The Tesla truck will almost certainly beat them to mass market. Look how long it took Tesla to scale up production -- the Model S shipped in 2013. It wasn't until 2018 that Tesla built their 200,000th vehicle. Rivian hasn't yet shipped a single truck to customers; they're in for a long and difficult road ahead building out their production lines.
All that said I do hope Rivian is successful. I would absolutely buy an electric pickup truck.
Tesla took so long for production because Charlatan-In-Chief didn't want to use any of the lessons learned about Auto Manufacturing the past 100 years and decided to do it his way.
Charlatan-In-Chief also assumed he knows more about A.I and Robotics than many who warned him about his 'Alien Dreadnought' vision.
Rest assured people who are focused on building mass cars won't have the same hubris
If there's one thing I love about people calling Musk a 'charlatan' who build his company on 'government subsidies' and 'fairytales' it is that you can just reply with a video of a double 80m orbital booster landing vertically after putting a massive payload into orbit.
The irony of criticising entrepreneurial risk taking on HN. Especially considering thus exact approach has lead to all his successes, which are innumerable.
Leaving knowledge on the table out of arrogance is not the same thing as entrepreneurship. Although i am as surprised as you that someone on HN managed to make the distinction.
Isn't it though. Copying an existing process would not be called entrepreneurship. Sure you can have one new aspect and everything else is the same. But the fundamental driver behind entrepreneurship is the thought that there can be a better way.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
I think a valid criticism of CIC is that he should have staged all his new tech instead of trying to do it all at once, like he himself has said. If you look you can find real things to be critical of him about.
All that said I do hope Rivian is successful. I would absolutely buy an electric pickup truck.