Would Rivian be able to keep its promise

I am probably one of the customer who was planning to shop for big car and Rivian happened to be in news around that time. The idea of Rivian was promising and it met my needs for a 7 seater car. A fair callout, I may not understand the uncertainties of market, challenges with the setting up new manufacturing units and other tons of complexities associated with delivering the cars. By no means it's a toy, it's an item with heavy price tag and most folks have to fit it into their budget consideration and matching requirement. The need part is where it becomes tricky for people like me and I tried to get estimates on the delivery from day 1, somewhere around October 2021 when it was in news before IPO. The estimated date has kept on slipping, however whenever I talked with customer support they did provided some estimate close to the accuracy of quarter. In the beginning it has been fall of 2022 which was just fine.

  However towards the end of this year the customer support stopped sharing the estimates around delivery and pointed towards some feature that they are working on which would be released towards end of year and the customers can see the estimates on the website itself. I was still hope full that may be if not 2022 then 2023 would be the year when I might get lucky.

   Now the ironic and yet fun part, received an email from Rivian that the customers can now see their delivery estimates online. With a high degree of excitement I opened the website on my phone itself to see the estimate to be   2024 - January- December. Now thats probably a good estimate for a very big scale project however this wide window does not works for planning the car (at least for me). However this was motivating enough that I bought a second car on the same day instead of waiting for that long. The website does says that some configurations (color and all) might be available sooner than later and I can tinker with those to see if the delivery estimates are impacted. I had chose the basic feature sets and don't really see the point of changing to colors with higher price tags. Not sure if it was a delay tactic by Rivian to tire out the people who has pre-booked at the earlier price. In any case it's one person out of the long waiting line and hope it speeds up the delivery for some one else.