Rivian is in the middle of a big moment in its still fairly young life. It is stepping out of the very expensive portion of the SUV and truck market and into the moderately expensive portion of the market. It is expected to sell a lot more units of the R2 than it ever could of the R1 and R2. It is also trying to get profitable. Rivian has never achieved an annual profit, and it needs to scale up production and sales considerably in order to get the economies of scale needed to achieve that feat. While the R2 provides some hope in that regard, it’s going to be tough to do it just with the R2. There’s a general rule of thumb that an EV producer needs to get to 500,000 vehicles a year to get profitable, and the R2 won’t get Rivian to that level. Though, the company has said that it intends to become profitable through the R2. As one effort to march toward profitability, though, Rivian has just decided that it’s time to cut some costs and lay off workers. The company announced today that it’s laying off hundreds of workers. That’s not quite 2% of its workforce, but it’s a significant cut. The company had 15,232 staff in North America and Europe at the end of 2025. Rivian had a net loss of $3.6 billion last year. So, it’s got a long ways to go to reach profitability. Perhaps with just enough squeezing and just enough vehicle sales, though, it could turn a profit sometime in 2026 or 2027? A sort of concerning thing for me here is that people in customer and service teams are being laid off. That implies overhiring based on higher expectd consumer demand to me…. “We recently restructured a handful of teams within Rivian as we work to profitably scale our business,” the company stated. Note that the company also laid off around 600 workers, or 4.5% share of its workforce, in October. Let’s hope demand for Rivian vehicles starts popping soon and the company decides it’s time to hire hundreds or thousands more again.
