I'm not interested in equating the market cap with the cost-per-vehicle like you are. I was inured to the "cost per" kind of thinking from working in Silicon Valley throughout the dotcom boom. (And the PC boom before that.) Adoption rates will always win. And no electric car maker has as many orders on hand as Rivian. While this does make it precarious by putting all their current production run eggs in Amazon's basket (during a chip and raw materials shortage that is not looking to improve any time soon), it also shows broad adoption into a commercial fleet by a leader that is respected by other large fleets. And a commitment to Amazon having their own, unique-looking, fleet, which further helps the Rivian contract look like not just a one-off purchase. And Amazon is the only fleet order we are currently AWARE of... Fleet managers have noticed. "They did it first" is a really important rationale that managers of huge fleets are looking for, when switching to something different. Fiskar, Tesla, and anyone else, is selling onesy-twosy to retail customers who will buy one every 5-10 years, to a public that will abandon a brand in the blink of an eye, and could buy ANYTHING else when they go to replace their electric car. Ford doesn't have a contract with Amazon for 30k vehicles. That's 1/3 of the Ford Transits sold every single year (~100k), going to a SINGLE customer. To me and my experience, that pencils out. A single big customer making a big stink about their adoption of a new fleet vehicle vendor, is the kind of thing that moves other fleets to act and follow suit. To me, market capitalization has not reflected fundamentals at ANY of the companies I have worked for, going all the way back to the days of Apple's grey PC clones. I have seen time and time again how the market cap of a company has been blown way out of proportion with (insert literally any other metric here) which will definitely lead to the company failing... to then only see the company succeed even further. To me, market cap today is only a measure of the rabidity of the fan base. The market for shares is restricted to the number of shares issued. But that is almost completely divorced from the market for the product itself. But in the end, buying a share at $300 is way cheaper/easier than a $70k electric truck, so it only makes sense that people are voting with their pocketbooks at $300 a pop. (For now.) IIRC, Tesla has still not hit the production numbers they were promising the first year for the Model S. That's what, 10 years of missing their 1st year production targets? And yet people still buy the stock. So there has to be something else the fans/investors are working from, and you nailed it in your other post: they are voting against the big car manufacturers. Rivian is the same thing, without the repugnant Elon Musk at the helm... just a buncha young idealistic neo-hippies. Rivian is worth $102b because of this page here: https://rivian.com/our-company That's what people want from their car company. Especially once they discover/realize/own how unpleasant Musk is. --- In the end, I think we are on the same side here: market cap does not reflect the viability/value of these companies. It is measuring something else, nowadays. I'm ok with that, and you are not. Have you done the math on that? $102b market cap / 30,000 sprinters = $3.4m per Rivian.
Ford, at the height of the pandemic, made 4 million cars a year. Rivian has so far made 40.
Even DeLorean was over 5,000 a year and they didn't have a $104b valuation.