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Rivian, a new US car maker, said on February 28th that it would recall 12716 vehicles, including nearly 89 per cent of vehicles produced by Rivian as of the end of September last year, because a faulty sensor in the front passenger seat could prevent the passenger airbags of the 2022 R1T electric pickup truck and R1s electric SUV from operating as expected.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recall notice, the vehicle recall is due to a failure of the auto-locking retractor sensor in the front passenger seat belt system, which may be mistakenly reported as turned on during actual shutdown, resulting in airbags being suppressed or improperly deployed. So far, the company has fixed the problem on later SUV and trucks.

Rivian said that so far, no accidents or injuries related to the above problems have been found. Although the recall involves 127.16 million vehicles, Rivian believes that fewer than 100 vehicles are estimated to be affected by the problem, and the proportion of vehicles that really need to be replaced may be less than 1%. However, considering that it is impossible to determine which vehicles have sensor problems, they have to recall all vehicles produced before September last year.

It should be noted that this is the fourth time that Rivian has issued a recall since it began mass production at the end of 2021. Prior to this, Rivian has submitted three recalls to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the most recent in October 2022 and the largest of the first three recalls. According to previous reports from Automotive Industry concern, Rivian recalled about 13000 vehicles, covering almost all cars sold, on October 7, 2022 because of possible loose fasteners that could cause drivers to lose steering control in extreme cases. Data show that by the first three quarters of 2022, Rivian had produced a total of 14317 new cars and delivered 12278 new cars. Rivian said the recall was voluntary, hoping to minimise potential risk, but Rivian shares tumbled more than 7 per cent on the day.

The other two recalls were in May and August 2022. Rivian recalled about 500 vehicles in May 2022 because they could cause passenger airbags to fail, and Rivian recalled 200 vehicles in August 2022 because some of their seat belts were improperly fastened.

Rivian is a relatively young electric car manufacturer, founded in 2009 and headquartered in Irvine, California. It 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.

Rivian currently has three all-electric models on sale: the R1T pickup truck, the R1s SUV and the EDV 700 minivan tailor-made for Amazon. 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, and Bezos personally promoted it.

On November 1, 2021, Rivian was listed on NASDAQ with an issue price of $78. It once rose to $119.46 in intraday trading, closed at $100.73, with a total market value of $85.9 billion. Only two days after listing, the market value of Rivian once exceeded $100 billion, surpassing Ford and GM and other established car companies. But the good times did not last long. Due to the chaos of the supply chain, Rivian's production plan was disrupted, resulting in a rise in its production costs.

Rivian financial report shows that since Rivian officially delivered its first batch of vehicles in September 2021, by the end of December 2022, Rivian has produced a total of 25352 vehicles and delivered a total of 21252 vehicles. Among them, Rivian produced a total of 1015 vehicles and delivered 920 vehicles in 2021 and 24337 vehicles in 2022, only 663 vehicles less than the expected production target of 25000 vehicles, with a total delivery of 20332 vehicles.

Early last month, Rivian announced that it would cut jobs by 6%, or about 840, due to operating losses and weak cash reserves. Rivian currently has 14000 employees, but Rivian did not give an exact time for layoffs at the time. Rivian, which currently has only one plant in Illinois, plans to have a capacity of about 150000 vehicles, and Rivian is expected to produce 50, 000 vehicles in 2023, double the figure in 2022.

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