Rivian has increased production of its all-electric R1T pickup truck and plans to be churning out 200 examples each week.
Rivian delivered the first R1T models to customers in September last year but the production ramp-up has been slow. To improve things, the electric vehicle startup paused production for roughly a week at the start of this month to make a number of fixes and improvements to the production line.
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Bloomberg reports that Rivian was averaging about 50 units of the R1T each week through the end of December but production has slowed over the past month due to supply-chain bottlenecks. Rivian has also had to work through COVID-19 outbreaks at its factory in Normal, Illinois.
During recent announced quarterly earnings, Rivian revealed that it produced 1,015 vehicles and delivered 920 of them throughout 2021. This was slightly down on the 1,200 vehicles that it had intended to produce.
The R1T isn’t the only vehicle being built by Rivian. The automaker has started to build pre-production units of the R1S SUV and hopes to begin building customer cars in the coming months. It is also building an electric delivery van for Amazon on a different assembly line and is expected to deliver 10,000 of these vans by the end of this year.
The car manufacturer says its Normal facility will be capable of building 150,000 electric vehicles annually by 2023 and there are plans in place to increase that to 200,000. Rivian also confirmed in December that it will construct an EV factory in Georgia that can handle the production of 400,000 vehicles each year. This site should start building vehicles in 2023.
