Rivian CEO issues strong statement about people who purchase gas-powered cars: ‘Sort of like building a horse barn in 1910’::“I don’t think I would have believed it.”
It’s important to read the full quote from Rivian’s CEO before complaining about $75k electric trucks:
“I think the reality of buying a combustion-powered vehicle … is sort of like building a horse barn in 1910,” he said. “Imagine buying a Chevy Suburban in 2030 … what are you going to do with that … in 10 years?”
He’s comparing buying a Rivian truck with buying a Suburban, which has a base price of $57k for the lowest tier configuration (LS) and a $76k price on the High Country configuration.
What he actually meant to say was:
“I’ve got my head so far up my ass that I think everybody should be spending $100k+ on a truck regardless of their need or financial circumstances. I’m also incapable of doing my job, which is why my company can’t produce enough units, even though it’s largely a solved supply chain problem. This is how I cope with my shitty existence on this planet.”
CEO of an electric car company recommends that people drive electric cars.
Doesn’t really seem like much of a headline.
The statement might be more significant if it was a CEO of a car company that made diesel/petrol cars who said it.
It’s more the tone deafness. Most people couldn’t afford either a car or a horse barn in 1910 just like most people (in America anyway) can’t afford an electric car.
A giant electric “luxury” truck is still a giant “luxury” truck. Buying one over the other is like buying a cruelty free synthetic beaver cap over a cap made from an actual beaver. Yes it probably is better, but you are still wearing an ass on your head.
It’s 2023, most people live in urbanized areas where a truck is similarly ridiculous, especially the modern “luxury” models. Those that actually use their vehicles for hauling things at a farm want real work trucks and tractors (regardless of engine type) with lower and longer beds.
In 1910, in the United States, there were about 5 automobiles per 1,000 people. His analogy is stupid.
Source: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Transportation Energy Data Book: Edition 33, ORNL-6990, Oak Ridge, TN, July 2014, Tables 3.5 and 3.6.
Buying any car, electric or otherwise, is 'Sort of like building a horse barn in 1910’.
Real sustainability comes from changing the zoning code to cease outlawing walkability.
I hate armchair urbanists so much it’s unreal
Maybe if the alternative to building a horse barn in 1910 was building a garage that was so expensive only like 5% of the population could afford it.
Hey rivian ceo, build more fast charging stations along interstates and not just in big cities. Or build EVs that can go at least 500 miles on a charge.
Sure, let me just fork over 80k for a truck from a company that’s been building cars for only a couple of years.
My next vehicle will likely be electric, but right now my wife and I have decent cars that still run, and are paid for, and I’m reluctant to waste money replacing something that still works.
I’m on a diesel and the emission zones in the UK are making it more challenging to own one. That said it has 750 miles range, 4 wheel drive, a station wagon, can actually tow stuff without halfing that range and can fill it up anywhere in minutes. It suits my lifestyle perfectly.
That and it cost me £2600… I wonder what electric car I could get for that.
80k and it cuts my carbon emissions by less than half. Which might be washed out completely when you consider that a Rivian weighs over 2x what my car weighs.
Electric is the future. But it is a boutique luxury right now. A compact ICE is probably just about as good a choice for the climate as a electric mega truck. Call me back in five years.
Manufacturing needlessly large vehicles that you can’t even see 30 feets in front of you while you run over children and still use plenty of fossil coming from the coal power plant 50 miles away, is also like building a horse barn in 1910. Obnoxiously large vehicles for anyone other than those that actually use them for their intended purpose is just as antiquated. In 20-30 years when half the world is suffering or dying due to the most extreme impacts of climate change we are going to look at large vehicles like we were insane. Edit: in before, “but I need my enormous vehicle because once every 13 years I haul 3 2x4’s and am too dumb to use a roof rack or rent a truck for the day!”
still use plenty of fossil fuels from coal plants
This is disingenuous as fuck and you know it. Updates to the grid are by far the most effective means of limiting carbon release. Tying engines to the grid maximizes gains in solar, wind, etc that not doing so does not.
There is no serious plan for climate change mitigation that does not involve EVs.
I own a gasoline car. I was being too flippant. I would point out that our car centric culture is inefficient no matter how you swing it. I agree it’s a part of solving climate change, but cars of any type are still a problem, we need to massively overhaul our urban transit and get away from cars in urban areas.
In the end all transit only accounts for 15% of the overall problem. Our spread out infrastructure caused by car convenience has many other negative externalities though, like the increased need to maintain more roads, electric loss over longer distribution, heating and cooling in large single family homes made possible by cars bringing you to your job while living way out in the suburbs (arguably way more serious than the cars themselves), etc. The suburban experiment was an environmental disaster, and I say this as someone that lives in a large house in the suburbs currently pumping out AC, so I’m not judging.
But plugging in your personal tank isn’t really solving the problem. It’s just ignoring it. Cars are the problem no matter the fuel source, because of the impact they have had on how we spread out and grow our consumption… We need multi use zoning, dozens of train lines in every city, bike infrastructure, work at home, massive reduction in fossil fuel based power plants… A reordering of society around alternatives to spreading out, a massive worldwide effort of urban densification. As well as a massive effort to hold corporations accountable for their energy use as well. That and we need to stop having so many fucking kids, the world can’t support this level of consumption forever.
Not disingenuous. True. Grid power is still dirty so electric cars are still dirty. Probably about a 50% improvement in carbon emissions based on the most common fuel mix in the US for an e car.
Clean transportation by car is a luxury that we do not yet have.
