Summary: Your author lives in Livermore, California, on the eastern side of the San Francisco Bay Area. My city and area are hot beds for all electric vehicles. I’m guessing that I see as more Teslas in a typical day than either Chevys or Fords. I also see many Rivian Trucks and SUVs. Rivian’s Headquarters are in Southern California, and their largest factory in in Normal, Illinois.
Tesla already had shown investors the magnitude of the EV growth opportunity: its market value was sitting above $1 trillion. The interest in Rivian had earned the company a moniker: the Tesla of Trucks.
Author’s comment: As of mid-November-2025, Tesla’s market value was $1.46 Trillion.
You will note that all of the other manufacturers covered by this series so far are U.S. based. So isn’t Toyota the odd man out. No, not really. Part of this story includes hybrids and extended-range EVs. Toyota is clearly the leader in hybrids.
"Prototypes are easy. Production is hard," Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO would say in the fall of 2023. That's an ominous take for the EV newcomers like Rivian, still struggling to scale up. But here's the rub: EV upstarts in the early 2020s would have it even harder than Tesla, because they faced some additional huge hurdles that Elon never had to worry about.
One is competition. Outside of China, Tesla essentially had a market to itself for a decade. Rivian, Lucid, and others face an influx of new models from well-capitalized traditional automakers that finally bought in on EVs, even if their early efforts stumbled.
