Ford drops plan for Rivian-powered EV. The company no longer plans to make an electric vehicle with EV startup Rivian, CEO Jim Farley tells Automotive News. The Detroit automaker originally made an announcement that it wanted to make a Rivian-powered EV in 2019 when it made its first investment of $500 million into the startup.
Ford and Rivian already canceled the vehicle they planned to make for the Lincoln luxury brand in the year 2020. One reason Farley gave for canceling of the EV collaboration was that the complexity of combining Rivian’s electric architecture with Ford’s own software.
Ford drops plan for Rivian-powered EV
“When you compare today with when we originally made that investment, so much has changed: about our ability, about the brand’s direction in both cases, and now it’s more certain to us what we have to do,” Farley said.
“We want to invest in Rivian we love their future as a company but at this point, we’re going to develop our own vehicles.”
The Decision to Cancel EV Was Mutual
The decision to cancel the EV was a mutual one, according to Rivian. “As Ford has scaled its own EV strategy and demand for Rivian vehicles has grown, we’ve mutually decided to focus on our own projects and deliveries,” Miranda Jimenez, a spokesperson for Rivian, said in a statement provided to The Verge.
“Our relationship with Ford is an important part of our journey, and Ford remains an investor and ally on our shared path to an electrified future.”
Ford made its initial investment in Rivian seven months before it revealed the Mustang Mach-E and just over two years before it revealed the F-150 Lightning.
But it has found remarkable and early success with those EVs. It has already made more than the 50,000 it planned to build in 2021, the first full year of Mustang Mach-E production and is even nearing 200,000 deposits for the F-150 Lightning.
Ford Plans to Double the Number of EVs
Farley also told Automotive News this week that Ford has made plans to double the number of EVs it will build globally by the end of 2023 to 600,000.
In the month of September, Ford announced plans to also build two new battery factories in Kentucky and even a “mega campus” in Tennessee that will build batteries and electric vehicles.
Rivian Has Their Hand Full
Rivian, meanwhile, certainly has its hands full. I mean it just started shipping its R1T electric pickup trucks, and is aiming to ship its R1S electric SUVs by the end of this year, and is also working on the electric delivery vans for Amazon that is also heavily invested in the startup.
The startup recently went public in one of the biggest IPOs ever, raising about $12 billion in the process. As a result, Ford’s 12 percent stake in Rivian is now worth more than $10 billion.
Ford helped Rivian get to that point, as was recently revealed in their startup’s stock exchange filings. Ford built the body-in-whites for Rivian’s prototypes the skeletal frame that rides on the chassis and even agreed to supply “certain vehicle components including related engineering work and tooling” for the entire lineup of R1 vehicles.
