Largely positive reviews are beginning to trickle in on EV upstart Rivian’s first consumer offering, the R1T pickup truck.
Grades for the Irvine firm’s electric-powered trucks appear to run much closer to Consumer Reports’ famous 2015 review for the Tesla Model 3 sedan (described at the time as the best-performing car it had ever tested) than the publication’s disastrous 2012 test drive and review of the Fisker Karma hybrid vehicle (it broke down during testing; the OC carmaker went broke itself the next year).
A handful of auto bloggers and industry journalists—not the Business Journal, sadly—were given a multiday test of the R1T late last month in the mountains of Colorado.
The reviews suggested the trucks aren’t yet the finished product; a few design tweaks and tech upgrades are still needed to help RJ Scaringe & Co. take on Tesla and a slew of other EV truck makers it will soon be competing with, several reviews said.
Reviews also suggest the auto sector’s journalists could use some tweaks of their own, in terms of understanding their industry.
An odd Bloomberg review, for example, questioned whether the trucks would be bought by “good ol’ boys” and cited as a serious flaw that Rivian’s vehicles would be inefficient as a work rig for contractors.
In fact, industry data shows that only a small fraction of pickup trucks are primarily used for commercial purposes. Women made up 46% of the pickup customers of Ford (which is making an electric F-150), according to 2020 survey by that automaker, though other reports still show males make up a much larger majority of buyers industry-wide.
No one’s calling RLH Equity Partners Managing Director Murray Rudin the Wally Pipp of the finance world, yet. But when the longtime host of our annual CFO of the Year Awards had to pull out of our Sept. 28 event due to a hiking injury, Solis Capital founder and Managing Partner Dan Lubeck took the opportunity to make a Lou Gehrig-like claim for the spot going forward.
Lubeck quickly won over the 450 or so attendees of the dinner event with a simple gesture: he bought tequila and vodka shots for the audience.
Winners of the CFO event will be profiled in next week’s print edition, see page 4 for more.
It’s been a month of flux for OC’s office market. See pages 1 and 106 for more on how tech tenants like Terran Orbital are still grabbing big chunks of space at the area’s high rises, while another front-page story shows that developers like Rexford Industrial are teeing up older office campuses for conversion into warehouse and distribution sites.
Rexford’s not the only one playing the office-to-industrial conversion game; see next week’s print edition of the Business Journal for info on how the local hub of another large industrial firm, Goodman, has gone big, paying nearly $130 million for an office campus in Cypress.
Investors also are still paying high prices for local office towers here; the Business Journal understands that one of South Coast Metro’s more prominent towers has sold for nearly $96 million, a steep markup from its prior valuation. See next week’s edition for more.
