Rivian Automotive Inc. is expected to price its initial public offering (IPO) later today, November 9, 2021. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and J.P. Morgan currently stand as Rivian’s underwriters for the company’s debut. And based on filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Rivian is looking to enter the public markets in a big way — and it is setting its ambitions very high.
Target Valuation
Rivian has disclosed that it is targeting a valuation above $65 billion in its IPO, with shares priced between $72 and $74. Such a valuation is ambitious, as it would make Rivian’s market cap just a bit lower than veterans such as General Motors ($84.82 billion) and Ford Motor Company ($79.65 billion), the latter being a key investor in the truck maker. Similar to fellow electric vehicle maker Tesla, which currently reached a market cap above of over $1 trillion, Rivian’s valuation target is founded on the idea that the company may see a meteoric rise in the coming years.
If Rivian’s shares end up selling at the top of their marketed range, the company could make history as the seventh-biggest US IPO on record, according to Bloomberg. It would also overtake longtime players in the auto segment, such as Japanese carmakers Honda Motor Co., which has a market cap of $53 billion, and French automaker Renault SA, which is valued at a conservative $11 billion.
The Finances So Far
Rivian’s S-1 filing with the SEC has provided a glimpse of the company’s finances so far. Just as expected, and similar to fellow electric vehicle makers that are just starting out, Rivian is currently burning cash, with heavy investments in R&D and high operating costs. This is likely due to the fact that the company is still learning the ropes when it comes to mass-producing its three vehicle offerings, one of which has an order for 100,000 units from Amazon, the world’s premier e-commerce site.
Rivian currently employs over 8,000 people across multiple facilities in Arizona, California, Michigan, Illinois, Vancouver, Canada, and the UK. And as the company approached the production of the R1T pickup truck and R1S SUV, its losses grew. Rivian posted a net loss of $994 million from January to June 2021, more than double the $377 million net loss it posted for the first half of 2020. Rivian’s R&D expenses are also on the rise, with the company spending $683 million in Q1 and Q2 2021. In comparison, its R&D cost for 2020 stood at $766 million. Despite this, Rivian still has about $3.6 billion in cash on its balance sheet.
What Analysts are Saying
Rivian is quite unique among EV startups today because its already has a sure customer in Amazon, which has ordered 100,000 units of an all-electric delivery van. That being said, New Street Research analyst Pierre Ferragu stated in a note on Monday that Rivian may end up facing a “natural ceiling” of 300,000 to 400,000 units per year, partly due to the price range of its consumer vehicles, the R1T pickup truck and the R1S SUV. The R1T currently starts at $67,500 for its base model, while the R1S starts at $70,000.
“Above $70,000, the global addressable market for Rivian’s SUV and pickup is less than 1.5 million units, and it will be a crowded space,” Ferragu wrote.
Ivan Drury, a senior analyst at Edmunds, highlighted that Rivian may face an uphill climb when ramping its first vehicles, especially considering that the chip crisis is still ongoing. “It’s difficult enough for established automakers, let alone a new one. Couple that with this new issue the entire industry is dealing with, the chip crisis, that just adds another layer of complexity,” Drury noted.
Rivian’s Production Plans
Recent reports have noted that Rivian is currently focusing its resources on delivering the first batch of its Amazon delivery vans. This makes sense considering the volume of orders it has received from the e-commerce giant, but this strategy could also result in the R1T and R1S being ramped at a more deliberate pace. So far, Rivian has noted that it has received just over 55,000 pre-orders for the R1T and R1S. And since starting deliveries of the R1T, the company has only delivered 156 units of the all-electric pickup truck, “nearly all” of them to Rivian employees.
Rivian’s SEC filing has provided a bit more detail about the R1T and R1S’ rather deliberate ramp. According to the document, the company expects to fill its pre-order backlog of approximately 55,400 R1 vehicles by the end of 2023. Previous reports also note that Rivian is expected to deliver the first 10,000 units of its Amazon delivery vans by the end of 2022, with the entire 100,000-unit order being completed by the end of the decade.
Legal Challenges to Date
Similar to other automakers, Rivian is also involved in some legal challenges. Among the more notable ones involve fellow EV maker Tesla, which has filed a suit against Rivian last year over the alleged theft of intellectual property related to recruitment, bonus and compensation plans for sales personnel, and manufacturing project management systems. A later lawsuit from Tesla also alleged that the truck maker was acquiring core technology related to its upcoming 4680 cells, which was deemed by the Silicon Valley-based company as the “most essential element for any electric vehicle.”
