Post-IPO public communications

[dleewla]

I have an early Rivian R1S (Launch Edition) reservation and an early Lucid Grand Touring reservation. I've heard nothing from Rivian, and honestly I don't have a lot of confidence I'll get my R1S in the next 6 months.

Monday, my Lucid Delivery Advisor spoke with me for an hour to finalize my build, setup delivery location, and discussion payment. My Lucid is now locked and will be headed into production in the next 2 months. There are also numerous people on the Lucid forum who have already taken delivery, and several more who are having cars delivered over the next few weeks.

3 months ago I told my wife that I was pretty confident we would end up with the R1S before the Lucid, and now it's quite the opposite. I'm getting concerned about the complete lack of communication from Rivian. The IPO isn't an excuse to stop talking to their customers.

Oh yeah, its no secret their comms dept sucks, if they even have a dedicated one. I said it in another thread but I sorta think this is a symptom of it being a "tech company". When it started, it started with a bunch of hardware and software engineers and was most likely not much different from a silicon valley tech startup.

I've worked in the tech industry for a while, been a part of startups and the general evolution goes something like this. Have an idea, start with engineers, build it, iterate, slowly start adding more engineers, some designers and product managers and whatever other staff you need to run the org bare bones. No need for comms because, its in stealth, no one to really communicate publicly with. As you get closer to an actual product, other pieces of an org start to get added in any meaningful way like sales, HR, finance, legal, customer support, comms, etc. From what I've seen, comms and support can often be the caboose on the train. Its like suddenly, oh crap, we have to support customers now and oh crap we need to communicate with customers now. Its not in the DNA so it takes time to get organized and dedicate resources to it. The problem is the bigger the ship (or train) the harder and longer it takes to steer it now.

Just my opinion but I think Rivian is going through that evolution now. Unfortunately as pre-order holders we have to bear the brunt of this "beta" period where they are testing not only vehicles, production, deliveries, etc but the whole customer experience.

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