From the Daily Caller
Irving Klinsky
Contributor
The Biden administration cut a multibillion-dollar check to struggling electric vehicle maker Rivian on Thursday, just days before President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration.
The automaker suffered a cash drain in 2024 due to generally weak demand for electric vehicles, losing about $4 billion in the first three quarters of 2024 alone. Now, lame-duck President Joe Biden's Department of Energy (DOE) has given the troubled company a $6.57 billion loan to fund a new plant in Stanton Springs, Georgia, according to a DOE press release Construction of a manufacturing plant in North. (Related: Biden's green loan office delivers staggering $22 billion in administration's final hours)
“This loan will help us accelerate the launch of R2's Georgia factory [SUV] and R3 [crossover]providing thousands of jobs to the state,” Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe said in a statement Thursday announcing the loan finalization. “People are excited to drive our new models, and additional capacity for our mass-market products is critical to U.S. leadership in the electric vehicle industry.”
Rivian $RIVN Just announced the completion of a loan agreement with the 🇺🇸Department of Energy to provide up to $6.6 billion in financial support to build the next manufacturing facility in Georgia pic.twitter.com/OhfOulaNms
— Evan (@StockMKTNewz) January 16, 2025
The huge loan was allocated by the DOE's Loan Programs Office (LPO), which received a call from internal federal regulators in December asking it to stop working on new deals because of a range of potential benefits in its work conflict. The LPO has come under scrutiny from congressional Republicans in the past over director Jigar Shah's continued ties to a green energy trade group he founded before joining Biden's Energy Department, and a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation in July found that the green energy loan czar Paid $1.2 billion to an electric vehicle battery maker to support the trade group's “sister nonprofit.”
Rivian lost nearly $40,000 per vehicle in the third quarter of 2024 and has not had a profitable quarter since its founding in 2009.
Rivian and the Energy Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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