Rivian trucks are no longer exclusive to Amazon.
The automaker said Tuesday that it will now allow other companies to buy its commercial electric trucks, ending an exclusivity deal Amazon had when it pumped more than $1 billion into Rivian in 2019. Both companies’ stock prices rose following the announcement, which was timed with Rivian’s third-quarter earnings report.
Rivian was in talks with Amazon last March to remove its exclusivity requirement early. The original exclusivity arrangement was scheduled to end after Rivian delivered a total of 100,000 electric trucks, sometime before the end of the decade. Rivian said during the investor call that it still plans to meet Amazon’s goal.
“We’ve been working on the exclusivity agreement with Amazon for a while,” RJ Scaringe, Rivian’s CEO, said Tuesday during a call with investors. “Thanks to this, we have built relationships with a variety of commercial operators, everything from last mile to retail.”
Amazon boasted last October that it had 10,000 Rivian pickup trucks on the road, meeting the 2023 sales threshold set by the companies. That may seem like a lot of pickup trucks, and it is, but the monster truck’s 10,000 orders were said to be “at the lower end of the range that Amazon had previously communicated to the automaker.” Wall Street Journal Written in March. Hence the talks came to call for an exclusivity agreement early.
We’ve always said we want others to benefit from this [Rivian’s] “The technology is in the long term because having more electric delivery vehicles on the road is good for our communities and our planet,” Udit Madan, head of transportation at Amazon, said in a prepared statement. Of course, everything that’s good for Rivian is also good for Amazon; The retailer owns a 17% stake in the electric car maker.
Amazon’s total fleet (owned and rented) is massive, and covers a lot Tens of thousands of trucks and vans And About a hundred planes.