Electric vehicle mania has been sweeping the world ever since Elon Musk disrupted the age-old engineering principle of powering road vehicles with internal combustion engines which run on refined fossil fuels.
The original electric car prototypes that were produced long before Tesla was founded were the work of established motor manufacturers such as General Motors and Toyota, however they bore no resemblance to the cars on sale at the time, and were slow, had a small range, were impractical and undesirable.
In short, the desire among motorists to avoid the cost of refuelling their cars with oil-based petroleum products and the concern for the environment were not enough to entice people into plastic blobs with pram wheels.
Tesla then came along and made cars that look and drive like normal cars, but with full electric power, which in some of the models was far higher than the existing performance cars on sale.
The popularity of the Tesla models and the increasing cost of commodities such as oil and natural gas moved the game on, and now almost every car manufacturer makes either hybrid or fully electric cars, with governments looking to ban the sale of new cars whose motive power is solely reliant on internal combustion in the very near future.
Therefore, many new products have gone to market, and one of them is the electric truck range produced by Rivian in the United States.
Rivian is a relatively new motor manufacturer, and its all-electric range of pickup trucks was the source of high hopes, as the company listed its stock on the NASDAQ exchange last year at a time when although the company was 12 years old, very few people had heard of it or seen any of its products.
Its IPO was very high profile, however recently, Rivian stock has been taking a beating.
Just yesterday, during the New York trading session, Rivian stock declined in value by a strong 9.46% and is now at its lowest point since the company became listed on the NASDAQ.
What's more, this equates to a 69% drop in value over the period since the company listed.
There has been a sell-off over recent days, and even a Financial Times article inferring that the CEO of Rivian Automotive, Robert Scaringe, is somehow the opposite in character to Elon Musk as Elon Musk is often held up as the archetype of a toxic boss whereas Robert Scaringe is viewed as “the anti-Elon" for his ‘down-to-earth' and ‘thoughtful’ demeanour.
This is a polarising opinion especially when bearing in mind that Elon Musk has a massive public profile and a lot of influence over all sorts of markets, not just the car market but also the stock and crypto markets.
The Rivian trucks are on point and hit the market at a time when all-electric vehicles are hot property. Even Ford has launched an all-electric F150, its best-selling pickup truck, perhaps as a reaction to this upstart competition.
However, being the antidote to Elon Musk is perhaps an unwanted title when Elon Musk is highly influential and the richest man in the world.
