The exclusivity agreement that Amazon struck with Rivian is ending earlier than the two companies originally intended.
On Tuesday, Rivian said it will now let other companies buy its commercial electric vans. Both companies' stock prices rose following the announcement, which they timed with Rivian's third-quarter earnings report.
When Amazon pumped more than a billion dollars into Rivian in 2019, the online retailer also called dibs on the electric vehicle maker's commercial fleet. Yet, we learned in March that Rivian was in talks with Amazon to strip out the exclusivity clause ahead of time.
Amazon boasted in October that it had 10,000 Rivian-built vans on roads, meeting a sales threshold set by the two companies, but Amazon's target for 2030 is ten times greater. Rivian still plans to stick by a deal to deliver 100,000 electric vans to Amazon, the EV maker said.
It's a lot of vans, but Amazon's total (owned and leased) fleet is enormous, spanning many tens of thousands of semi-trucks and vans and around a hundred planes.