A large illustration of “all hat and no cattle”. 
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A glaring door gap like that, especially on what’s supposed to be a showcase vehicle at a costly event, is about more than looks. To give one example, it shows the level of contempt Musk holds for his fanbois in that he knows they’ll swallow anything he serves up and pretend the flaws don’t exist.
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Well they don’t legally have to, of course. But their businesses will not survive if they don’t.
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There’s good reason that all the vehicles in the Mad Max franchise (including 2015’s Fury Road) are cobbled together from cars and trucks that were built circa 1980 or earlier.
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Self-cleaning demo not yet feature complete.
How tough is this California secondary-market parts thing?
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You’re conflating a few different markets there though. Enthusiast vehicles will always have parts available because the demand exists and people will pay a premium to get them remanufactured. Furthermore any car that sold in high numbers will always have parts because the junk yard supply is high.
The Rivian and its contemporaries fit none of these third party support criteria, so it’s factory support or nothing. I don’t trust that factory to still exist in five years, never mind twenty.
No he has not. He is a monster. Please do not boost his signal.
I think you are unintentionally engaging in some fauxstalgia there. Some parts for cars have always been like this. Tail light lenses for a ‘58 Nomad were unobtainium five years after the car was made. Styling always changes every year. However the wheel bearings, valve lifters, differential gears, and thousands of other parts in that Nomad are the same ones rolling around in a Chevy Colorado truck you can buy today. The big companies are extremely incentivized to do this with all the invisible parts of the car to save on supply chain changes, which are expensive. Furthermore mainstream cars that sell in high numbers will always have a secondary market for parts (either scrapped or reman). The Rivian? Ain’t nobody gonna make parts for that.
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While I agree with almost everything you’re saying (and still agree about exterior parts), all of the parts that are common between the R1T and the Amazon EV truck are going to be supported for a long time to come. That’s pretty much everything mechanical on the “skateboard” platform.
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I misspoke earlier. When I said “a fairly hard-core hobbiest”, I should have said “seriously hard-core hobbiest”.
An even higher bar if all you want to do is just want to keep an old car running.
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I’m not talking about the lens where you could legally get by with some red translucent tape to cover a crack though. I’m talking about the circuit board that interprets the signal from the wiring harness and drives the LEDs. In the old days plenty of cars had different plastic lenses but they all used the same bulbs and you didn’t need to know any circuitry or programming to come up with something that was at least functional if you couldn’t get your hands on OEM parts. Now that many, many models have their own unique intergral LED lamps that’s a huge proliferation in different parts that need to be stocked, so it really is different than before.
But let’s talk about my other example: my wife’s Mitsubishi Galant smog system. It wasn’t exactly a low-production or exotic vehicle. Yet the parts weren’t available, and per California law, we legally wouldn’t have been able to fabricate or adapt other parts on our own even if we were able to do so. At least electric cars won’t be dealing with smog checks but good luck with other parts like sensors or other electronics that go obsolete pretty quickly. Plus there are already cars today that can’t get over-the-air software updates or have functional infotainment systems because they relied on outdated wireless standards.
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And will beat open road self-driving cars to market by 10 years. Which will happen 50 years before a true AI.
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I don’t know nothin’ about no electrical veehickles or gasoline trucks for that matter but that is one ugly truck.
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I’m actually surprised that California allows you or anyone else to operate a pre-emissions controlled vehicle on its roads.
This law may benefit (1) new car dealers and (2) well to do people who can buy new cars every few years, more than it benefits the state’s air quality. Need to fix your 1994 Plymouth so you can get to your minimum wage job? Sucks to be you, bunky.
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Goodness, why is this topic being throttled?
Guessing the fans showed up.
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What are you basing this on? I don’t see a lot keeping Rivian from going away tomorrow, and Amazon deciding cars are not for them after all, on a whim.
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I didn’t even realize that was supposed to be a cowboy boot. Just looks like a generic boot.
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All vehicles in CA are only required to meet the emissions standards of their time. There has never been a vehicle “banned” from the road for emissions. Old cars go away, so there’s not a lot of point in doing that. Furthermore, all cars older than 25 years are exempt from all emissions checks, again because there are so few of them on the road by then that they are a drop in the bucket. The purpose of CARB is to pressure automakers to step up their game and making sure people maintain the cars they own to control emissions. New cars are 90% of the smog problem, so the focus is on them. And it worked brilliantly. The air was opaque in LA in the ‘80s and is really very good today, all while the population (and number of cars) doubled.
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Amazon previously committed to buying 100,000 electric delivery vans from Rivian, with the first 10,000 potentially coming online this year. Amazon has participated in numerous, multi-billion dollar investment rounds raised by American automaker Rivian.
One of the reasons Rivian has missed it’s volume delivery for R1T pre-orders is that it has to meet it’s commitment to Amazon. Essentially, Amazon’s $1.5B “pre-order” has priority over individual’s $3k pre-orders.
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Okay that’s genuinely encouraging. If that many Amazon trucks will be out there, at least a spares supply should exist for a while. Thanks for sharing!
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Seems to me that the same thing could be accomplished in a less onerous way by just doing an emission test on every car annually based on the standards in effect when manufactured. Pass the test and you are good, regardless of what parts you have installed in the car.
Requiring that non-OEM parts be “certified” sounds like the auto manufacturers put some cash under the table. When regulations require a process rather than a result, especially when the result is easily measured, it’s likely that someone is making money from the process.
