I Spent 3 Days Driving the Rivian R1T Electric Truck!

so i've always liked cars but it turns out i'm kind of an electric vehicle enthusiast i owned a tesla model 3 performance for about three years that kind of converted me to battery-powered cars and i just sold it for a tesla model y performance and look i've driven and enjoyed a handful of other evs i mean there's the ford mustang machi the porsche tycon the volkswagen id4 and others but i just got back from a little three-day press event in colorado with what is perhaps the best electric vehicle i've driven in my life and it's a pickup truck from a company that has never shipped a car before [Music] it is rivien and their upcoming r1t now in this video i am going to give you a tour of the vehicle's hardware and software the driving experience that i had both on-road and off-road and sorry i've gotta say it i'm going to show you some of its quirks and features because there are a lot of them speaking of lots you sure do get a lot of value with setup the netflix subscription for mac 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and i'll get to why in a bit now the car will begin shipping with an epa rated battery of 314 miles and coming at a later date is rivien's max pack which is expected to push that range north of 400 miles now rivien engineers told me that the packs are about 135 kilowatt hours and 180 kilowatt hours respectively that is a lot of battery at slow public chargers and at home it's able to charge via the standard j1772 connector and then when you want a dc fast charge it obviously supports ccs it can even negotiate a handshake to support what's called plug and charge it's basically just like the tesla supercharger you pull up you plug in and you're done no apps no credit card it just works which is amazing that's supported at electrify america and rivian's upcoming adventure network they didn't say whether or not chargepoint will be 100 supported by the get-go but i've heard that it has anyway doesn't matter the specs on this thing are impressive from a quad motor design that brings a three second zero to 60 time on a truck which is amazing to the capable suspension that offers competent on-road and off-road performance this thing looks great i'm figuring that the best way to show you this car is to we'll just show you around it let's start with the front the front trunk now a lot of electric cars make you actuate the front trunk from a screen inside the car or from your app there is an actual press button here which i think is really really great the front trunk opens it's incredibly spacious inside a really deep cavity you can fit a bunch of stuff and then there's even more additional storage space under here for stuff like a an onboard mobile charger and then this which we'll talk about in a minute the front trunk also self closes which is nice and there's 12 volt power in the front which is pretty handy as well now going around to the front of the car there are cameras everywhere multiple cameras on the mirrors on the windshield a lot of these we've actually even used today to view the rocks inside of the path that we're driving which is really awesome a downward firing camera these door handles are door handles that i really like they do self-present which is nice when you walk up to the car but one of the things that i've noticed with most electric vehicles i don't know why is they're always electronically actuated these are just regular old-school door handles they're manual releases there's a regular pull handle inside no special electronics to break which i very much appreciate this is the kind of the halo feature the distinguishing feature of the rivian r1t that's the gear tunnel and well it's a tunnel because there's this door on each side that goes all the way through you can obviously put some gear in here if you need storage you can also fit the camp kitchen and a number of other accessories that will be coming to market and then there's a bunch of little hidden storage features around this entire vehicle there's one here which inside here you have your compressor hose there is a compressor in the rear portion of the vehicle so that closes manually opens manually closes but no big deal here the lift gate you've got a couple buttons one is for your tunnel which i've been told don't push this button yet but it works allegedly and then we've got the rear liftgate too this comes down automatically you do have to close it manually but that's not that big of a deal you have a full-size spare underneath here which is very awesome when you're off-roading we actually needed to use one today so great that it's ready to go you've got your jack and everything that you need to do to change a tire up on the lift gate over here you have your compressor this is a automatically controlled it will detect your tire pressure there's a very cool compressor hose that actually locks onto the stem and then you set your tire pressure and you press go and that's pretty much it really simple then there's this thing they're calling this gear guard and the idea of it is really simple but actually quite clever it's basically you know a cable a bike chain if you will but it's got these little connectors on the end and what you can do is just slide them inside of these hooks when the vehicle is unlocked you can slide them in and then when you lock the vehicle and you walk away these lock inside so there's pins that close around