Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) effectively created the electric vehicle market, proving to the legacy automakers that they needed to view the technology as a legitimate business threat. Every EV company is compared to Tesla, which has gone from an upstart business to a sustainably profitable and sizable automaker. This is where the new Cybertruck and EV truck maker Rivian (NASDAQ: RIVN) intersect.
What does Tesla do?
Tesla makes electric vehicles, from sedans to trucks. It also does a number of other high-tech things (like robotics and clean energy), so it isn’t exactly a pure-play auto stock. However, that doesn’t change the fact that it has a sizable auto business. In 2024, Tesla sold nearly 1.8 million EVs across all of its vehicle platforms.
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Image source: Rivian.
There are a number of different models in the mix. Right now, it lumps the Model 3 and Model Y into one group. These are sedans and SUVs, respectively. These two models accounted for around 95% of the company’s total vehicle sales. The remaining 5% of sales gets lumped into the “other” category. That includes the Cybertruck, which saw its first deliveries in late 2023.
Even if every single one of the “other” vehicles Tesla sold in 2024 was a Cybertruck, it only managed to sell around 85,000 of the vehicles. And, notably, the volume of “other” vehicle sales fell by nearly 50% between the fourth quarter of 2024 (23,640 vehicles) and the first quarter of 2025 (12,881). That’s not a good sign for Tesla’s truck offering, though the current drop in sales is likely being swayed by CEO Elon Musk’s involvement with the Trump administration.
What does Rivian do?
Rivian only makes and sells EV trucks. To be fair, it makes trucks for the consumer market and for the commercial market, so it has multiple sales channels. That said, the automaker spent 2023 ramping up its production to around 50,000 vehicles a year. In 2024, it refocused around profitability, managing to achieve a modest gross profit in the fourth quarter of the year. It is making very good progress as a business.
Still, Rivian’s production of 50,000 EV trucks is fairly close to the size of Tesla’s “other” category, which includes its Cybertruck model. In fact, in the first quarter of 2025, Rivian sold around 8,000 trucks, which is about 60% of the number of “other” vehicles sold by Tesla. If you go back to the run rate of the fourth quarter of 2025, before political issues may have impacted Tesla vehicle sales, Rivian’s first-quarter production would have been closer to a third of Tesla’s “other” sales.
These are very different figures, of course, with the latter suggesting materially more room for growth in Rivian’s truck business than the former. However, there’s a bigger picture issue here. Rivian only makes EV trucks. Even if it can increase its production to the same level as Tesla has achieved, it doesn’t offer a huge amount of growth potential over the long term.
Rivian does things differently from Tesla, but…
Tesla’s Cybertruck has, to be polite, a polarizing appearance. Rivian’s consumer vehicles are far more traditional and, thus, likely to be more appealing to a broader range of customers. It also makes commercial trucks, which could be a fairly large market in and of itself. So, investors might feel comfortable dismissing the EV truck comparison being made here.
However, given Tesla’s dominant industry position in EVs more broadly, that could be a mistake. Rivian has achieved a great deal in a short period of time, and it is likely to keep reaching new milestones in the years ahead. However, it still remains to be seen if the niche Rivian has chosen to focus on is actually going to be big enough to support a sustainably profitable business. The comparison to Tesla at least hints that the road to profitability might be harder than Rivian is expecting.
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Reuben Gregg Brewer has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Tesla. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.