Photo: RJ Scaringe
RJ Scaringe did not think that showing the camp kitchen for Rivian vehicles on Twitter was enough. The Rivian CEO also presented the Amazon electric vans Rivian has developed in a tweet in which he only said he loves them. The long line of side-by-side vans photographed from the back comprises eight vehicles that do not seem to care about our doubts.
The most important one is whether they are production vehicles or prototypes. They sure seem to present a camo pattern, but the answer probably lies somewhere between those two exact definitions because of the nature of Amazon’s contract with Rivian.
If we were talking about deliveries to regular customers, Rivian would spend months and millions of miles in development tests. It would have to ensure nothing would go wrong with those vans. But Amazon is not only the single customer for these electric vans so far: it is also a massive Rivian investor and shareholder. In other words, it could put these vans to work and tell Rivian if it finds any issues with them.
Rivian would probably have to place engineers in each of these vans or at least a remote monitoring system to evaluate how well they are going. If anything went wrong, Amazon could just replace the vehicle with another one and proceed with deliveries. That would cause some inconveniences, but it could also help Rivian speed up the development process.
Amazon has ordered 100,000 of these vans to Rivian. It will take quite some time for the electric vehicle startup to deliver all these electric vans to Amazon before selling them to anyone else. We are not even sure these vans will be available to other customers: Amazon may decide they are a competitive edge and keep buying all of Rivian’s capacity to manufacture them.
Whatever lies in the future for those Amazon electric vans, what we can say for sure is that RJ Scaringe loves them. That may already speak a bunch about these vehicles.
If we were talking about deliveries to regular customers, Rivian would spend months and millions of miles in development tests. It would have to ensure nothing would go wrong with those vans. But Amazon is not only the single customer for these electric vans so far: it is also a massive Rivian investor and shareholder. In other words, it could put these vans to work and tell Rivian if it finds any issues with them.
Rivian would probably have to place engineers in each of these vans or at least a remote monitoring system to evaluate how well they are going. If anything went wrong, Amazon could just replace the vehicle with another one and proceed with deliveries. That would cause some inconveniences, but it could also help Rivian speed up the development process.
I love these! pic.twitter.com/roAQy4Xff2
— RJ Scaringe (@RJScaringe) July 3, 2021
Amazon has ordered 100,000 of these vans to Rivian. It will take quite some time for the electric vehicle startup to deliver all these electric vans to Amazon before selling them to anyone else. We are not even sure these vans will be available to other customers: Amazon may decide they are a competitive edge and keep buying all of Rivian’s capacity to manufacture them.
Whatever lies in the future for those Amazon electric vans, what we can say for sure is that RJ Scaringe loves them. That may already speak a bunch about these vehicles.
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