these loops and it makes it so that if your cover is open while you have valuable gear inside well it won't go anywhere because you've got this and then of course you've got the kind of perimeter security features around the vehicle to make sure that when the car is parked it's not tampered with it has a 360 degree recording similar to sentry mode from from tesla vehicles and uh yeah that's pretty much the rivian r1t from the exterior there are a couple features inside that i want to show you but hold up before you get inside the car you need a key and rivien provides four key options yes four the most common as with tesla is certain to be the bluetooth phone key so you just approach the vehicle with your smartphone in your pocket and it'll unlock walk away from the car and it locks easy but there's also an nfc key card that you can tap on the door handle a traditional key fob that also features front and rear trunk control and uniquely this keyband which is basically just a little waterproof nfc bracelet i can imagine this being a huge hit with the outdoors crowd this next part is subjective of course but i think that the cabin is beautiful there is a lovely wooden dashboard with a center control display and driver display firm but comfortable vegan leather seats a 100 recycled microfiber headliner which feels more like alcantara but more durable presumably and a panoramic glass roof it's kind of like a tesla at least from a minimalist style but it looks better to me the interior comes in three colors a white black and green the green is super hot in person that's definitely the sleeper color and probably worth the extra money let's talk power there are six usb-c ports throughout the cabin there is also what in my opinion is the best place qi charging pad for two phones and there's also a 110 volt outlet on the rear of the center console and then oh actually hidden under the center console is the camp speaker this quirky little thing is exactly what it sounds like a fairly large bluetooth speaker that actually sounds quite nice with a fancy little ambient light that you can use to light up your campsite and well pretty much take anywhere you want the great thing is is that it slips inside the center console when it's not in use and it's standard equipment the other really unique quirk is this flashlight torch that slides into the driver's door for charging when not in use take that rolls royce in your stuffy british indoor umbrella flashlights are actually cool oddly there is no glovebox in the r1t but it actually kind of more than makes up for it in the storage department there are these little document boxes underneath both of the front captain's chairs there is a very deep center console which is great and then there's actually a very large open storage area underneath the main display now i'm a little split on this because i can imagine it looking kind of a bit cluttered with a bunch of crap in it however because it's open it's not as constrained as what would be the case if it were a traditional center console so you can fit a bunch of stuff there and it actually makes the cabin feel a lot more open now the door pockets are also very stretchy and they accommodate all sorts of weirdly shaped objects that would never sit inside of a molded door cavity and you can even lift up the rear bench for quite a lot of hidden storage oh and that gear tunnel that i showed you earlier yeah well you can access that through a small but usable opening in the rear seat nice the only thing left of note in the main cabin well other than the display and software which we'll get to later is the elevation sound system by meridian it's it's fine with a bit of eq'ing i'm sure you could get it to sound quite good and i didn't have a ton of time with it but i was by no means blown away on the same kind of tangent it wasn't bad at all and probably in line with decent luxury sound packages in the same price range it's it's good it's fine the cabin interior is remarkably well sealed now there's no active noise cancellation but even with the all-terrain tires equipped on the vehicles that we took out those are naturally going to be quite a bit louder it was still dead quiet it speeds under about 80 miles per hour and i often found myself accidentally going about 20 miles per hour over the speed limit just because the suspension is so excellent and the cabin is so quiet the same cannot be said of my tesla model y which has a cabin uh volume similar to that of a 1981 trobond now if you can't tell i like the cabin in this thing but it pales in comparison to the driving experience starting with the powertrain there is a quad motor design quad motor yeah it is but kind of it's it's two dual motor drive units once it's on the front axle and the other sits on the rear now the front drive unit provides 415 horsepower combined with 413 foot-pounds of torque and in the rear a higher torque derivative only gives you an extra 5 horsepower but almost gives you 500 foot pounds of torque pretty amazing so combined you get a truck with 800 horsepower and 900 foot pounds of torque impressive numbers to be sure but what does that actually translate to in the real world well on surface streets it means that you're going to be fast now rivian says that this truck can do zero to 60 in about three seconds we didn't have any timers but my butt dyno pretty much certifies this number more impressively however is the incredible acceleration