Agree, because of the instant torque with EVs the horses become a little less of an important spec.
The R1S looks nice, if it was in my price range I'd get that for my wife.
R1S wouldn't even be a consideration if we had to pay current pricing. I don't see these high prices holding. Once supply chains sort themselves in the next year or so and all the people who just gotta have these EVs have one, there will be more options and better prices.
I have an early reservation and already passed on the launch model, I anticipate ordering the Ultra within the next 3 months (hope is probably a better word).
Both companies will fail. Rivian has lost significant dollars on every vehicle it has sold and has no path to positive margin. None. It cannot survive. Fisker is a basket case. Tesla, on the other hand, has never lost money on any car that it has sold, has an average 27% gross margin since inception. Rivian's production costs per unit exceed what any consumer would pay for its vehicles, You and others point at their gross selling prices as a current obstacle. They are still selling you a vehicle for less than the component costs to THEM with assembly labor and delivery. It is an unfeasible business model.
Hmm, not sure I've commented about Tesla and their gross selling prices. Might be confusing me with someone else.
You talked aspirationally about Rivian getting their prices DOWN. That cannot happen - they MUST push prices up to exceed cost or go out of business., That is in the cards abyway (or be bought out). Fisker will not be fine. They cannot ramp to volume, full stop. How many new car manufacturers making a volume consumer product have come into existence in the last seventy years and survived to profitability? Exactly one. Tesla. The convergence of factors that made this possible was unique and not replicable. Fisker is another Delorean. Or another Fisker.
Hmm
The fact that they are just getting going is the reason they cannot become competitive. These vehicles are software-based and to succeed requires unit sales in the hundreds of thousands, or affiliation with a larger organization that provides that resource (such as Lamborghini being a division of Volkswagen Audi Group, same for Bentley, etc.). It takes billions in infrastructure and development costs - and no new manufacturer, starting from scratch, can get scaled sufficiently to have a competitive product to market. It is not possible, full stop. I love what the folks at Lucid, for example have done. But their Achilles heel, and it is fatal, is software development resources. Every review raves about the car and then says - don't buy it, the software is buggy, long lags, freezes, and generally sucks, plus charging doesn't work. Even Tesla is struggling there, and they have multiples of the resources, many multiples of these little guys. They are succeeding due to being way ahead of the pack as first mover, but there is no chance that any emerging competitor can catch them. Perhaps some of the legacy manufacturers will be competitive - see KIA, Mercedes, Nissan, maybe Ford and GM. But for the small players, there just are not enough units to spread the development costs for mapping, self-driving, user interface, etc. This is my bailiwick - finance and cost structures (I'm a finance professor at Johns Hopkins as my retirement gig). I've spent a lot of time inside Tesla's financials - the only thing that got them here is an amazing product (engineering for range, performance, style, Supercharging) and huge positive gross sales margins, coupled with a very high stock price and the concomitant ability to issue many billions of dollars of new capital to finance R&D and new plants - those elements (most critically the billions in capital access) do not exist for the Fiskers, Lucids, Rivians, etc., and none of them can survive. Not one. No chance.
