Ford Drops $500M on Rivian, Gets Head Start on EV Pickups, SUVs

by Bill Howard

Ford Tuesday plunked down a little cash, about 1 percent of the company’s total value, to buy into Rivian, a promising Michigan-based developer of electric pickup trucks and luxury SUVs. This gives Ford instant credibility — at least more than it had lately — in the Tesla upper-crust strata of electric vehicles. Rivian on its own had been…