as "Intel in the field of new energy vehicles". It is worth mentioning that apart from Xie Jiapeng, including Eric Bach, vice president of hardware engineering, Peter Hasenkamp, vice president of supply chain management, and Doreen Allen, director of sales, all come from Tesla, so it is not too much to describe Lucid as a "replica Tesla".

In October 2016, Atieva announced its entry into the auto market and renamed the company Lucid Motors. The first model, Lucid Air Pure, starts at $87400, a direct counterbid to Tesla Model S. In addition, Lucid also regards Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz as direct competitors. Audi represents technology luxury, BMW represents sports luxury, and Mercedes-Benz is classic luxury. It can be said that Lucid was born to target the luxury market. According to the information on Lucid's official website, its permanent magnet synchronous motor is an integrated development, highly integrated with motor, inverter and reducer, with a weight of 74kg and can output 670 horsepower, while the traditional method is the collaborative development of multiple teams with different levels of integration, even Tesla's high-performance permanent magnet synchronous motor weighs as high as 134kg and outputs 429 horsepower.

The core competitiveness of Lucid lies in solving the "driving anxiety" to some extent, with a maximum range of 520mph on a single charge (EPA certified mileage of about 837km). It is the longest-lasting electric car sold in the US market, and its original production of Tesla's ultra-long-range model, Model S Plaid+, has long been cancelled. According to official Lucid data, bookings have reached 30, 000 vehicles, but production is expected to be 12000-14000 in 2022.

Tesla is quite different from Rivian and Lucid. The biggest difference is that the scale of Rivian and Lucid is larger than that of Tesla at that time. Rivian is losing money on every car it delivers, and if Rivian fails to cut costs by expanding its scale and cutting production costs, it is likely to go bankrupt. Musk believes that Rivian is on the trend of bankruptcy and needs to make some changes. Rivian is no different from Tesla five years ago.

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