Rivian spinoff Also ships late: 4 lessons for hardware teams
Also raised $105M, borrowed Rivian's supply chain and Jony Ive's design firm, and still shipped its e-bike months late. The interesting part is why, and what it cost them.
Rivian spinoff Also has started delivering its TM-B e-bike after months of missed dates, according to TechCrunch. Bikes began shipping the week of 31 July, with the rest of the Launch Edition queue expected to land through September.
I don't care much about the bike. I care that a company with $105 million, a parent automaker's supply chain, and Jony Ive's design firm on the industrial design still could not hit a shipping date. That failure mode is the same one that eats a two-person team in Colombo, just with more zeroes.
🕐 The timeline is the whole story
Here is the sequence, pulled from the source:
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 2022 | Starts as an internal skunkworks project inside Rivian |
| March 2025 | Spun out as Also, with $105M from Eclipse |
| Spring 2026 | Original delivery target for the TM-B |
| July 2026 | Revised delivery target |
| Week of 31 July 2026 | Deliveries actually begin |
| Through September 2026 | Remaining Launch Edition orders expected |
Four years from skunkworks to first customer unit. Two public target dates, both missed. The company's stated cause was component supply:
"A rapid, industry-wide spike in demand for raw materials and electronic components has impacted key parts required for the TM-B."
That is a real constraint, not an excuse. But notice what it implies: the Spring 2026 date was published while the bill of materials still had single-sourced parts nobody had locked. The date wasn't a plan. It was a hope with a month attached.
📣 The delay didn't cost them customers. The silence did.
The detail worth stealing is in the customer reaction. TechCrunch reports that reservation holders on Reddit were frustrated by repeated missed timelines and a lack of communication, and that some cancelled.
Read that carefully. Two separate complaints:
- The dates kept moving. Annoying, forgivable, normal for hardware.
- Nobody told them. Not forgivable, and entirely free to fix.
Key takeaway: Customers will absorb a schedule slip they were warned about. They will not absorb finding out on their own that a date passed. The second one reads as contempt, and it is the only part of a supply-chain delay that costs you nothing to prevent.
If you are running a pre-order, a client project, or an open-source release with people waiting on it, the rule is boring and absolute: the update ships on the promised date even when the product doesn't. A three-line email saying "we slipped, here's the new date, here's why" on the day you said you'd deliver is worth more than the delivery being two weeks earlier.
🚲 Also is not selling you a bicycle
The line most people will skim past: Also mostly calls itself a "vehicle" company, not an e-bike company. The roadmap the source describes is not bikes at all:
- Four-wheel pedal-assist cargo vehicles for Amazon
- Autonomous delivery vehicle development with DoorDash
So the $4,500 e-bike is a wedge. It is the smallest thing that exercises the whole stack — battery, motor control, frame manufacturing, regulatory approval, fulfilment, warranty, support queue — and it does so against paying consumers instead of a procurement department at Amazon. Every screw-up on the TM-B is a screw-up that doesn't happen on a fleet contract.
That is a strategy small teams should copy and almost never do. The usual pattern here is the opposite: chase the enterprise deal first because it's worth more, then discover the delivery muscle doesn't exist. Also inverted it. Ship the small, unforgiving, public thing first. Learn on strangers who paid $4,500, not on a client who can end you.
The uncomfortable read is that this cuts both ways. If the wedge product slipped twice on a parts shortage, that is exactly the signal Amazon's procurement team is now pricing in.
💰 What a $4,500 e-bike actually costs landed in Sri Lanka
For a local reader the sticker is only the opening number. A $4,500 bike is not a $4,500 bike once it clears Customs, and I'm not going to guess at your final figure because it depends on HS classification, motor rating, and whatever the levy schedule looks like on the day your shipment lands.
What I'd check before getting attached to the idea:
| Question | Where to work it out |
|---|---|
| Is it classed as a bicycle or an electric two-wheeler? | Bicycle import tax calculator |
| What if it's treated as an electric scooter? | Electric scooter import tax calculator |
| What's the running cost vs a petrol bike? | EV vs petrol cost calculator |
| Total duty on a general shipment | Customs duty calculator |
The classification question is the one that decides everything. Two products that look identical in photos can land in different duty brackets on motor wattage alone, and that difference is usually larger than the discount you negotiated on the unit price.
Warning: Pre-ordering hardware from a startup that ships internationally means your money is exposed to two independent risks — the company missing its date, and the duty regime changing while your unit sits on a boat. Also's reservation holders only faced the first one.
🛠️ The part that transfers to software
Most people reading this build software, not vehicles, so here's the honest translation.
- Single-sourced dependencies are single-sourced dependencies. Also got caught by one supplier of one component. You get caught by one free-tier API, one unmaintained npm package, one hosting provider's pricing change. Same shape, cheaper blast radius.
- A date you publish is a promise about your least-understood dependency, not about your work. Estimate the unknown part or don't publish the date.
- Ship the small public thing first. The wedge-product logic works even better in software, where the cost of shipping the small thing is close to zero.
- Communication is the only variable fully under your control. Supply chains, upstream APIs, and Customs are not. The status update is.
💡 What this means for you
If you're building something with a delivery date attached, take one concrete action from this: write down every dependency you do not control, and next to each one write what your public timeline looks like if that dependency slips by six weeks. If the answer is "the timeline is wrong," you have a hope, not a plan, and you should either pad the date or stop publishing it.
And if you're the one waiting on Also's TM-B, or on any pre-order: the useful signal was never the delay. It was how long the company let you sit there wondering.
This is commentary on reporting by TechCrunch. All facts about Also, the TM-B, and its delivery schedule come from their 31 July 2026 article.