It hasn’t been a good month for electric Pickup maker Rivian. The golden ticket of startup investments is being sued by a shareholder who claims the company misled investors about its retail pricing strategy. A week ago, Rivian announced an unexpected price for its line of electric Pickup and SUV models. The complainant says that Rivian deliberately underpriced the true value of its R1 SUV and R1T pickup in order to flytrap investors. Customers with existing pre-orders also raged at the price increase, only for Rivian to backtrack like a bear on a unicycle. Current orders will be fulfilled at the original price, going forward the price increase will be implemented for all new orders.

More bad news was announced a day ago as Rivian posted a Q4 net revenue loss of $2.4BN. The company delivered 909 vehicles in the first quarter 2021 and managed to significantly ramp up production to 920 for the entire year. Rivian expects to manufacture 25,000 vehicles for 2022, half the amount initially forecast.

The lower production value is being blamed on Covid, supply chain issues and severe weather. Rivian has so far manufactured 1,410 vehicles since the start of 2022 and has a pre-order book of 83,000 to fulfill. The company, which is backed by the likes of Amazon raised $12BN with its IPO in 2020.

Rivian is finding that slick presentation and a buffed-up articulation of the future is easy when it comes to raising money. But manufacturing vehicles is much more difficult. Amazon placed an order of 100,000 electric vans of the back of its 18 percent Rivian shareholding. But after realizing that the order would not be fulfilled Amazon switched to rival firm Stellantis. Shares in Rivian have halved from $78 to $35.

This was always going to happen with a start-up vehicle manufacturer. To go from 0-50,000 vehicles in a year takes years of planning. It is a challenge even the biggest car manufacturers struggle with. One can find little sympathy for the investors.

Rivian is a fairly easy investment equation to work out. The investors were dazzled by creative analysis and their own greed.