You don’t engineer for what you currently have. You engineer for where you want to be.
Renewable energy is the fastest growing segment of the energy market by a mile, growing exponentially.
I don’t have my numbers at hand, but renewables account for something like 80+% of new energy growth in the US.
Yes. The OP is about how TODAY it is silly to use ICE. Today it is silly to pretend that electric cars are clean. They will be at some point. At that point, I will agree with the obnoxious CEO from the article. Today, he is wrong, very heavy (7-8k lbs) coal powered trucks are not clean.
Make them smaller!
Purchasing EVs sends price signals. Big trucks are in demand, and it’s easier to cater to demand than shape demand when you’re an emerging market.
Seriously the epa doesn’t even bother to rate mpg in vehicles that approach rivian weight. An f250 probably gets a combined 15mpg. It weights 6k lbs vs the rivians 7k. if your only seeing a 50% cut in emissions with the switch to electric. A rivian truck is pretty much the same as an ICE car that gets around 30 combined.
There are a million reasons that drive them to make these monsters. But the climate isn’t one. I don’t care about the market forces. I care about cutting CO2 emissions. These vehicles do not help that mission today. The CEO is wrong. His vehicles don’t make sense TODAY except as a luxury product for rich people to signal their virtue. That’s it.
I don’t care about market forces
Then you are not serious about impacting climate change.
The rivian truck (I call it “froggy”) is actually a pretty small pickup truck, by american standard … have you seen a F150? (including the electric “lightning” version)?
Rivian truck
It’s like buying a small house!
A small house for 74,000? Lol, you’d need at least double that in the Northeast part of America.
I was being facetious
Even a subcompact automobile takes up an entire traffic lane and an entire parking space, and providing such spaces is what ruins cities.
The future is designing our cities for walking, biking and transit, not replacing our disastrous car sewers of gasoline cars with disastrous car sewers of electric cars.
Completely agree, people are not zooming out enough to understand the real problems. Our spread out car centric infrastructure has externalities past just the fuel issues on the cars themselves. Our car centric culture is largely responsible for a huge boom in energy consumption outside of just driving. There is a huge cost to spreading out beyond cars. I think the biggest is our trend in occupying larger and larger single family homes and larger and larger office spaces which require heating and cooling (Which is a little more than double the environment cost of cars iirc). One of the benefits of densification is that you often share a wall with someone else that is also heating and cooling and there is far less energy loss. Those energy costs far exceed our transit issues, but are directly related, in that cars allow density to reduce and therefor people to consume more energy at home and their place of work. And if people are still unwilling to densify then we need to greatly increase the energy efficiency of single family homes and businesses by 4 fold. Better insultation, better windows, better appliances, across the board.
The thing that bothers me about the communication around electric cars is not that they are an improvement, because they most certainly are a good stop gap to one of our many issues, but people like to singularly focus on car fuel type like it is the focal point of climate change when it really is urban and suburban car centricity that is a much larger issue. Electric cars wont stop climate change, they only slow it down a little. Countries like Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland, etc are far closer to becoming carbon neutral partly because car centricity is not a focus in these places, people live closer together and use all types of transit that supplement each other. And yet no one would claim any of those places are unpleasant to live, far from it they are some of the most desired places to live in the world. We need to start modeling the rest of the world off of the design improvements those countries made over the last 60 years.
in before, “but I need my enormous vehicle because once every 13 years I haul 3 2x4’s and am too dumb to use a roof rack or rent a truck for the day!”
I win!!!
My enormous eletric vehicle (plug-in Rav4) is powered from my home solar panel system, and I use it to transport my dogs to the park a couple of times a week.
I’m completely guilt free!!!😃
Man I can haul 3 2x4s in my Camry
If solid state batteries do work out line Toyota says, these old EVs aren’t going to be too attractive
Maybe. I remember when I built my computer in the mid 2000s (in high school) and saw something about magnetic RAM and how it would be a huge game changer. I thought about holding off so I didn’t build something that would immediately be like buying something that runs on vacuum tubes in the age of transistors, but decided I wanted the computer sooner than later, it would still be useful, and who knows what would really happen with this magnetic RAM buzz. 20 years later, magnetic RAM has not, in fact, changed the game.
Even if Toyota does pull a rabbit out of its hat and they build a bunch of cars in 10 years, that 10-year-old car built today won’t be particularly attractive anyway.
Actual (chopped up) quote from RJ:
“I think the reality of buying a combustion-powered vehicle … is sort of like building a horse barn in 1910,” he said. “Imagine buying a Chevy Suburban in 2030 … what are you going to do with that … in 10 years?”
This article is clickbait garbage.
How much does it cost to repair a fender bender on a Suburban? Cus on an R1S, well…
$42,000 rear bumper
Yikes! Are you supposed to just throw the truck away when someone hits it?
In my state the minimum legal auto insurance coverage is something like $25k per vehicle. So it’s very possible, at least here, that your rivian gets a parking lot bump from Jim-Bob in his 30 year old Civic, and his insurance just won’t cover it. And if he’s driving around in a car that’s old enough to run for congress that’s covered by minimum liability, Jim-Bob probably doesn’t have any money you could sue him for. I doubt they would garnish wages over a traffic accident, either.
Insurance and parking are two deeply costly aspects of subsidizing roads and cars over mass transit that simply aren’t accounted for. Imagine thinking an effecient industrialized society would have strip malls and cars.
I don’t want ev, I prefer more hybrid maybe even hydrogen.
