Rivian’s cost-cutting measures have gotten it a lot closer to profitability, but the company is warning that 2025 could still be a challenging year — especially because of the whorl of uncertainty caused by the new Trump administration.
The company announced Thursday its fourth-quarter and full-year 2024 financial results, and along with it, shared plans to deliver between 46,000 and 51,000 EVs across 2025. Rivian cautioned that “changes to government policies and regulations, and a challenging demand environment” could affect those results, according to the shareholder letter the EV maker released alongside its results.
Rivian didn’t specify what those changes might be, but Trump said on the campaign trail that he was inclined to find a way to kill the $7,500 federal EV tax credit. Friend of the Trump administration Vivek Ramaswamy has also called for the clawback of a $6.6 billion loan from the Department of Energy to build a plant in Georgia. That loan was finalized three days before Trump took office.
“We’re really looking forward to working with the new administration and Department of Energy on our loan, and we share in the President’s desire to bring jobs back to the US,” Rivian’s chief financial officer Claire McDonough said on a conference call Thursday, noting that the company plans to create 7,500 manufacturing jobs at the planned Georgia plant.
“We really believe, and we’re very aligned with the administration on this, that the U.S. needs to continue to be a world leader in this regard, and our investment into electronics, into software, into autonomy and AI — these are really key areas for us as a country to continue to exercise a leadership position in,” CEO RJ Scaringe said on the call.
Rivian spent much of 2024 on a cost-cutting tear. It laid off 10% of its workforce in February, and rolled out simplified, cheaper-to-make versions of its flagship EVs — the R1T pickup and the R1S SUV — in June. The company ended up changing 600 parts on those vehicles to drive down manufacturing costs, while also revamping its electric architecture and software user interface.
Changes like those helped Rivian notch $170 million of positive gross profit in the final quarter of 2024 – though $60 million of that came from software and services.
Rivia …