As much as I complain about Tesla, when you commit to a purchase it locks in the price. A person who buys a day after you may pay $1,000 more, but Tesla does not retroactively change your price... if you make ANY changes to your order though, it re-sets the commitment date and you will be at the new price. If I wanted to buy a Tesla model Y today, the regular long range would cost the same as my Performance model did 8 months ago... glad I pulled the trigger when it did!What we've learned from all of this is the "reservation" system is just a marketing gimmick. There is no guarantee of price, or delivery or anything.
jack vines
Because of your post I looked up mine... I could make $15,000 profit by selling my Model Y Performance after owning it for 8 months and 16,000 miles. I have added some aftermarket stuff that depending on buyer would actually increase that amount, but I wouldn't count on getting any extra for them from your average buyer. I might have to cross shop some of the new ultra fast charging CCS cars!Sad but I can't say I'm surprised. Yesterday I checked the KBB value of my year old Model 3 LR and the trade-in value is $8k more than I paid for it new a year ago! Private party is $10k more. If I could do without a car for a year or so, I'd sell it for a profit.
Mike
I would much rather purchase a Rivian delivery van tricked out as a camper than either the R1T or R1S. I don't need to blow every other car away at a stop light, and I sure as [email protected]#%k don't need a glass roof (one of the dumbest trends / fads I have ever seen). I need long range and fast charging in a reasonably priced vehicle that is large enough to camp in with reasonable comfort. The Model Y performance is barely adequate on its own, but I will be doing another camping trip with a hatch mounted tent... I expect that to move from "barely adequate" to "comfortable"... but a full on EV camper van would be the ideal solution for me.I think you are getting your data mixed up. Rivian IPOed at $78, it hit $171 within the first week. Since then it has been on a pretty steady decline down to the $55 - 65$ range which it has been within most of this year so far. This price increase had nothing to do with their stock performance. Likely it is more related to the challenges they have faced scaling up production as they have been burning through cash faster than expected due to the challenges they have faced. Price increases on raw materials of course are part of that challenge, but certainly not the whole story. It could also be related to the fact that Amazon has signed a contract with a competitor for delivery vans, Amazon seems to be hedging their bets around Rivian being able to deliver all the EV delivery vans they have promised because of these scaling issues.
Honestly this price increase while it may be needed to get the cash flow they need to survive, it could also be the reason they don't. Everyone I know who has a Rivian order has canceled theirs. Seen tons of people on twitter posting their cancelation notices as well. Rivian is being faced with all the "big boys" actually producing EVs now and in most cases undercutting their price. Which the larger companies can afford because they make money through volume not through single models.
Good for you! You know, you could always wait for demand to go down, and hope that the purchase price goes down to something you find more reasonable? This usually happens with the dealership model of sales, with dealership markup on cars that are "hot" when they first hit the market. Being first in line costs money, if you don't want to pay, don't! Go to the back of the line and laugh at the people who paid more to be first. This is unlikely to happen with Rivian though since it is not a dealer markup on a popular new model, it is a price increase due to real world inflation levels combined with possible stock shenanigans. What you are actually complaining about is totally different though. You are complaining about paying refundable reservation money (not a deposit) to be front of the line with the option to purchase, you know this... so how are they tricking you? This is a PR nightmare for them because it breaks trust... Tesla didn't raise the price of the Model 3, they just refused to produce the low cost one for years in hopes of converting base model reservation holders into higher trim level purchasers... dishonest... but not as bad as Rivian.Dude the car market has a middle man enshrined and protected by the state to exist, I reject the entire argument that it is a free market. That middle man represents literally every single make and model owned in most cases by mult-billion (yes billion) dollar publicly traded companies that exceed the size of some of the automakers they sell! If they represent the entirety of a single point of access of all cars sold, across every brand, where is the free market?
This is a silly argument to have because at it's flawed at its roots. The new car market is not unregulated. You already live in the Soviet model but just don't want to admit it.
If they're not locking in price, they're not locking in your place in line, what exactly are they giving you? They're offering you literally nothing but your money back if they do decide to alter the arrangement and make it unpalatable. The answer is they're tricking you every time you put that money up. They're able to do that because people have to drive cars and they have all of them.
Over the past 2 years it's been the consumer who eats the inflation end over and over and over again and has to pay the supply problem even when the automaker is against it. Rivian here has some financial issues and whoops, convenient free market arguments fly out, shame on me for trying to buy a car.
Done with it. Never again will I place a reservation on a car. I'd rather drive an ICE if it ever came to that.
They need you to sign for everything, but if you are a victim of identity theft and you say "That isn't my signature" they say "so what? Pay us!!!"I hear all that. Many purchasing processes are inefficient and aggravating. I just refinanced my mortgage with the same finance company, and they are asking me all the same stuff as if they didn't know me from Jack. The whole process is purposely opaque, and they intend people to not read any of the stuff, so they frustrate them with needless paperwork to "sign". It's 2022 and we still need another human to physically watch a pen meet the paper. It's like living in a future dystopian bureaucracy coupled with ancient practices of putting ink to paper.
Don't get me started on tax code, or realtors.
My laugh on your post is not about you not getting the Rivian, it is about your Eeyore like statement about avoiding cars you are interested inSo, turns out I may have been making a wrong assumption in Rivian's honesty level when I opined on the situation. I may be right about it being stock-price related but.. not in the way I was saying if this is true...
Rivian Backtracks on Price Increases after Facing Customer Backlash
Rivian reversed course on price increases for its R1T and R1S electric vehicles after major backlash and will now honor the original pricing for orders placed before March 1.www.caranddriver.com
I bought a reservation for a poison pill, apparently. I am a dark cloud of car ownership. If I own the car or am about to own the car or am researching the car, stay away, boulders will fall from the sky that target that only make and model for some reason.
The problem for Rivian is the F-150 Lightning and the Chevy Silverado EV. When it was a choice between the butt ugly Cybertruck, or the relatively normal looking Rivian (both of which will be expensive, with a token number of software limited Cybertrucks sold at the low promised price), the choice for most American's that could afford a $70K+ EV truck would have been the Rivian. But now with the F-150 Lightning and Chevy Silverado EV (both look normal, and both will sell for thousands of dollars less in base trim) I don't see much future for Rivian. The "I am so cool, look at me in my Eco friendly truck" people will get the Cybertruck... regular people will be drawn to the Ford and Chevy. Rivian will be left out in the cold.Whatever they are doing, they are 100% tanking the stock. My god, every move they make is a shot in their foot as far as their investors go.
Yup, with Tesla the reservation just gets you head of the line for option to purchase... if you want the lower trim car you had to wait for darn near forever to actually get it. They got a lot of complaints over this and didn't seem to do it with the Model Y... but they seem to be doing it with the cybertruck, so I am confused as to weather or not they learned a lesson? Ford and Chevy already have a history of zero options work truck versions of their vehicles, so I think they are much more likely to deliver fairly early on the work trucks... but the quoted price will only be if you "buy in bulk".We've beaten this horse unmercifully, but what actually happens is if one orders a base model, Tesla just doesn't build or deliver it and the would-be buyer either steps up to the more expensive model or steps aside. Had friends and family members who went through that Model 3 debacle for two years.
GM and Ford are not Tesla, but I'd wager those who order the vaporware $40,000 work truck will be waiting as long as the $35,000 Model 3 buyers waited.
jack vines