in the 60 miles per hour to well in order to not incriminate myself i'm going to say undisclosed speed window it's no model s plaid but it doesn't peter out like most evs in the upper double digit range of which my model 3 and model y performance most definitely do the quad motors also get you per wheel torque vectoring in combination with an electronic roll control system to help with understeer and understeer is something that you would expect given that this truck has a gross vehicle weight rating of 8532 pounds which is insane batteries are heavy that is a ton greater than the f-150 hybrid however i was shocked to find that the rivian r1t does not handle like a truck certainly not one that is pushing four tons and a lot of this comes down to suspension but i'm kind of getting ahead of myself off-road these quad motors become indispensably handy as they independently adjust torque for each wheel which results in superb traction control in rock crawling mode from what i saw i think they're just as good as walking differentials now rivien says that their system outperforms lockers pretty much every day of the week and while i didn't do enough crawling for me to speak to that personally i can say that in regular off-road mode which we did a lot of the wheels had far better slip control than something like an lsd now the best part about all of this however is that the torque control is automatically and or manually adjustable on the truck's touchscreen of course drive units are just one small part of this whole equation and i kind of showed my cards earlier suspension is a lot of what makes this truck feel so special on the car's touchscreen you can change the ride height and the range is pretty huge you can ride as low as 7.9 inches when focused on performance cornering on surface streets and as high as 15.1 inches for raw crawling off-road additionally the suspension auto adjusts and balances when you're towing or when you have a heavy load there's also active damping that is really impressive in all terrain mode we kind of easily absorbed the rough colorado highways as we would in probably a nice high-end luxury suv but in sport mode pretty much everything would stiffen up and provide much better road feel which was great for performance oriented driving and then in off-road mode well i toggled between soft and firm damping through multiple ride heights depending on if i wanted to absorb the dirt road below me or if i wanted to get precise suspension feel while crawling trails as briefly mentioned earlier ditching an anti-roll bar which is not a great companion for off-roading in favor of an electro hydraulic roll control system was a great move obviously when driving aggressively it helps minimize body roll when you're cornering in canyons there was a surprisingly little amount of understeer for a vehicle this big but then it also felt really great on rough terrain in the ride quality department because unlike the model y performance which does have a fixed sway bar being able to increase the deflection prevents the cabin from kind of following the wheel into an uncomfortable or undesired position when you know you don't really want to feel the road now i could go on ad nauseam but i'll end with this i talked to the director of vehicle dynamics at rivian and he shared some interesting nuggets of information that pretty much confirm as to why everything feels so cohesive he told me that rivian like any company has a constant battle between designer engineer and technician and in order to get anywhere there have to be compromises from every side but he also said that rivien has a really good culture of cross-contamination between departments which is something that is is fairly actually unheard of the end result is something that is visually compelling but also capable not one overweight in the other now there are not a lot of vehicles out there that rock massive 34 inch tires on suspension with a large kingpin offset that can use a bunch of torque vectoring and other technological cover-ups to still maintain a great ride on roads cornering canyons but i feel like they've probably done the most they possibly can and in the end i think they've killed it i mean look at the terrain differences between here and here and while not perfect at either one of them it is really really good at both and all i had to do was tap a button on the screen to optimize for a stock suspension system the rivien truly impresses and now to my few remaining driving related experience comments the max regen is extremely strong which was awesome when off-roading because i didn't have to two foot the pedal work and on the highway well the same holds true you'll probably never need to touch the brake in this car because it regens so aggressively way more than even my teslas do and that's pretty much the strongest regen i've felt to date of course if you don't fancy this you can change the amount of regen on screen but i really wouldn't recommend this as this is going to drastically kind of inhibit the range that you can expect to achieve now the tow rating is 11 000 pounds which is between the f-150 and the f-250 which is actually really impressive considering that the even the f-150 kind of dwarfs the size of this thing i don't know why since i love evs but up until i had driven the rivien i had never really considered an eevee thriving off-road but they totally do i mean think about it these low speed high torque