Rivian have always struggled to bring down the cost of manufacturing their EVs. This is one of the biggest issues they have when you are making an EV battery & motor are 2 of the most important components of the car. In Rivians case they both are sourced and not done in-house. They got carried away making a luxurious car, custom screen setup (rather then leveraging Carplay or Android Auto) & good looking interior. If you want to be in a profitable in first place they should done total inverse, focus on making a great battery & motor like Tesla did and try to source out other things. This is one of the reasons why BYD and Chinese EV companies are destroying all their competition, they do majority of things in-house.
If Bosch couldn't supply the motors required in the contact, I don't see why Rivian has to commit to not making motors themselves.<p>Seems like the logical thing to do. If Kroger says they'll sell me 100,000 apples and only delivered 23k, I might buy an orchard
> “Instead, Bosch had apparently employed teenage interns to stand by the line holding flashlights for quality control,”<p>I’m not surprised. A lot of companies in Germany hire students and pay like 1.000€/month for this kind of work instead of creating automated processes. When you tell them that they need to hire engineers for the automation, they complain how expensive to hire them and instead they can just hire bunch of students by paying less to let them do the work manually.