I hold some RIVN and I'm wondering why they're spending resources on custom silicon instead of using something off-the-shelf. What is their advantage here? Can they hire the right people? Can they ship enough units to pay for it?

Those are my bearish questions. On the bullish side, the VW deal shows that they're willing and able to license part of their platform, so possibly have a big chance to recoup costs and maybe turn a profit just on that side, which justifies a big software + autonomy investment.

If their idea is both novel and useful, and if it actually works, and they can actually produce it, then: They can sell it to other automakers.

(GM has made a lot of cars with their own transmissions. And at various times, they've supplied -lots- of them to other automakers all over the world. They've made a lot of money doing this.

Someone's gotta build the machine vision/control systems for all of these self-driving cars; that someone may well be Rivian.

It's not as sexy as something like a new convertible might be, or a $40k self-driving electric car, and a consumer might not even know that the new car in their driveway has expensive Rivian parts buried inside, but that future can be very profitable for them.)

>On the bullish side, the VW deal

Oh, I think everyone missed this. Rivian is betting Elon made a big mistake by designing FSD to be strictly for Tesla. Rivian are doing FSD to license it out to other manufacturers. They're planning to open a new market.

Fair point. I think they wanted to sound super futuristic (they often borrow a page from Apple's book) but they forgot they're not Apple.