More recently, Laura Schwab, who was the first female President in luxury automaker Aston Martin’s history, also filed a suit against Rivian over alleged gender discrimination. Schwab served as Rivian’s Vice President of Sales and Marketing during her tenure with the company. But according to the former Rivian executive, she was routinely excluded from meetings despite her experience in the auto industry, and her warnings about the R1T and R1S’ pricing and public targets were largely ignored. Finally, Schwab noted that she was terminated by Rivian just before it went public, which effectively made her lose “millions of dollars in unvested equity on the eve of the company’s IPO.”
Conclusion
With electric vehicle maker Tesla joining the trillion-dollar club, numerous investors are now looking towards the “next Tesla.” And while not all EV startups have succeeded — hydrogen truck company Nikola is a good cautionary tale — companies like Rivian and Lucid Motors do seem to have the makings of a legitimate, and potentially profitable long-term business. This was something highlighted by Pitchbook senior mobility analyst Asad Hussain, who noted that “Rivian’s premium market valuation reflects its ownership of the entire value chain and freedom to innovate without dealing with stranded assets. Between Rivian and Lucid, the market finally has credible candidates for ‘the next Tesla.”
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Tesla Full Self-Driving is set to receive improvements to address its two biggest issues, according to a company engineer.
Director of Engineering at Tesla AI, Phil Duan, revealed in a post on X that improvements to both pothole avoidance and navigation “are coming,’ something we have heard many times in the past. However, there are a few things that seem to hint that things might be different this time around.
Improvements on both are coming.
— Phil Duan (@pduan) October 1, 2026
Pothole avoidance, navigation, speed control, and left lane camping are some of the most prevalent and frequently mentioned shortcomings of the Full Self-Driving suite. These are a few of the biggest issues that have kept Tesla Full Self-Driving as a Supervised suite, meaning drivers must remain attentive during operation.
Pothole Avoidance
Pothole avoidance was first mentioned as an “Upcoming Improvement” with the Tesla Full Self-Driving v14.3 update back in early April of this year. It was listed alongside “Expand reasoning to all behaviors beyond destination handling.”
It’s been six months since we first saw pothole avoidance explicitly mentioned, and it has not moved beyond that and joined the main release notes yet.
Tesla has not shed any light on why pothole avoidance has been such an issue for it to solve, but it also has issues identifying large bumps much of the time, so its modeling of sudden changes in road conditions is likely pretty weak at this particular point. I’ve had more issues with large bumps than potholes, personally, but both are issues that need to be resolved.
This is that big bounce that I mentioned in the quoted post.
It’s just a tad too drastic to take at the speed FSD wants to go over it. You can see me quickly swipe down into Sloth, but I intervened. https://t.co/K20PK9ysBg pic.twitter.com/81Oc82ZJcZ
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) August 2, 2026
It makes sense that things might be pretty close to being released to the public, as we are going on such an extensive period of time between it being mentioned and it actually being deployed.
Navigation
Navigation is likely the most painful part of using Full Self-Driving, as it routinely takes strange routes, has trouble with local rules (like Except Right Turn Stop Signs in Pennsylvania), and sometimes does not realize that maneuvers it is suggesting are against the law. Turning out of my neighborhood, you cannot turn left, yet my Model Y still suggests it roughly 70 percent of the time when I’m leaving.
However, Tesla might be close to a breakthrough on this. With the Summer Update, Tesla added “Preferred Routes” alongside “Automatic Navigation.”
Preferred Routes prioritized roads that the driver had actually taken before, instead of always defaulting to what the vehicle believes is the most efficient path. This has already solved many of my issues. Formerly, I would turn off the Online Routing setting, and that would eliminate most of my complaints with routing, but then you lose out later on the Live Traffic Visualization.
Tesla’s Navigation has improved tremendously thanks to the Preferred Routes release with the Summer Update, but it still could use some polishing, as it still suggests strange routes from time to time, and it also has a lot of issues getting out of a parking lot. I find that those truly confuse FSD sometimes.
News
SpaceX’s midnight spy satellite launch quietly set a new record
Falcon Heavy launched its first NRO mission while SpaceX landed four boosters in one day.
SpaceX closed out one of its busiest days ever with a midnight Falcon Heavy launch from Florida, and the rocket’s two side boosters came home to finish off a landing record the company had never set before.
Falcon Heavy lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 11:54 p.m. ET Thursday carrying NROL-97, a classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office. It was the first time the NRO has flown on Falcon Heavy after 22 missions on Falcon 9, and the first NRO mission bought through the National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 2 contract awarded in 2025, according to Spaceflight Now.