applications are where electric motors are at their most efficient we were out on the trail riding all day i mean we started when it was 25 degrees fahrenheit very cold and it we finished with it pushing 80 degrees fahrenheit but despite all of this we used barely like 20 of the vehicles range climbing these trails all day long and i got to tell you being in nature with a car that is just completely silent it's pretty special i mean we didn't scare off any wildlife and we were able to just chill on the trail and cook lunch a good lunch in a real kitchen with the camp kitchen which has an induction stovetop that works incredibly well a four gallon water tank and a wash basin and it also contains all of your cookware and your silverware and your plates and it's awesome and that's going to be increasingly handy as the world kind of continues to burn fires are kind of not allowed most places anymore so the camp kitchen is a great solution that is not just a sandwich out of the cooler and while we didn't do it at the end of the night in theory you could pitch up your tent in about five minutes and just hang out right on top of your truck bed you could be here in the wild for days on a single charge and i just think that is so cool now these add-ons the tent the camp kitchen they are really pricey and they are certainly the privileged way to camp but it was just so convenient that i would be a lot more encouraged to go up for a single night into the mountains into nature versus now where it kind of feels like we need to prepare days in advance for just a single night of camping now let's finish up by talking about the cockpit and autonomy because this is where well i wasn't quite as convinced with the rivien r1t the driver's seat and display screens have a lot of similarities to tesla and rivian engineers many of whom come from tesla were not really shy to admit that they had been inspired by some of tesla's ideas i mean even small stuff like when you move your driver's seat the display pulls up the wheel and mirror adjustments just like a tesla which are adjusted just like a tesla the climate control auto vents were just like a tesla and the excellent steering wheel had a scroll design that was pretty much just like a tesla one area where rivien did up tesla is in the driving stocks they're actually half good both the wiper control and light control are semi-digital in that their state is displayed on the driver screen in front of you but they're physically controlled with a physical switch and i cannot tell you how much i envy that because my purely screen driven model y is really frustrating when it starts raining and i gotta use the screen to turn the wipers on or when i'm driving at night and i gotta toggle the fog lights ugh it's a thing but anyway where tesla really excels the rivian head kind of falls flat the display ui is rough not rough relative to most crappy car infotainment systems but rough relative to tesla the company that they seem to be trying to emulate the display is usable but the animations are laggy the maps were difficult to pinch and rotate the full page design is really pretty but frankly it just takes up way too much space and covers important things while driving it needs work luckily i had multiple engineers admit to me voluntarily that it wasn't really up to snuff and they're kind of just focused on shipping a car right now but that it's at the top of their list of things to improve and honestly it felt honest and that's a sentiment that i felt a lot while i was with rivian and that's a sentiment that is rare look i've been in this industry for 10 years i've gone through the corporate bull crap that you know gets fed to journalists like crazy the culture at rivien is is different and it seems awesome i mean i just talked to a bunch of people that really were passionate about what they did not only did they clearly believe in the product that they had made being desirable but they got along really well with one another especially people that don't tend to get along designers engineers technicians and while they've made a desirable product they were really quick to kind of ask for suggestions they didn't try to frequently hide behind the corporate facing cop-outs that you know oh we're working on that otherwise great they openly admitted false and admitted to fixing them or not fixing them and that kind of brings me to my interview with r.j scoring who's the ceo of rivian and it also brings me to their driver plus system rivian makes no attempt at overselling driver plus capabilities unlike well tesla with the autopilot full-self driving suite every feature listed on rivian.com seems achievable because well frankly tesla's already done it their visualizations on screen are very similar to tesla's but the capabilities of the system itself are not they're really not even close right now they're using off-the-shelf sensors and compute hardware but the entire software stack is built in-house and at the moment driver plus offers basically just rudimentary lane keeping so radar cruise control and the ability to stay inside a pair of lines kinda it's fine but it's nothing groundbreaking it's frankly not even as good at handling lane merges and aggressive turns as my wife's genesis gv80 now look they have the hardware and the sensors over built to hopefully allow these cars to grow into those capabilities and opportunities i mean look the steering wheel has a capacitive sensor