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Electric Truck and SUV Maker Rivian Gets $500 Million From Ford

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Rivian, electric truck and SUV maker, has a $500 million strategic partnership deal with Ford.

A few months ago, Rivian revealed an all-electric pickup and SUV with about 400 mile range. The new vehicles look competitive for electric car maker Tesla and the Model X SUV and Model Y Crossover vehicles. Rivian has been taking $1,000 deposits for the R1T pickup and R1S SUV that will start selling in the fall of 2020.

Rivian has not starting selling their new vehicles. In February, Rivian received $700 million in investment from Amazon. Rivian was talking to GM about partnering but Rivian turned down GM when they required an exclusive arrangement.

Ford will develop a new vehicle using Rivian’s skateboard platform which has batteries and the electric engine. Ford will still develop its own separate electric vehicles.

The Rivian electric drive delivers power and torque through four independent motors — with 200 horsepower available at each wheel. This precise torque control enables active torque vectoring and maximized performance in every situation, from high-speed cornering to low-speed rock crawling.

The Rivian vehicles will have up to 180-kilowatt hours of batteries.

Rivian has six new vehicles that will be ready by 2025. They will all be pickup trucks or SUVs.

The Tesla Model X currently has 75 kwh, 90 kwh and 100 kwh versions. Telsa Model X has ranges from 250 miles to 325 miles.

SOURCES- Rivian, Ford, Tesla
Written by Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

16 thoughts on “Electric Truck and SUV Maker Rivian Gets $500 Million From Ford”

  3. “Rivian revealed an all-electric pickup and SUV with about 400 mile range”  Tesla increased Mode S range to 370 miles.  I guess nobody can claim that electric cars have range issue any longer.

  4. How about they just build a basic 250km range EV that costs $10k. I don’t need torque vectoring, super fast acceleration and other high tech accessories. Just give me a car I can drive to work and back.

  5. I saw these in person, besides you looking good you left out the best part. It goes 0-60 in 3 seconds. If they live up to that claim they’ll smoke most sports cars.

  7. I am not a car designer, but I have kicked the idea around with a few guys who were. The issues they brought up are:

    • A wheel hub motor means you have to get a hundred kW or so of electrical power to the wheel. That wheel is bouncing up and down on the suspension. So how do you do that? Have a thick electrical cable that is flexing? Have solid conductor bars with rotating electrically conductive bushes? Both ways have longevity issues. Remember it’s not just bouncing up and down, it is doing so in the wet, heat, dust etc.
    • A wheel with say 60 cm diameter = 880 rpm at 100 km/h.You don’t want a 100 kW motor that is spinning at 880 rpm. It would need huge torque, and so huge coils, huge magnets. It would be very big and heavy. The motors the EVs use are much smaller and spinning at 10 times the speed. That’s how you get it to be light and efficient, and that’s really difficult to put into a hub because you need to squeeze a 10:1 gearbox in there too.
    • Unsprung weight. Everyone knows this one.
    • Brakes. The brakes are on the wheels, and in hard braking they are shedding literally thousands of kW of power. And they shed it as heat. You don’t want that next to your electrical wiring.
    • Liquid cooling of the motors? So you are running pipes of coolant to and from your bouncing wheels? Good luck with that.

    Now all of these are engineering problems. Not fundamental physical constraints. So they can be solved given time, money, luck and sufficient compromise on other factors. But why?

  9. As if anyone, anyone at all, would complain if their new Dodge DesertCrusher came with a 10 litre V12.

  11. A severe lack of macho appeal is a problem with a lot of modern vehicle design across the board, not just the electric ones.

    So people responded by buying light trucks which still looked tough.

    So car designers noticed that lots of people, including heaps of women, were buying light trucks. So they redesigned light trucks to look soft and weak.

    So people responded by buying military vehicles.

    Repeat until even heavy tanks are only available in pastel colours and with soft, unthreatening curves.

  12. I keep coming back to the question of simplification and in wheel motors. How much simpler would the mechanics of the drive train be if you used in wheel motors instead? You would still need suspension, some mechanism to turn the front wheels, and perhaps liquid cooling of the motors..?

    By the way, I love the fact that Rivian has torque vectoring. Also love the fact that Tesla is getting some good competition…

  13. I wonder if the skateboard will be the basis of the new electric F-150, or perhaps something unusual for the north american market, a low riding coupe Ute like the ones made for Australia.

  14. Even though they have so much money behind them, I will have a sigh of relief when I see these things produced in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

    I really think all the pickups should be made to use natural gas instead of gasoline or diesel (well, obviously these electrics are just fine too). Natural gas is just getting cheaper and cheaper while gasoline and diesel inch upward. Better for everyone. The engines need a little more displacement to get the same horsepower, but that is not hard to fix.

  15. This is great news for Rivian & Ford, wish I could fast forward a few years and see what happens. The Rivian truck is a mid size, so I expect to see an all electric Ford Ranger offered by 2022 with a 400 mile range.

  16. I’m a little miffed by the lack of testosterone in the designers drawings. The lack of innovation and ability to utilize the freedom of ICE constraints is what bothers me. I suppose it’s just too big a step to diverge from pickup truck design. A new design would likely exacerbate the misconception an electric truck is all woman’s hormones.
    Oh well, reality bites.

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