Rivian just raised its 2026 delivery outlook from 62,000-67,000 units to 65,000-70,000 units. The midpoint moved from 64,500 to 67,500. That's a bump of 3,000 vehicles in a guidance range so wide you could park a semi in it.
This is how you announce progress when you haven't actually delivered anything yet. You take a number you made up six months ago and replace it with a slightly larger number you're making up today. Wall Street analysts will model this into their spreadsheets with four decimal points of precision. They'll debate whether 67,500 is achievable or conservative. They'll publish price targets based on production capacity that doesn't exist for demand they can't quantify.
Lucid missed expectations for the second quarter. This matters even less than Rivian's guidance raise, which is saying something. Expectations for Lucid were already so low they required a bathysphere to locate. Missing them anyway takes a special kind of commitment to disappointment.
Retail traders are currently deciding whether to buy Rivian calls because the outlook improved or Lucid puts because analysts are sad. Both groups will lose money. The Rivian buyers will discover that raising guidance from "almost nothing" to "slightly more than almost nothing" does not justify a market cap the size of a small European nation. The Lucid shorts will get squeezed when some analyst upgrades the stock from Sell to Hold and the algos treat it like the Sermon on the Mount.
None of this has anything to do with whether either company will exist in five years. The delivery outlook for 2026 is a joke told in 2026 about predictions made in 2024. By the time we get there, Rivian will have revised this number six more times and Lucid will have missed expectations so consistently that missing them becomes the expectation.
The funniest part is someone's going to trade on this information like it means something.
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