Rivian and Lucid

[Terri Kennedy]

Originally Posted by robg

Personally though, I don't have the risk tolerance to plunk down that much money with an unproven company producing a brand new vehicle.

I did that with the Atom and the manufacturer (Brammo) initially had no idea how much it cost them to build a car (or how long it takes). They proceeded through a series of massive price hikes and priced themselves out of the market - an Atom is a very fun car, but by the time you get to $120K there are a lot of fun cars. They pivoted to making electric motorcycles, got a round of funding from Best Buy and eventually got acquired by Polaris.

There were at least 2 very dangerous problems with some Brammo Atoms. The first was that on early cars they used a massively under-rated rod end in the suspension*. I had a rod end failure on the back that dropped the frame onto the highway at speed. If one of the front ones let go instead, my passenger and I would have both been killed. The second one was a design error that caused a high stress point on the alignment thimbles with subsequent cracks and failures. That never happened to me, but there were a number of crashes (including one with a fatality) that were allegedly caused by thimble failure.

Nope - not doing that again.

* When I visited Aurora Bearing with my Atom (they made the rod ends), pretty much the whole company turned out to see it. When I was discussing the under-rated rod end, one employee chimed in with "Isn't that the model we sell for lawn mowers?" (it was). I asked what she did and she said she swept the floors under the end mills. So, essentially, even the janitor knew they were the wrong part.