Rivan wants you to cancel your pre March '22 order [?]

[crashmtb]

Now you have gotten my hopes up again. I am in the Florida Panhandle, five hours from the nearest Rivian Service Center. Even though my original Rivian pre-order date is November 28, 2018, my expected delivery date is just 2014. As a very early adopter, I have been quite disappointed that there is no "first come, first served" consideration at Rivian. If you don't live in or near a big city, you are just SOL.

If they are now delivering vehicles to folks four hours out, maybe five hours out will become reasonable sometime in the next several years.

I got really excited when Rivian started delivering vehicles. I thought that with a second day pre-order, I should be getting my R1T any day. Needles to say, I am not that excited any more.

Brian

I still don’t understand why you haven’t just used a believable address in a city nearer a service centre. Surely you know someone in a city with a service centre?

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[White Shadow]

True, but bad for Rivian is bad for R1 owners. Nothing against the company as I love nearly everything about it, just wish they were more forthcoming about estimates.

Reserving today gets you this: Deliveries for new reservations are expected to begin in late 2023.

Eleven months? Ok, so where does that leave those of us already in the queue?

Agreed....but my point is that Rivian has an incentive to try and fulfill all of those early low-priced orders ASAP. Unless you truly think that the plan is to anger people enough that they'll cancel themselves. I doubt that's the case though.

 

[John G.]

The only thing you may really count on is...Your Rivian is coming s00n!

 

[the long way downunder]

Certainly looks and feels like being dicked around on Max Pack, dropping quad motor, winch, and delaying tank turn indefinitely. These were "at launch" specifications and quite literally three "wow" features that I found most appealing in 2018 and in June '21 when I was first told "ready any day now" from my first guide … a condition that continued till March '22 when I was told "it's at the service center, take it leave it … you're welcome to wait for Max Pack and the winch" … everybody in the dark, the people making the decisions not communicating to the people impacted by those decisions.

I'll just hold my orders, play with my existing R1T and see what happens. Hopefully sooner or later Rivian will get some adult supervision and start normalizing (pun) their communications with customers (and with Wall Street.)

Is there even the option of an R1S LE Max Pack? (that's our other outstanding pre-order) … I assume we take delivery of that as a Large S for the largesse and we'll be paid to flip it rather being offered what we ordered in good faith. I wonder if anyone flipping their R1 gets "black balled" or somehow earmarked with a special "don't sell these people another one till we've run out of back orders."

I assume if I want to update my humble Large R1T to a Max R1T I can downgrade to dual motor and they'll "honor" the original price, while de-contenting in a rather egregious bait-n-switch.

It's not as if Rivian is making these changes negotiable, it's always "no soup for you!" terms.

 

[Rivianation]

Agreed....but my point is that Rivian has an incentive to try and fulfill all of those early low-priced orders ASAP. Unless you truly think that the plan is to anger people enough that they'll cancel themselves. I doubt that's the case though.

I'm not saying angering people is their plan. Just not prioritizing them when others will pay more. The angry person above mentioned that there are 25,000 people ahead of my order. If each is paying $15K less than the 25,000 ahead of me, then that is $375,000,000 they don't get. Not exactly chump change and I'm sure it gets them thinking.

And this definitely crossed their minds when they tried to up the price on all pre-ordered in March 2022, in the first place.

 

[Sully151]

They are just holding on to your S until they really get the suspension dialed in.

 

[moosehead]

 

[zipzag]

Riivian gave me access to the online shop (store?) over a month ago. They seem to be encouraging me to buy now and that is at the old price. They don't seem to be trying to get rid of me.

 

[canikony]

I have a feeling they will eventually reach a point where they will give you a refund or make you buy a vehicle. Tesla did the same thing for people who had Model 3 reservations that were stagnant.

 

[RexRemus]

The angry person above mentioned that there are 25,000 people ahead of my order. If each is paying $15K less than the 25,000 ahead of me, then that is $375,000,000 they don't get. Not exactly chump change and I'm sure it gets them thinking.

It's also $2,000,000,000 (at 80k) that they DO get. Better to take a loss of $375M than to force those people to pay 15k more and lose half those orders entirely, plus the negative press/ill-will when most people say Fuck Rivian and cancel entirely. When they raised the prices the first time clearly enough people canceled (or were ready to) that they backtracked - do that to those same people a second time and you're going to lose a LOT of them. And maybe that's good - there's enough other people in line at the higher price, Rivian still won't be able to fill demand, but wow would that look shitty, and it might lead to the first quarterly report where the number of reservations is less than the previous qtr and that would be a bad look.

