Shares of rising electric truck manufacturer Rivian Automotive (RIVN 6.10%), which mostly kept pace with the market in 2023, are stumbling out of the gate in 2024. The stock skidded 10% on Jan. 2, the first trading day of the new tear, after Rivian reported a sequential slowdown in Q4 deliveries.

It's falling further on Wednesday -- down another 4.3% as of 12:45 p.m. ET -- in response to a halfhearted price-hike note from Goldman Sachs.

Hits and misses

Rivian's update on 2023 production and deliveries, released yesterday, wasn't all bad news. The company produced 57,232 electric trucks and SUVs through the end of the year, beating its own forecast for 54,000 units by a substantial margin. The company also turned in a production number for Q4 (17,541) that was a respectable 7.5% above Q3 production levels.

But the news wasn't all good, either.

Production doesn't seem to be the problem for Rivian, but rather getting consumers to buy and take delivery of the products it's producing. Deliveries in Q4 totaled only 13,972 units, 10% fewer trucks and SUVs than it delivered in Q4, and 20% fewer units than the company produced. So no wonder investors were spooked yesterday!

What Goldman Sachs said

Responding to the news, investment bank Goldman Sachs made the curious decision to raise its price target on Rivian stock but leave its buy recommendation on the stock at neutral, indicating the bank isn't 100% on board with Rivian stock.

Why not? Well, the weak deliveries numbers are probably one reason. Another reason, says Goldman, is that it's unsure the company "can sustain pricing and growth [in] a more competitive market," as The Fly reports today. Rivian is hoping to turn at least gross profit margin-positive late in 2024, but if the company continues building more EVs than consumers want to buy, that's going to be a difficult trick to pull off. More likely, Rivian will need to slash prices to move product -- hurting its gross profit margin rather than helping it.

And the EV market is only getting more competitive as more and more companies introduce their own electric vehicles.

Meanwhile, on Wall Street, the consensus remains that Rivian won't earn its first real profit according to generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) before 2030 at the earliest. Investors selling Rivian stock in these early days of 2024 may simply not want to wait that long to find out if Rivian will ultimately succeed.