Rivian ($RIVN) produced 10K vehicles in Q4, up 36% QoQ, slightly missing goal

Rivian has released its Q4 production and delivery numbers, with a big increase in quarterly production, and a 663-unit miss for Rivian’s overall 2022 goal of 25,000 vehicles produced.

The company produced 10,020 vehicles in Q4 and delivered 8,054, which means the company produced 24,337 and delivered 20,332 vehicles over the course of the full year. This is a slight miss from Rivian’s 25,000 full-year production guidance, but still an impressive ramp from earlier this year.

In addition, Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe told Rivian employees in an internal email that there are 714 vehicles “currently being factory gated,” which means they have left the general assembly line but are “awaiting parts, software validation, wheel alignment, upfits and charging,” and thus do not count as being finished vehicles. This means that a total of 25,051 came “off the line” in 2022, but as these were not completely finished vehicles, they don’t count against the 25k metric.

Last year, Rivian had only just started production, and entered 2022 having produced only 1,015 total vehicles in 2021. Rivian has repeatedly reiterated throughout the year that it would produce 25,000 vehicles in fiscal year 2022. After the last quarterly update, it had only produced about 15,000 cars – so it was only just over halfway to its full-year goal, three quarters of the way through the year. It looked like quite the stretch.

But production has steadily ramped since then, with big increases each quarter:

On a full-year basis, production of 24,337 vehicles is nearly 24x more than 2021’s production number of 1,015 vehicles. Even with these small misses against their hopeful production numbers, that’s still an impressive trajectory.

On December 31, a social media post went out claiming that Rivian had crossed the mark of 25,000 vehicles made. We didn’t post about it at the time, because we couldn’t confirm these numbers.

It turns out that the social media post was correct – Rivian had produced 25,000 total vehicles. However, that included the 1,015 vehicles from last year, and Rivian’s guidance was for 25k vehicles this year, which means a small miss on their 2023 production guidance.

Production rate is important for Rivian, as the company has said that profitability will come with higher production rates. Their factory in Normal, IL has the capacity to build 150k-200k vehicles per year, so lower production numbers will result in a higher cost per car, which is why it’s important to ramp up quickly.

Rivian is currently losing money at the rate of more than $1 billion each quarter as of their last quarterly report. However, due to their IPO in late 2021, the company’s cash reserves are quite substantial, at ~14 billion at the end of last quarter.

Rivian stock has gone down significantly from its IPO at $78/share after reaching a peak of nearly $130/share, and is currently trading at around $17/share. As of their last financial report, the company’s book value, which is the amount of money it would have if it closed down, converted all of its assets to cash, paid off its liabilities, and returned that cash directly to the shareholders, was $16.65.