After it’s IPO went wild this month, Rivian Automotive is now worth almost 50 percent more than Ford Motor Co., one of it’s early investors.
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The two companies have scrapped plans to jointly develop an EV, Ford CEO Jim Farley told Automotive News. Ford already had canceled a planned Lincoln collaboration at the start of the coronavirus pandemic but still intended to work with Rivian on a different vehicle until recently.
“Right now, we have growing confidence in our ability to win in the electric space,” Farley said in an interview Thursday. “When you compare today with when we originally made that investment, so much has changed: about our ability, about the brand’s direction in both cases, and now it’s more certain to us what we have to do. We want to invest in Rivian — we love their future as a company — but at this point we’re going to develop our own vehicles.”
Ford is so confident in its abilities that it’s doubling its planned EV production capacity to 600,000 globally by the end of 2023, Farley said. The company aims to become the largest U.S. EV maker after Tesla in the same time frame, Farley said, and to challenge Tesla’s leadership after planned EV campuses in Tennessee and Kentucky come online several years later.
“We respect Rivian and have had extensive exploratory discussions with them,” a spokesperson told Reuters. “However, both sides have agreed not to pursue any kind of joint vehicle development or platform sharing.”
Ford owns about 12% of California-based EV maker Rivian, which went public on Nov. 10 and already is worth 1-1/2 times more than the 118-year-old Michigan automaker.
Ford believes it will be building 600,000 EVs annually within two years.