Going forward, Rivian vans are no longer an Amazon exclusive.
Rivian said on Tuesday that it will now let other companies buy its commercial electric vans, ending the exclusivity deal that Amazon secured when it pumped more than a billion dollars into Rivian in 2019. Both companies’ stock prices rose following the announcement, which they timed with Rivian’s third-quarter earnings report.
Rivian had been in talks with Amazon to strip out the exclusivity clause ahead of time since at least March of this year.
Amazon boasted in October that it had 10,000 Rivian-built vans on roads, meeting a sales threshold set by the two companies, but Amazon’s target for 2030 is ten times greater. Originally, the exclusivity deal was set to end after Rivian delivered 100,000 electric vans by the end of the decade. Rivian said it still plans to come through on the 100,000 vans. That may sound like a whole lot of vans, and it is, but Amazon’s total (owned and leased) fleet is also enormous, spanning many tens of thousands of semi-trucks and vans and around a hundred planes.
In all, it sounds as if the automaker gets to have its cake and eat it too. Yet, Amazon’s 10,000 van orders were reportedly “on the low end of a range Amazon had communicated earlier to the auto maker,” per the Wall Street Journal.
“We’ve always said that we want others to benefit from [Rivian’s] technology in the long run because having more electric delivery vehicles on the road is good for our communities and our planet,” said Amazon transportation boss Udit Madan in a prepared statement. Of course, whatever’s good for Rivian is also good for Amazon; the retailer owns a 17% stake in the EV maker.
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