I'm not saying they wouldn't or couldn't be favoring "new" reservations over old because of this, but I suspect even if they are, they're doing it in a sort of round-robin way - if I sell one "old" and one "new" - I still net $7500 more "profit" across the two of them "now" vs waiting to clear ALL "old" orders. And maybe its 2:1 or 3:1 old to new ratio - or whatever, but at least they are recouping some margin by rotating in a "new" vehicle purchase NOW, vs frontloading all the losses only. That isn't something I would consider malicious at all - it's smart business. What I feel so many people forget is that, if Rivian doesn't survive at all we get nothing, we lose, good day to you sir - if I have to wait a bit longer at the old price, because it helps keep Rivian from going bankrupt - fucking GREAT. Because I don't want them to go bankrupt, I want them to be there to deliver and service and update my vehicle for a great many years. They're trying to balance 100 plates right now and make the numbers look good while doing a very aggressive production ramp, it's a difficult and delicate time. As long as people ARE getting vehicles, I'm ok if I'm "penalized" a bit to get mine if it's a "win" for the company as a whole. It's not all about "me", I care that they stay healthy as a business first

 

[astonius]

I think Rivian's outstanding preorder/reservation count may be a bit specious. I suspect internally they are seeing concerning numbers around conversions to actual orders, particularly for post-price-increase reservations in light of the macroeconomic environment and changes to the tax credit. Consider new orders placed today are estimated to deliver as early as "late 2023." If true that's really not much of a wait for a product that has over 100k reservations. I don't think they're ramping the line quite that fast.

 

[VSG]

my original Rivian pre-order date is November 28, 2018, my expected delivery date is just 2024.

With an Adventure R1T ordered in 2018, you should have had delivery by now. The location didn't really play any part in deliveries until June of last year when they sent out the new delivery windows. But Adventure editions had been shipping for several months already at that point so you should have received yours by then. I suspect there's something you left out, like you were configured for a Max Pack or an Explore model? Or did you switch from a R1S at some point? Those are an entirely different story. If not, then location seems to be the only thing left.

 

[VSG]

Great example. I'm sure they told you about " Ocean Coast interior problems ", but did they allow you to choose another interior color to shorten the wait? Many will pick the config that gets the vehicle delivered faster. At this point, I'll take what they make. You can't really go wrong with any config. lol

What's your point? Yes, I got access to the R1 shop. That was set up entirely due to customer complaints from people who were flexible in the color/wheels/options/etc. they would accept and didn't want to wait any longer. It was a BENEFIT and opportunity, not a punishment or a devious underhanded move to try to get us to take something off the lot. And it addressed some of the downsides (out of order deliveries, etc.) of the batching process that they had to put into place to maintain production rates during a worldwide supply chain disruption.

A LOT of people appreciated this, because they were perfectly willing to accept a different color etc. The R1 shop is making a lot of people happy - just read the forums. It was a good and welcome change made to the purchase process, but it is also becoming less relevant now that Rivian is locking in configurations earlier and getting a lot of the supply problems under control.

If like me you didn't want to change, then you could choose to keep waiting. I really wanted OC interior, so I kept waiting. No one ever pressured me or even contacted me to change. I got an email that said I had access to the shop, no one even forced me to log in and look. Entirely up to me. I waited.

 

[VSG]

It's also $2,000,000,000 (at 80k) that they DO get. Better to take a loss of $375M

Yes, and more importantly, it's a decision they made a year ago with full understanding and disclosure in their financials about how it would affect their bottom line. This decision is now already built into the business plan, and they've still managed to exceed analyst EPS estimates for the last three quarters.

To the original point:
The price drop was not a concession they had to make, because prices were never locked. You won't see Ford honoring the price for Lightning reservations made last year. You won't see Tesla selling Cybertrucks for <40k like they promised. While it was disappointing to see Rivian raise their prices so much, the price rise was a realistic reflection of their increased costs in the 3+ years since they had made their price public.

Rivian's mistake was trying to keep the old price for so long and not making the price rise gradual and up-front. They also could have softened the blow in a way that would have cost them less, for example by only protecting LE prices, or only protecting prices prior to the configurator going live, or with some variation of a phased increase. But raising the prices was not in and of itself a mistake - it was *how* they did it that rankled.

Rivian has already bent over backwards on the price issue, unlike any other auto manufacturer, so postulating that they're actively trying to weasel out of this voluntary concession, and that this was planned ahead of time ("let's distract them with price protection while we gouge them on everything else") is really bordering on conspiracy theories. Unless you have something concrete to share.

 

[jhelmig]

And for a proof point today, they updated the gear shop today to support the pre-March 22 prices for the stuff they moved to the gear shop (except the spare - need to get that one). I got my pre-March 22 in late December no problem. And I was one that was both delighted and surprised they even grandfathered pricing after nothing more than a fully refundable 1K hold fee.

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