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Latest Rivian news
- Thread starter MXLRplus
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Too funny. Elon's approach of, "screw it, let's start shipping, and fix mistakes as we find them" is the right approach, IMHO, for a startup like Tesla was in the early days.
If you're a mature company with a constant output of new and existing products rolling off the assembly line, then, yeah, you can take five years to design and build a great car since you're building upon proven processes. But a startup has no proven processes and will make tons of mistakes regardless of how much it plans.
That's my worry with Rivian. They haven't even started the hardest part of their business: manufacturing, let alone doing it at scale. And by delaying their product launch so much, they've allowed not only Tesla, but the mass market pickup and SUV manufacturers to catch up. Rivian looked a lot better as a company when they were the only company coming out with a pickup and a full size SUV. Now, they'll be launching their products into a crowded market.
I don’t get it, the truck and the SUV were unveiled in November of 2018 with an expected delivery of 2020. The Pandemic slowed them to 2021. 2 years from unveiling to production doesn’t seem that bad.
it’s just that we haven’t seen much concrete progress on the manufacturing side of things. There doesn’t seem to be any sense of urgency. You can blame the delay on COVID, but the fact is if Rivian had moved faster, they would have shipped before COVID hit. Sure 2+ years (and counting) from unveil to shipping, but XLR82XS is right, the company has been around for 11 years and no revenue to date.
And how about their service network? Why hasn’t Rivian been inking deals to get their service network together? Now’s a great time to do that, auto dealers are reeling, so they would welcome new revenue streams.
Finally, when Tesla was at this stage with the Roadster (and later, Model S), we got a steady stream of blog postings about various technology going into the cars. With Rivian, we get heavily overproduced marketing fluff. We get that from the big car companies. We don’t need it from a startup.
Not sure where to post mention of this but Tesla filed a lawsuit against Rivian in a San Jose court today over poaching employees and stealing secrets: Tesla Inc. v. Rivian Automotive Inc., 20CV368472, California Superior Court, Santa Clara County (San Jose).
Bloomberg - Are you a robot?
“In the new suit, Tesla called itself Rivian’s “number one target from which to acquire information,” and said that Rivian has hired 178 ex-Tesla employees, roughly 70 of whom joined Rivian directly from Tesla.”
Bloomberg - Are you a robot?
“In the new suit, Tesla called itself Rivian’s “number one target from which to acquire information,” and said that Rivian has hired 178 ex-Tesla employees, roughly 70 of whom joined Rivian directly from Tesla.”
XLR82XS
D M C
Elon loves to sue people. Can you imagine if every automaker sued every other one who hired their ex-employees? Of hospitals sued doctors, etc.
How could you 'steal secrets' if you publicly claimed all your IP is public domain?
This is nuisance suit that will gain no traction. Non-compete clauses are very hard to enforce in California.
I’m going to disagree with you on two points. First, from what I understand not all of Tesla’s patents were put in the public domain, so you have to sue to protect your research and development work that isn’t open source. Second given how Elon hates spending money on advertising, I bet paying lawyers would be next, more so from suits brought against Tesla, but in any event really don’t think he loves to sue people. Apart from the expense, it takes away from time from him and the company that could be better spent.
and it took Tesla almost as long to get the Model S on the road.
Cherry pick much? Tesla’s first car was the Roadster. Tesla was started in 2003 and delivered production Roadsters in 2008, so five years. And they did it with far, far less funding than Rivian is doing it with. Yeah, the Roadster was a limited edition vehicle (about 2,400 units), whereas Rivian says their initial yearly production run will be 20,000, nonetheless the assertion of Rivian’s long gestation without delivering any product is true,
Poaching lawsuits are very common in the software and high tech industries. Almost a standard operating procedure for all large companies. If nothing else, it tells the competitor to be more careful.
Tesla did not claim their IP was public domain. They said they wouldn’t charge money for access to their patents. Frankly, it was a PR move, more than anything else.
Obviously Tesla must have private IP if they are suing someone again about it. Elon Musk is Just Another Hypocritical Tech Billionaire
Come on. He sued Top Gear for crying out loud.
A true nuisance lawsuit Judge Tosses Tesla's Case Against Top GearWhat's the count on the suits he's filed?
they built shanghai in one year and have said they expect Berlin to be built in a year. While they said Austin will be a huge factory, Tesla builds factories in stages and will likely only build phase one first. Texas is likely similar to Nevada in that they can build quickly. I think phase one of Nevada didn’t take much longer than a year and it was their first giga factory.
RobStark
Well-Known Member
I have a lot of experience with rough off-road work from the Sahara, to the Arctic and all places between. I cringe when I watch the various Rivian videos. Especially over what they call "rock crawling". The truck handles the rocks terribly, it is nearly out of control as it bounces like a ball, and throws rocks and gravel behind it. Top that off these guys are terrible drivers, clearly out of their element. They should be creeping over the rocks at a walking pace, not rushing it. The truck likely will not creep without getting stuck which is why they do the rocks way too fast. I no longer have a need for terrain where steep hills with large rocks need to be surmounted, but just the same, Rivian is over hyping its crawling abilities, sad to see such bragging where there is misrepresentation.
If you read, or even skim, the complaint, you can see that this is about stealing trade secrets. And specifically conspiring with current employees to leave Tesla and come work at Rivian (which is fine) but steal Tesla trade secrets in advance and bring them with to the new employer (which is very much not fine and very illegal). Reading the complaint will cure a lot of confusion and mistaken assumptions about what this lawsuit is and what it isn't.
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/20132288/document__1_.pdf
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Interesting stuff from the lawsuit. I had assumed it was really high tech stuff like battery design, but instead it was more mundane, but no less secret and proprietary. Sad to say, this happens frequently, and Tesla is absolutely in the right to sue over this. When I was running my own company, and we were only about 40 or 50 employees large, my Director of sales resigned over the weekend. And he took the entire sales and lead database with him. Suing him would have been a distraction, he didn’t go to a direct competitor, and we didn’t have a lot of free cash to mount a lawsuit, so I just let it go. Actually, I even bought back his vested stock options. Which gave me a little bit of satisfaction when the company went public a few years later and he missed out on a lot of money. But had we been bigger or had I been more aggressive, he would have been in a a world of legal trouble as well.
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