The image was taken by Mitchell Clark.
Rivian will build up to 400,000 electric vehicles per year in Georgia, which will be its second factory. The company made the announcement on Thursday with state representatives after months of speculation. The $5 billion facility will be built in the summer of 2022, and Rivian expects to start making vehicles there in the summer of 2024.
Rivian is building its first electric pickup trucks at a former factory. The company said Thursday that it has shipped its first two SUVs. It is committed to producing 100,000 custom delivery vans for Amazon and has been looking for a place to build them.
Rivian was in talks with Forth Worth, Texas to build a new factory and was evaluating multiple locations as recently as August. A new factory will be built east of Atlanta and will employ thousands of workers. Rivian plans to build a battery cell production facility in the area. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution broke the news last week that the factory announcement was coming, but it is not clear how much Rivian is getting in state and local incentives.
Vehicles come off the line in 2024.
Rivian was founded in 2009. The R1T and R1S were introduced at the LA Auto Show in the fall of 2018). Since then, it has gone up in leaps and bounds. It has hired thousands of employees, received billions of dollars in funding from Amazon, Ford, T. Rowe Price, and others, and recently went public in one of the biggest IPOs in US history.
The startup expects to spend $8 billion through the end of the year, which is a high price tag. Rivian lost over $1 billion in the third quarter of 2021, but it is finally making money as it delivered the first 11 R1T pickup trucks. The startup says that it has produced
Rivian had $5.2 billion in cash at the end of the quarter, but says that the proceeds of its recent funding rounds have boosted that figure to $19.9 billion.
It will take two years for Rivian to make all of the vehicles that they have taken over 50,000 pre-orders for. The startup said in Thursday's regulatory filing that the number of preorders has gone up to 71,000. The company has other future models in the works and plans to sell non-delivery vans to other commercial customers, so it needs more capacity. Rivian believes that the Illinois plant can make 200,000 vehicles by the year 2023.
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