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If Tesla Is Only Selling This Many Trucks, How Much Growth Is There for Rivian?

Reuben Gregg Brewer, The Motley Fool

Sat, May 10, 2025, 3:05 PM 5 min read

Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) effectively created the electric vehicle market, proving to the legacy automakers that they needed to view the technology as a legitimate business threat. Every EV company is compared to Tesla, which has gone from an upstart business to a sustainably profitable and sizable automaker. This is where the new Cybertruck and EV truck maker Rivian (NASDAQ: RIVN) intersect.

Tesla makes electric vehicles, from sedans to trucks. It also does a number of other high-tech things (like robotics and clean energy), so it isn't exactly a pure-play auto stock. However, that doesn't change the fact that it has a sizable auto business. In 2024, Tesla sold nearly 1.8 million EVs across all of its vehicle platforms.

A line of Rivian trucks in a parking lot.

There are a number of different models in the mix. Right now, it lumps the Model 3 and Model Y into one group. These are sedans and SUVs, respectively. These two models accounted for around 95% of the company's total vehicle sales. The remaining 5% of sales gets lumped into the "other" category. That includes the Cybertruck, which saw its first deliveries in late 2023.

Even if every single one of the "other" vehicles Tesla sold in 2024 was a Cybertruck, it only managed to sell around 85,000 of the vehicles. And, notably, the volume of "other" vehicle sales fell by nearly 50% between the fourth quarter of 2024 (23,640 vehicles) and the first quarter of 2025 (12,881). That's not a good sign for Tesla's truck offering, though the current drop in sales is likely being swayed by CEO Elon Musk's involvement with the Trump administration.

Rivian only makes and sells EV trucks. To be fair, it makes trucks for the consumer market and for the commercial market, so it has multiple sales channels. That said, the automaker spent 2023 ramping up its production to around 50,000 vehicles a year. In 2024, it refocused around profitability, managing to achieve a modest gross profit in the fourth quarter of the year. It is making very good progress as a business.

Still, Rivian's production of 50,000 EV trucks is fairly close to the size of Tesla's "other" category, which includes its Cybertruck model. In fact, in the first quarter of 2025, Rivian sold around 8,000 trucks, which is about 60% of the number of "other" vehicles sold by Tesla. If you go back to the run rate of the fourth quarter of 2025, before political issues may have impacted Tesla vehicle sales, Rivian's first-quarter production would have been closer to a third of Tesla's "other" sales.

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