Falcon Heavy lifts off from pad 39A in Florida for the 14th time! pic.twitter.com/uuZLKNTdD7
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) October 2, 2026
Roughly eight minutes after liftoff, side boosters B1104 and B1072 touched down at Landing Zones 1 and 2 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, setting off double sonic booms across Brevard County. B1104 was flying for the second time and B1072 for the fourth. Both last flew on August 30 on NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, making NROL-97 the quickest turnaround between Falcon Heavy missions to date. The brand new center core, B1106, was expended in the Atlantic so the payload could reach its high energy orbit, and SpaceX’s mission page noted the fairing had previously flown on the NROL-95 mission in July.
The two landings capped a record for SpaceX. Earlier Thursday, Falcon 9 booster B1101 returned to Landing Zone 40 after sending the Crew-13 astronauts to the International Space Station, and another Falcon 9 launched the Transporter-18 rideshare with 130 payloads from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Spaceflight Now reported it was the first time SpaceX has landed four boosters in a single day, wrapping up the triple header Teslarati previewed on Wednesday.
Falcon Heavy’s side boosters land on LZ-1 and LZ-2 pic.twitter.com/dBPcNeggFx
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) October 2, 2026
The mission also brought Landing Zone 1 back for what may be its final landing. SpaceX first landed an orbital class booster there in December 2015, but its lease on the former Launch Complex 13 site ended in 2025 as the company moved Florida landings to new pads at its own launch complexes. With LZ-40 already holding the Crew-13 booster, SpaceX brought LZ-1 back into service for one more night. Launch tracker Next Spaceflight listed NROL-97 as the final expected landing at the site.
NROL-97 adds to a fast growing stack of national security work for SpaceX. The company has flown four Space Force missions from Vandenberg since mid August, several believed to carry Starshield satellites, pushing its Pentagon contract total for 2026 past $8 billion. Elon Musk was also named this week to help lead the Pentagon’s Project Meridian study on the future of warfare.
The Florida doubleheader stood out for another reason. The Space Coast saw only one launch in all of September as SpaceX shifts more of its East Coast infrastructure toward Starship, which reached orbit for the first time on Flight 14 just three days earlier.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported strong delivery figures that beat Wall Street guesses, and they were revealed alongside the company’s second-best quarter in terms of energy deployments ever.
Tesla announced this morning that it delivered 486,532 cars in Q3, while producing 464,391, exceeding analyst consensus, which sat around 462,000 units.
Meanwhile, Tesla reported 13.7 GWh of energy storage deployed for the quarter. That’s the second-best quarter Tesla has ever reported on that side of things.
🚨 Tesla delivered 486,532 vehicles in Q3, beating expectations at 464,391.
Big Q from the Tesla team, also 13.7 GWh of energy was deployed. pic.twitter.com/olioLWgG7a
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 2, 2026
Vehicle Deliveries
Deliveries were strong, and it was another quarter when Tesla had the opportunity to outshine the Wall Street pundits who are quick to criticize and slow to give credit. Tesla saw a slight decrease in deliveries compared to Q3 2025, but Tesla still had the $7,500 EV Tax Credit to use to help incentivize consumers to pick an EV.
A small decrease of 2.1 percent is pretty telling because it shows Tesla does not need massive federal credits to convince consumers to purchase its vehicles.
It was also the company’s third-best performance all-time in terms of deliveries, trailing that of Q3 2025 with 497,099 deliveries and Q4 2024, when the company handed over 495,570 cars.
We reported several days ago that Tesla Showrooms across the United States were completely bare of inventory or unclaimed units. Many locations also removed Demo Drive units, which had been bought by customers looking to take delivery sooner.
Tesla showrooms picked clean ahead of Q3 end as demand looks strong
Energy Generation
Tesla’s Energy Generation performance in Q3 was also very strong, as the company deployed 13.7 GWh of energy storage over the past three months. The only quarter when Tesla reported stronger energy deployment figures was Q4 2025, when 14.2 GWh of energy storage was deployed.
Tesla’s Q3 performance in energy generation has continued to grow each quarter, with the company increasing its deployments by ten-fold since Q3 2021, when just 1.3 GWh was deployed.
It is also nearly double what it was in Q3 2024, when the company reported 6.9 GWh. This is one of Tesla’s quickest-growing divisions, and it flies under the radar with fans and analysts, as many are focused on self-driving or the vehicles themselves.
Tesla Stock
Shares rose 5.07 percent to $372.06 at just after 10 a.m. on the East Coast. This is a rarity for Tesla after a strong delivery report, as positive news usually brings the stock down. Many quarters with extremely robust delivery reports have not been as kind to the Teslanaires of the world.
Tesla says fixes on Full Self-Driving’s two biggest issues are on the way
SpaceX’s midnight spy satellite launch quietly set a new record
