Rivian shares plunged by more than 5% on Friday after its biggest backer Amazon confirmed it is piloting General Motors’ BrightDrop electric delivery vans, raising concerns about the EV maker’s exclusive role in Amazon’s decarbonization push.
The stock fell as much as 10% to $12.57 after Bloomberg first reported the trial, compared with a Thursday close of $13.97.
“We’re committed to having 100,000 electric delivery vehicles on the road by 2030, and we regularly test various vehicle options — including a small number of Chevrolet BrightDrops in our fleet,” Amazon spokesperson Steve Kelly told Bloomberg.
The pilot involves about a dozen vans, according to the company.
Amazon had more than 30,000 Rivian vans on US roads as of June, up from 20,000 at the end of 2024.
The disclosure comes just two days after Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe reaffirmed the goal of delivering 100,000 vans to Amazon by 2030, a commitment first announced in 2019 when the e-commerce giant became one of Rivian’s earliest investors.
Speaking at a Goldman Sachs conference earlier this week, Scaringe acknowledged that the electrification of the commercial business has “gone slower than we thought it would.”
However, the chief executive said Rivian remains confident that “the commercial space will electrify” through the end of the decade.
Rivian began opening orders for its delivery vans to other commercial customers in February but has only announced one major contract so far — a deal with meal-kit company HelloFresh, which received 70 vans in April.
DHL was seen piloting Rivian vans last year, though no purchase agreement was made public.
Scaringe said the company is “thinking about what comes beyond that initial 100,000 unit contract,” given Amazon’s far larger global delivery fleet.
Scaringe told investors earlier this week that Rivian expects commercial sales “to grow quite meaningfully” in 2026 and 2027 as production scales.
In the same interview, RJ Scaringe hinted that Rivian will adopt a direct-to-consumer business model in Europe, as expansion to the Old Continent is expected to happen in 2027.
Despite recognizing the need to build local infrastructure, the chief executive noted that Rivian has “some footprint in Europe today” with its Amazon-integrated vans.
“So we’ve got some experience in both setting up infrastructure and then operating that infrastructure in Europe, we have our European entities to do that already,” Scaringe said, however admitting that they “need to be scaled dramatically to support R2.”
