Jeff Bezos’ space trip was an ad for a disguised Rivian car

You know those bait and switch car commercials where there’s a touching story about a kid growing up and leaving home, or some other heart-wrenching vanity with universal appeal, but then this is an Audi. or Volkswagen or Subaru? It just happened today, but on a much larger scale, as Jeff Bezos took his Blue Origin New Shepard rocket on a billionaire little space escape.

While Blue Origin’s high-profile suborbital launch was a big publicity for the company’s space tourism business, it was also, unexpectedly, an advertisement for Rivian, the electric vehicle startup Amazon has invested in. hundreds of millions of dollars. From Tuesday’s events, Rivian’s R1S SUV could be seen transporting the crew – including Bezos, his brother Mark, Wally Funk, 82, and Oliver Daemen, 18 – to the launch site while being verified by reviewers, and as The Drive pointed out, a number of R1T trucks were at the landing site.

As of this writing, the Blue Origin video has been viewed nearly three million times, and that doesn’t even include the plethora of other unaffiliated outlet covers. This is a big deal, as Rivian is in desperate need of good PR. The EV startup initially looked promising – with Amazon leading a $ 700 million fundraiser in 2019 and reportedly ordering 100,000 delivery vans, and other big names like Ford and BlackRock investing heavily – but as it is. the case with these hopes of electric cars, they have hit a number of delays. After repeatedly delaying the release of their EVs, they have again moved delivery dates from this month to September at the earliest.

Of course, if you’re not one of the folks who have already booked one of Rivian’s so-called “electric adventure vehicles”, you would have no idea that the company has encountered several obstacles. Everyone around the world who attended the launch simply saw a cowboy hat wearing Bezos and his merry band ride up to their rocket in an electric SUV from a sci-fi movie, and many of those people are now trying to figure out how to get your hands on it.

According to Bezos, Blue Origin has sold nearly $ 100 million worth of tickets for future space tourism flights – and we now know the company can actually meet that. Rivian is also probably racking up new bookings as we speak, but we won’t know until September, or later, if this Amazon-backed company can do the same.