Rivian shares fell to $12.16 on early Monday, the lowest in more than 14 months, extending a slide that has taken the stock down 46% from its December peak even as the R2 crossover it staked the company on moved to a second production shift.
The stock traded at $12.23 in early New York trading, down 1.6% on the day, 38% below its $19.71 close at the end of 2025. Shares of the EV maker were trading 93% below the all-time high of $179.47 reached on November 16, 2021, six days after the initial public offering.
Last February, when Rivian shares were trading at about $15.00, the company’s founder and CEO RJ Scaringe said he was more bullish than ever.
“I’ve never been as bullish as I am about Rivian as I am today, which is maybe a little unexpected because our share price has been much higher in the past, but I’m the most bullish I’ve been on the business in this moment,” the founder said last February when asked what he would say directly to Rivian shareholders.
The all-time low is $8.26, set on April 16, 2024, and the gap between that floor and today’s price is now narrower than the gap to the $22.69 high of last December, when the stock hit a two-year high on R2 and autonomy enthusiasm.
Four things have changed since December, none of them the R2 schedule.
The Share Count
Rivian had 1,443,948,130 Class A shares outstanding at July 21, 2026, up 19.4% from 1,209,521,515 a year earlier and 16.7% from 1,237,077,289 at January 29, according to the cover pages of its SEC filings.
The biggest step was the July equity raise, in which the company sold 86.25 million shares at $15.50 for about $1.32 billion net, a deal that erased a second-quarter beat the same evening it was announced and that came off a shelf registration filed on April 30, the day Volkswagen paid in its $1 billion.
Volkswagen took $1 billion of new Class A shares on April 30 and $750 million on June 30, 2025, with a $460 million equity tranche still to come, and the company carries a $4.5 billion Department of Energy (DOE) loan and expects a further $1 billion of Volkswagen debt and $250 million from Uber by year-end, so the market is pricing a company that has funded the R2 ramp partly by issuing shares at a quarter of its own 2021 valuation.
Every new issue at a lower price lifts the bar for the next one, and with cash burn guided to an adjusted EBITDA loss of $1.8 billion to $2.0 billion for 2026, investors have been raising questions about a potential new sale.
The CFO Departure
Chief Financial Officer Claire McDonough, who has run Rivian’s finances for nearly six years and signed every one of those raises, steps down on October 30, the day after third-quarter results, to become Chief Financial Officer of GE Vernova.
Rivian named Derek Mulvey, its VP of Finance and McDonough’s colleague of about 11 years across two companies, as interim replacement while an executive search runs, and then lost its VP and Corporate Controller a month later.
The company has also made a fifth round of job cuts since June 2025, eliminating title and registration roles this month, which points to cost discipline but also to a thinner organization heading into the R2 volume year.
R1 Demand
Cox Automotive estimates put third-quarter US sales of the R1S at 5,582, down 31.8% from 8,184 a year earlier, and the R1T at 1,732, down 27.2% from 2,378, so the two models Rivian has sold since 2021 shed 30.8% of their volume in the first full quarter of R2 availability.
Over nine months the R1S is down 12.3% to 17,259 and the R1T down 21.3% to 4,609, and the slide accelerated in the third quarter rather than easing. The two models also slipped sequentially, from 7,402 in the second quarter to 7,314, in a period when Rivian’s total deliveries rose 58%.
Rivian’s answer in October has been 1.99% financing on 2026 R1s and 3.99% on 2027 models, the kind of incentive a company does not offer on a model with a waiting list.
The R2 itself reached 3,456 U.S. sales in the third quarter by Cox’s count, up from 789 in the second, a real ramp but one that only just covered the 3,248 R1 sales lost in the same three months.
A Record Quarter Built on Vans
Rivian’s October 2 release gave a single figure of 19,248 deliveries and 19,751 vehicles produced, a company record, and did not break out the R2, the R1 or the commercial vans.
Cox’s model-level estimates, which sum to 19,239 for the quarter, show the Amazon-anchored delivery van at a record 8,469, or 44.0% of the total, with the three passenger models combined at 10,770.
The same arithmetic shows vans rising from 2,639 to 8,469 in a year while the passenger line went from 10,562 R1s to 10,770 R1s and R2s, which means the record quarter added almost nothing on the consumer side once the R2 is netted against the R1 decline.
Of the 7,045-unit increase from the second quarter in Cox’s US figures, vans supplied 4,466, or 63%, and the R2 2,667, with the R1 subtracting 88.
What Comes Next
Rivian reports third-quarter results on October 29, the last set McDonough will present, with annual guidance of 65,000 to 70,000 deliveries and a fourth-quarter outlook of 23,200 to 28,200 vehicles that implies the strongest quarter in its history.
The company reaffirmed rather than raised that range on October 2 despite beating the roughly 18,000-vehicle consensus, and the low end still requires fourth-quarter deliveries 20.5% above the record it had just reported, a hold the market read as a ceiling rather than a floor.
Rivian also said in July that R2 launch costs added about $100 million to second-quarter automotive costs.
The backdrop is a US EV market that shrank 39.5% year on year to 262,649 sales in the third quarter after the federal tax credit expired on September 30, 2025, with EVs at 6.4% of new-vehicle sales, Cox Automotive’s Kelley Blue Book estimated, so Rivian’s 46% gain came against a collapsing base and a sector the market is marking down as a whole.
Scaringe said last week that memory chip prices are adding “many hundreds of dollars” to the cost of each vehicle, a headwind that lands directly on the R2’s margin case, and the stock reversed a gain on the delivery beat on October 2 before sliding to today’s low.
