Severe battery shortage will hit supply chain worse than chip shortage, Rivian CEO predicts

Wall Street Journal has recently interviewed RJ Scaringe, the CEO of Rivian and he warned us that the next 20 years will be “make-or-break” time for many of the automakers. The CEO compared current supply chain issues and chip shortage to a “small appetizer” when it comes to the upcoming battery and raw materials shortages.

For those of you who follow the EV world it’s not a new warning, Tesla gave similar warnings 10 years ago. Now it looks like every automaker in the world is scrambling to secure future supplies of lithium and other materials, cooperation agreements are being signed left, right and center. Is it enough? Absolutely not, if we are to convert the entire auto industry from ICE to EV in the next 20 years then there is not enough capacity in the mining industry, there’s not enough capacity in the battery industry to deliver the batteries we will need.

Rivian plans to follow Tesla in signing partnership contracts with as many suppliers as possible and eventually Rivian plans to make its own batteries but it’s not going to happen any time soon.

What is concerning is the fact that Rivian already scaled down production of vehicles to 25,000 - that’s half of what it planned. Where does this put the R1S? Most likely deliveries will be delayed, R1T is being delivered already to some lucky customers but there’s no word yet on R1S. And what about the Rivian contract to deliver 100,000 vans to Amazon?

Conclusion is simple - if you are planning on buying an EV, you may wanna hurry up and place the order now. As we see demand go up, delivery times will skyrocket. Some brands have EVs in stock but this will change, further we go into the EV transition the more issues will surface.

The switch to EVs is coming at a tremendous pace. and there will be hiccups along the way for sure. But all bottlenecks will eventually clear up, hopefully.

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