Rivian halts van manufacturing unit talks with Mercedes-Benz
American EV start-up Rivian has paused joint-venture negotiations with Mercedes-Benz Trucks to prioritise its present spaces of commercial.
The 2 corporations signed a memorandum of figuring out in September to ascertain a brand new corporate to fabricate 3 new electrical trucks in Europe.
Those would had been two new automobiles in keeping with Mercedes-Benz Trucks’ upcoming VAN.EA platform in addition to Rivian’s second-generation Gentle Van platform.
The previous is because of arrive in the marketplace from 2025 and is unaffected by way of the joint-venture talks coming to an finish.
Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe mentioned in a commentary: “At this day and age, we consider specializing in our shopper industry, in addition to our present business industry, constitute essentially the most sexy near-term alternatives to maximize worth for Rivian.
“We percentage the similar objective as Mercedes-Benz Trucks, to assist the arena transition to electrical automobiles, and we sit up for exploring alternatives with them at a extra suitable time for Rivian.”
The deal would have established Rivian’s first enterprise out of doors america and marked a ramification of its business automobile industry.
It these days builds the Electrical Supply Van 700 (and has a shorter 500 variant within the works), for which retail massive Amazon holds a status order of 100,000 devices.
Mercedes-Benz Trucks boss Mathias Geisen added that “exploring strategic alternatives with the crew at Rivian sooner or later stays an possibility”.
The German company will proceed with plans to make bigger its manufacturing unit in Jawor, Poland, to commit it to VAN.EA-based merchandise. Mercedes-Benz Automobiles has been generating combustion engines at Jawor since 2019 and batteries since 2021.
The inside track comes after Rivian recorded a $1.72 billion (£1.4bn) loss all the way through the 3rd quarter of 2022.
