Rivian R1T First Drive reviews

[trailless]

I'm all for electric vehicles and would love an electric truck. I just want one last run with an ICE vehicle before switching. For a daily driver, the Rivian or Cybertruck are going to be amazing vehicles. I'll never need more range during daily driving. Also the max I'm willing to drive before taking a plane is usually around 300 miles. So it would be a perfect vehicle for me.

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[dcmdon]

I was really excited by the independent 4 wheel drivetrain, but there are several points in these review videos where it looks like the motor with traction is torque limited. I’ll try to grab a time stamp (here’s another), but if you watch any of these videos long enough you’ll see a situation where it lifts a wheel and 2-3 wheels are slipping but the last wheel doesn’t have enough juice to power over the obstacle. Each of these situations is remedied by a little bump or some repositioning, but it makes you wonder if the old school locked diff still has some merit in these next gen “off-roaders”.

You are right. And it makes sense. It looks like at each of those points, the individual motor that has traction but is hard up against a rock doesn't have enough torque to push the wheel over the rock that it is hard up against.

 

[dcmdon]

Tesla did this in 2014. They opened one swap location and could change a battery in 3 minutes. They had every intention of opening more but found very few customers opted to do it. Preferring to use the Supercharger network as it came online.

There is a Chinese company, Nio, that says they have 143 locations that offer battery swaps and they have done 500,000 of them.

Range is clearly being worked from a number of angles. Charging, batteries, battery swapping - but we also have to solve the power grid issues nationally.

Looks are subjective. I hate the Cybertruck and thought it was a joke. Plenty of people seem to love it. The F150 is an F150 and has some excellent features. It's the EV that has my dad interested. The Rivian looks nice to me. Exterior styling is pretty conservative with the exception of the front end, and I don't mind the headlights. Interior styling is very modern. I don't get into the sustainability conversation and vegan interior. If it's nice, it's nice.

I'll end up with Ineos Grenadier before I end up with an EV though. And keep my fingers crossed that Porsche, or someone, creates a synthetic fuel that keeps ICE vehicles around.

Swapping batteries doesn't make sense simply because of the cost. a 100 kWh battery cost $20,000. Its just not reasonable to expect to swap these things back and forth when they cost that much. It also introduces warranty issues.

You pull in with your brand new truck with 3 cycles on the battery and swap for a pack with 200 cycles on it. Then the pack fails. How is that warranted? Its a nightmare.

The answer is simple. Faster charging times. If they can get charging time for lets say a 60% (from 20% to 80%) charge down to 10 minutes, then its essentially like a gas vehicle with no need for a 500 mile range or battery swaps.

It will happen. Probably sooner rather than later.

 

[869 KPH]

You pull in with your brand new truck with 3 cycles on the battery and swap for a pack with 200 cycles on it. Then the pack fails. How is that warranted? Its a nightmare.

Simple, you own the car not the battery. Would make the buy-in costs hella cheaper too. Just like buying a cordless drill without the battery is a lot cheaper.

 

[dcmdon]

Simple, you own the car not the battery. Would make the buy-in costs hella cheaper too. Just like buying a cordless drill without the battery is a lot cheaper.

Then they would have to charge you MUCH more for a "fill up" because part of it would need to go to pay for the battery. The cost of the batteries needs to be figured into the revenue model. In other words, there has to be a way to pay for these batteries.

Though as I'm typing this I was thinking that you buy the car, but you rent a battery. That entitles you to swaps and since you don't own it, if it fails, its not your problem.

 

[roth_nj]

Swapping batteries doesn't make sense simply because of the cost. a 100 kWh battery cost $20,000. Its just not reasonable to expect to swap these things back and forth when they cost that much. It also introduces warranty issues.

You pull in with your brand new truck with 3 cycles on the battery and swap for a pack with 200 cycles on it. Then the pack fails. How is that warranted? Its a nightmare.

The answer is simple. Faster charging times. If they can get charging time for lets say a 60% (from 20% to 80%) charge down to 10 minutes, then its essentially like a gas vehicle with no need for a 500 mile range or battery swaps.

It will happen. Probably sooner rather than later.

So a number of years ago Tesla actually built a couple battery swapping stations. It was an attempt to promote the EV uptake prior to the model 3 to solve the charging time issue.


What they found is people did not want to give up their batteries for this exact reason and no one used the stations. They ended up scraping the whole idea.

I’m the same way with my co2 tank for my home brew system. I have a (new at the time) tank and it’s still all shinny and bright cause it just sits in the basement. F off going somewhere where they are going to just try to swap out for some dirty ass beat up tank instead of actually filling mine

 

[DocMike]

I can see this now. EV "Jerry Cans" painted red and attached to bed racks.

Except your numbers are off. WAAAAYYYY OFF.

The battery that makes a Tesla go 300 miles weighs about 1800 lbs. So about 6 lbs of battery per mile.

So a 100 lb battery gets you about 16 miles of extra range.

 

[dcmdon]

I can see this now. EV "Jerry Cans" painted red and attached to bed racks.

So if we assume a 4x4 gets 10 mpg on the trail. 5 gallons gets you 50 miles.

5 gallons weighs about 40 lbs with a 10 lb can. So lets round up to 50lbs to make the math easy.

Then you have about 1 mile per pound of gas and can.

With an electric you get 1 mile for every 6 lbs of battery.

So if you wanted to boost your range by 50 miles, like you would with a 50 lb jerry can. You would need 300 POUNTS!!! of batteries. Crazy.

 

[jeepers29]

They used first build Rivian's (pre-release) in Long Way Up (Ewan McGregorr and Charley Boorman https://tv.apple.com/us/show/long-way-up/umc.cmc.1nv0tluok21c2f8549mdjqdnh?ign-itscg=MC_20000&ign-itsct=atvp_brand_omd&mttn3pid=Google AdWords&mttnagencyid=a5e&mttncc=US&mttnsiteid=143238&mttnsubad=OUS2019869_1-479821460116-c&mttnsubkw=108368349575__8dcB2vbT_&mttnsubplmnt=)
along with pre-production concept build electric Harley Davidson's. Rivian donated and installed charging stations all the way up through South America and Mexico to L.A. Makes them pretty cool in my book.

Yep, I really enjoyed the show and was really impressed with both the Harley and Rivian prototypes.

 

[auxSwitch]

cross posting from general forum:

 

[4MOTION]

While out exercising my Supra.
I saw this gentleman on PCH near Seal Beach.

To be honest, not impressive looking, but nevertheless, I'm a car guy so I guess I like it.

 

[A 2]

Saw this guy in the wild. I was out mountain biking out in Anza Borago state park. I think he was with the Rivian off road test crew. I’d buy an electric truck some day.

 

[Challenger85]

While out exercising my Supra.
I saw this gentleman on PCH near Seal Beach.

To be honest, not impressive looking, but nevertheless, I'm a car guy so I guess I like it.

Yeah, reminds me of the super masculine Honda Ridgeline or the beautiful Hyundai Santa Cruz. I’m sure it will be very popular for anyone swayed by Twitter followers, men with man buns and anyone named Chad.

 

[ilovebikes99]

They are built and engineered very well that I can tell you. Probably much better than our trucks

 

[CMac]

The entire front end is hideous.

Reminds me of RoboCop.

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