Rivian’s revised R1 vehicles look really nice. They focussed strongly on production cost, to make each vehicle sale more profitable. Their recently announced R2 and R3 vehicles, smaller and with a lower MSRP, would be their way to try to reach more customers.
Passenger vehicles are not a part of the climate space that I worry about as much as other segments. EVs have several inherent advantages:
- Far fewer moving parts. Over the long term, EVs are more reliable and will be cheaper to maintain.
- ICE engines deliver about 20% of their total energy to moving the vehicle, EVs are >50%. Moving the entire energy requirements for passenger vehicles onto the electric grid would result in using substantially less total energy.
We need more climate change work to reach this level of clear superiority over legacy methods.
- Solar energy production got there first, all of capitalism's incentives are now driving toward more solar installation.
- Concrete and steel production show exciting progress, that the resulting materials are actually superior to what came before in their durability and control over material properties.
More. We need more.