Evercore Reiterates $18 Price Target on Rivian

Evercore ISI analyst Chris McNally reiterated on December 15, 2025, an ‘Outperform’ rating and $18 price target on Rivian.

“PM Summary – attractive for consumers, not market moving for investors (yet)

Rivian’s autonomy platform is headed in the right direction, though nothing announced was materially different from others in the space or Street expectations.

RIVN’s approach looks very similar to Chinese approaches for L2++/L3 with LiDAR and an AI based driving “brain”, utilizing an End-to-End (“E2E”) approach (vs “rules based” approaches of yesteryear)…but with Western costs/timelines.

The big (lone?) surprise of the day was that RIVN is following in the footsteps of other vertical integrators and is ditching NVDA in favor of a custom built, in-house chip (produced by TSMC) designed to save time (up to 1-year faster development), and long run cost (despite increased upfront R&D spend) and increases efficiency (reduction of wasted compute).

The chip will be capable of up to 800 TOPS (full system ~1600; L3 competitors aiming ~300-500 TOPS) processing up to 5Bn megapixels/second (seemingly more than necessary given 11 cameras at 65 megapixels each + 5 radar and 1 LiDAR).”

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