Piper Sandler upgraded Rivian to Overweight from Neutral on Monday, raising its price target to $20 from $18, according to a new client note first obtained by Price Target.
Separately, the firm cut Stellantis to Underweight from Overweight, slashing its target to $4 from $14.
Rivian shares rose 3.4% to $16.37 in early Monday pre-market trading, nearly erasing Friday’s 3.8% drop to $15.84.
At the pre-market level, the stock sits within a dime of Thursday’s $16.46 close, having recovered most of Friday’s decline before the opening bell.
Both calls come from analyst Alexander Potter, who trimmed his Tesla target to $450 on Friday — making Monday’s actions the third and fourth moves in a week that amount to one analyst re-ranking the western EV landscape.
The Rivian Case
Potter’s upgrade rests on what the note calls “a de-risked balance sheet, a smooth R2 ramp, and an improved demand outlook.”
First, Rivian boosted its delivery guidance, which the note attributes partly to expensive gasoline and renewed consumer interest in EVs.
Second, the company has apparently avoided launch problems with the R2, the mass-market SUV Potter describes as a pivotal product — one whose ramp toward a 20,000-to-25,000-unit delivery target this year has continued despite a brief paint-related pause.
Third, the recent capital raise of about $1.3 billion should fund growth while reducing dilution risk, in the note’s assessment.
As volume rises, Rivian should be better able to monetize software and services, which Potter frames as a key benefit of vertical integration.
That lever is already visible in the R2’s packaging — initial production ships with a Launch Package that includes a lifetime subscription to Autonomy+, the driver-assistance tier Rivian will otherwise sell as recurring revenue.
The new $20 target, based on Piper Sandler’s discounted-cash-flow model, implies upside of about 22.2% from Monday’s pre-market level — and roughly 26.3% from Friday’s close.
Timing sharpens the call: Rivian reports second-quarter results on Thursday, meaning Potter upgraded three days before the numbers that will test his smooth-R2-ramp thesis in public.
The delivery-guidance point has a fresh anchor too — second-quarter deliveries of 12,194 topped the company’s outlook on the strength of first R2 handovers, prompting a raised full-year forecast.
Potter’s upgrade also lands days after Rivian closed an end-of-July incentive push that stacked 0.99% financing and $1,000 discounts on the aging R1 line ahead of an expected 2027 model-year change.
A Five-Year Arc
Monday’s call closes a loop Potter has been drawing since Rivian went public.
The analyst initiated coverage after the November 2021 IPO at Overweight with a $148 target — near the stock’s $172.01 all-time peak — and stayed bullish through the collapse that followed.
By April 2023, with the shares down 92% from that peak, Potter cut his target 76% to a then Street-low $15 from $63 and downgraded to Neutral, citing the more than $4 billion Rivian still needed to raise.
Even in surrender he liked the model — praising the software, service and charging strategy — but wrote that “frugality matters more than ambition” in that market.
In March 2025, the analyst downgraded Rivian to Neutral from Overweight and slashed his target to $13 from $19, writing that the firm struggled to identify upside catalysts that year — while calling the stock his “favorite Neutral.”
Even then, Potter liked the strategy, singling out self-reliance in electronics and software, and pointed to the R2 launch as the catalyst investors could look forward to in 2026.
He also framed the Volkswagen joint venture as the way to de-risk the balance sheet — nearly the same vocabulary Monday’s note uses to declare the job done.
The target that came together with Monday’s upgrade, at $20, still sits 86.5% below the $148 with which Potter began covering the company five years ago.
The Stellantis Case
On the other side of Monday’s ledger sits one of the harshest calls a major bank has published on a legacy automaker this year.
Potter cut his Stellantis target by 71.4% in one step, writing that “the situation will likely get worse before it gets better” — and adding, in the note’s own parenthetical, that it might not get better at all.
His diagnosis: global automakers are balancing the demands of governments, unions, suppliers and dealers while facing competition from vertically integrated Chinese brands.
Those challenges are most severe, the note says, in Stellantis‘ key regions of Europe, Latin America and the Middle East.
Market share has not recovered as quickly as Piper Sandler hoped, the note says, and the firm now suspects margin downside — cutting estimates and dropping its valuation basis to four times estimated 2027 earnings from six times.
The irony is that Stellantis‘ own answer to those vertically integrated Chinese rivals is one of them.
Its Leapmotor alliance set a third consecutive delivery record in June and is on course to top 100,000 European sales this year.
That momentum was formalized on Friday, when the group named Leapmotor International chief Tianshu Xin head of its China and Asia-Pacific region, effective August 3 and reporting directly to chief executive Antonio Filosa.
The Tesla Context
Monday’s notes follow Potter’s Friday move on Tesla, when Piper Sandler trimmed its target to $450 from $500 while keeping an Overweight rating.
The reduction was the eighth from Wall Street in 24 hours, after seven firms cut on Thursday in response to second-quarter results.
Potter tied that $50 reduction to a line-by-line reading of the 10-Q, cutting 2026 and 2027 estimates on lower margins even as his discounted-cash-flow valuation rose.
The $450 target implies upside of about 40.8% from the $319.69 level where Tesla closed on Thursday.