to make sure you're touching it right now but eventually they're going to move to an ir based dms which will probably watch that your eyes are on the road and as long as they are you can chill with your hands sitting idle free if the system becomes confident enough and that's really where things get interesting because when i chatted with rj he told me that he's confident that the hardware will be capable of surface street driving but that at the end of the day it really kind of just depends where an automaker is willing to compromise on safety he said that's the singular question he expressed a lot of frustration with the industry he mentioned waymo and stated that it was ridiculous to imply that their vehicles which have hundreds of thousands of dollars in sensors and are hand mapped could be bested by a consumer vehicle that has a limited sensor suite in order to hit a certain price point now rj didn't rule out the tesla rivian or anyone else could get to level three or even level five autonomy the singular question however is how safely do you want to do it and where are you willing to compromise and my sense is that rivien well they don't really have an answer for that themselves yet rj even implied that automakers have demonstrated that they're not really capable of self-regulation i think he's talking about tesla and that governments will have to probably step in rivian is putting the best hardware they can in their vehicles and they're working on the software and they're hoping that they can get to a point where regulators and automakers and consumers can all land on the same page he did share a little nugget of information with me that they're going to be launching a semi-autonomous off-roading mode where the car will be able to pretty much do pre-planned off-road trails with accompanying audio and video guides which i think is super cool because the car is going to be driving itself on difficult terrain that people who don't know how to off-road probably won't be comfortable with and they're just chilling listening that's very cool i also asked the ceo just how you go about launching a brand new car company i mean tesla did it but they built a very few number of cars initially and it was very regional they started out pretty much only in california and then slowly expanded to the west coast as production increased rj told me that rivien well they don't really have in a specific regional area that they're targeting at launch they're going to deliver the vehicles directly to people's homes without the need for a brick and mortar dealership and then demo drives will eventually be organized to let prospecting purchasers well test drive vehicles and decide if they want to buy them and then most service well that'll be done by in-field mobile technicians similar to tesla i asked about larger repairs what happens when you need a lift or whatever well rivian service at least initially will come tow and pick up your vehicle they'll drop off a loaner and then they will take it to the closest physical service center which are allegedly being built out rapidly now normally i would be really suspect about this being successful at scale and i must admit i'm still a little bit hesitant i mean again this is a brand new company kind of but many of my fears have been quelled by the fact that a lot of this infrastructure and fleet development is apparently pretty much already there and that's due to rivien's deal with amazon and their 100 000 electric delivery trucks that are being made in the same factory as rivien's own vehicles the future still holds a lot of questions but the truck itself seems very very good and that's one of the biggest hurdles that most car companies never overcome they've made one of the best cars from day one mass production has apparently already begun the first deliveries are going to be taking place within the next couple of weeks and rivian's optimistic that they can get through their 40 000 pre-orders by the end of next year 2022 and well you know what i i kind of gotta put my money where my mouth is because i don't see how the cyber truck can be a better car for me than the rivian r1t has already demonstrated itself to be and it actually exists so i am literally going to put one thousand dollars towards a pre-order right now okay i just logged into the rivian iphone app and it says hey quinn thanks for downloading the app it will come to life when you complete your vehicle purchase my pre-order is complete and if this is not an endorsement of what i think about the truck i don't really know what more i could say well folks if you enjoyed this video please give it a like if you didn't like it send it to someone you don't like get subscribed so you can catch more videos like this one but most importantly and as always stay snazzy also this is the last video we're ever filming in the office so goodbye office we're moving somewhere new [Music] so you

Channel: Snazzy Labs

Views: 476,757

Keywords: snazzy labs, quinn nelson, snazzyq, rivian, rivian r1t, r1t, cybertruck, electric truck, ev truck, evs, ccs, electrify america, rivian adventure network, offroading, off-road, driving dynamics, best electric truck, f150 lightning, f150 lightning vs rivian r1t, rj scaringe

Id: KS1HdnKG0YY

Length: 27min 36sec (1656 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/ohpaulmichael]

Snazzy Labs is solid, good review. Rivian is going all out with these youtuber reviews this week