Piper Sandler, Truist, and Bernstein All Agree… Rivian’s Not That Buyable Right Now

There was a time when Rivian was the Palantir of the EV sector. The cool EV startup that was supposed to come out of nowhere and sucker punch Elon Musk in the face with a rugged, electric truck. Amazon threw its full Bezos weight behind it with a pledge for 100,000 electric delivery vans. Ford dropped $500 million to get in on the action. And in 2021, Rivian IPO’d at a historic $86 billion valuation… making it, for about 48 hours, more valuable than both Ford and GM (despite delivering basically zero cars).

But if you turn the clock to present time… the Tesla killer has been doing a lot more stalling than killing.

Since that IPO high, Rivian has been making money disappear like a magician. They’ve reportedly lost $18 billion since 2020. Amazon backed away. Ford cashed out. Earnings became a quarterly letdown ritual. And now, analysts are finally starting to wave the surrender flag.

This week, Piper Sandler’s Alexander Potter downgraded Rivian from Buy to Hold, lowering his price target from $16 to just $13. For reference, the stock currently trades under $12. Over at Truist, analysts are holding steady with a $14 target… but in my opinion, they might as well just tell investors “we don’t love it… but we’ve held out this far so why not?”

Bernstein isn’t afraid to go full doomsdayer mode, maintaining an Underperform rating with a rock-bottom $6.10 target. Their reasoning is that Rivian’s luxury EV lineup is too expensive, their delivery numbers aren’t scaling fast enough, and their best-case scenario seems to be surviving long enough to maybe not run out of money.

So what’s Rivian doing now? Doubling down on the EV truck game? Launching a new truck model to compete with Tesla’s Cybertruck?

Nope. They’re building scooters (like the ones you see all over Broadway in Nashville next to feces and empty beer bottles).

Okay, technically, they’re launching a spin-off called Also, a “micromobility” startup that will make lightweight electric vehicles like e-bikes, scooters, and other tiny transportation gadgets for both consumers and businesses. And yes, that’s the same micromobility space littered with bankruptcies, delistings, and the shattered dreams of Bird and Lime. You might remember Bird… the e-scooter company that soared to a $2.5 billion valuation and then filed for bankruptcy in 2023. Or micromobility.com (formerly Helbiz), which couldn’t stay above $1 a share and got delisted.

So naturally, Rivian thought, “Yeah, let’s do that.”

To be fair, this has been in the works for quite a while. Also was born out of a skunkworks program that’s been simmering inside Rivian since 2019. CEO RJ Scaringe said they wanted to see if all the fancy EV tech they’d built for trucks could be condensed into something smaller and cheaper. Turns out it can. And now they’re going for it… with a team of about 70 people poached from Tesla, Apple, Uber, and Specialized, and a $105 million investment from Eclipse Ventures to help get things rolling.

RJ is staying on as chairman of the board for Also. Chris Yu, Rivian’s VP of future programs, will run the show. And the new company plans to leverage Rivian’s tech, software, retail presence, and economies of scale to (hopefully) do micromobility better than the last dozen companies that face-planted in this space.

Of course, they’re being vague about what they’re actually launching. According to Scaringe, the first product will have “a seat, two wheels, a screen, a few computers, and a battery”... which sounds less like a groundbreaking EV and more like a Peloton that escaped the gym. The plan is to get it into production by next year for U.S. and European markets, and eventually roll out commercial and consumer vehicles for places like Asia and South America.

RJ says the idea is to offer high-quality micromobility products at prices that are more affordable than the rest of the market. He even took a shot at current e-bike prices, saying it’s “remarkable” that nice ones can cost upwards of $10,000. According to him, most micromobility startups couldn’t scale because they didn’t have access to real EV tech, and their supply chains were a mess. Rivian, on the other hand, has all the powertrains, software teams, and tech infrastructure needed to build something better… and cheaper.

So yeah, maybe this isn’t an idiotic move. Maybe Rivian sees the writing on the wall for oversized, overpriced EVs in an era of rising rates and falling demand, and wants to carve out a niche in something smaller, leaner, and more urban.

But still… scooters? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see if this move makes any sense or not.

P.S. Just when you thought our beloved congressmen couldn’t get any greasier, one Republican lawmaker decided to YOLO $175k into a stock… right before a major FDIC announcement hit. Lucky timing? Insider edge? You be the judge. We broke it all down inside our recent Stocks.News premium article… click here to check it out ASAP. 

Stock.News has positions in Amazon, Ford, Apple, Uber, and Tesla.