Rivian R1T Electric Truck | Hoist Review

okay so we've uh we've put the uh we put the ribbian up on the hoist and i brought kevin and jordan here you've already seen these guys you know kind of that they're into suspension systems and whatnot so we're going to give you a quick glimpse at what i think is the most extraordinary suspension system i've ever seen period but then these guys they've seen more than i have so anyway we're going to move right along and i don't know who wants to uh jump in first but seeing as uh some of us are shorter than others i'll stay out here looking forward to lead the way in that case um so just at first glance looking under the vehicle um it actually is very reminisce of the uh old model s when it when it came out so and what i mean by that is if you look underneath the whole subframe or the cradle is almost exclusively aluminum extrusion so it's great in terms of quick adaptations as you're developing a program the tools are dirt cheap right extrusion tools and the aluminum well you get to save some weight and still get the structure you need so it's all mig welded but there's a lot of machining and mig welds not cheap either so right yeah and so like and actually i don't know if this is mig or tig because normally for aluminum i'd want tig welding which again um adds a whole new dimension to cost right yeah and to your point sandy vehicles that launch with something like this typically end up with a die casting permanent mold cast something like that to replace it just from a a volume and yeah reduction of weld for sure perspective so um but yeah i mean getting underneath it taking a look at the suspension systems clearly there's a lot of travel if it's not very evident on the video we were just commenting before we started filming the delta height between like the nominal under surface of the body and where the wheel is is probably second to none so the downward the overall suspension travels is very impressive and so on this they have both air and hydraulic systems so that's a uh that's quite a packaging exercise to get both those lines right out throughout the entire vehicle and then to have it function so we have to also mention that we did take off this front skid plate so we could have a look at what's going on here we're definitely not going i'm not letting these guys uh attack my car with wrenches but i do trust uh andrew to take off a couple of things he'll put him back on sure yeah with respect even with to the suspension travel like this reminds me a lot of uh like an m998 humvee or high mobility multi-wheel vehicle i believe the real one yeah yeah so and that's a vehicle that has um you know the cvs are packaged up the differentials are packed up tightening the frame the brakes are up here so in a very similar fashion with how these cvs are evenly biased and um that vehicle also has portal hubs so the cvs come they would come into the top here of their their hub and then essentially essentially a set of planetary gears that drive the wheels but when you look at the ground clearance if you look at humvee and this it's very very similar to like the overall profile of how flat the bottom of this vehicle is and that's a vehicle that was you know packaged around um you know having the mobility and not necessarily around like you know people's creature comfort you know sit in the backseat of a humvee you're like this so there's a lot of compromises in respect to that to where the powertrain is packaged but this is probably the only thing i've ever seen that has kind of a similar profile of how flat the bottom of the vehicle is um and then how far especially in the rear how much down travel that this vehicle does have and and you can really only do that successfully if you will by moving all of these articulation points further inboard so if you were to look at a conventional automotive application where you've got essentially an sla short arm long arm front suspension like this you would see relatively speaking these inboard pivot points on both the half shaft and the control arms themselves significantly further outboard so by moving them inboard if you look at this cv axle this joint here by moving that inboard you lengthen your cv axles and what that does is it reduces the severity or the tightness of the angles on the the joints for the the half shaft so less articulation at full travel allows you to you know enabled by the length of it enables you to have more travel and you can definitely see if you were to look like underneath eric like how narrow these points are going down the vehicle and essentially this is the long control arm is like the only way to get travel out of independent or independent rear suspension so if you look at the the ram trx the ford raptor all those vehicles they get they get wider for a series of reasons but one of them is because they're they're going longer with their their control arms to get the travel because of the inherent like architectural aspects of these type of systems so they cover it with you know wide body kits and things of that nature but that's what they want you know you can if you drop down you know those mounting points you kind of compromise um your ground clearance and you're not really doing anything for some of the joint considerations for your cvs i just noticed that this a arm is touching the um touching the extruded stuff here i've never seen that before either it's closed here's a little bit of it there's a millimeter on this side but it's on an angle so my guess is that it's tighter in there i i tight it seems to be the word it's huge and tight at the same time and by the way i should mention that kevin uh is in the army reserve that's why he kind of knows a lot about what's going on the guard it's a little different oh the guards yeah sorry and sandy in terms of clearances you see that evident here as well so eric if you point to the upper control arm next to the the bellows so it's that kind of like accordion shaped cover around the uh the air shock or the air strut you can see how close the upper control arm and the top of the knuckle are to interfering with that so yes andy you're right they they're not giving their themselves much room for error in terms of build process but if you can do it consistently then you can have clearances like this yeah yeah a mess is as good as a mile right the other thing we should mention too is that some of these uh some of these covers are made out of carbon fiber i think it certainly looks like it and i haven't seen any any markings but uh this stuff is uber strong this is the battery would be underneath here yeah it's interesting so as you go back um they've got some steel some thinner steel shields in the front probably as you go to the leading edge of the battery to protect for stone impingement or just protecting the face of the battery in general then they've got an arrow cover which is also providing a small air gap right if i push up with my thumb you can see there's an air gap between that and the bottom plate of the battery the bottom plate of the battery is carbon fiber right so it's multi-layer you can see right here i don't know if you can tell eric the uh the sealant coming down from the top of that carbon fiber there right so it's giving them most definitely some shear strength and rigidity in the body carbon fiber is not going to give a whole lot so if you talk about global or modal stiffness on a body and white structure this is a unibody this is going to be hugely advantageous to that overall body stiffness number yeah that's maybe something we didn't mention this is a unibody's not like most pickup trucks this size uh most of them would be uh would have a frame but this one uh it's a little different um so let's go and have a look at the the rear suspension a bit so um if you look here you can see that you've got these are the two the two motors for the rear um and then after that we started looking at amazing stuff again to to this rear suspension yeah it's interesting now going to the rear it looks like a uh either a low pressure haven't looked at it too much either low pressure permanent mold casting or sand casting probably the low pressure for the one of this the side node on the subframe so by doing that in contrast to the front you'll note that there's hardly any tig welding right only where the extrusions meet either other extrusions or the sand casting itself but they're getting a ton of feature integration there and plus as this is kind of the nexus for two of your for and aft control arm points there's a lot of load being transferred to this so you get a really high modulus from a big casting like this so it's really good in terms of suspension dynamics just to manage all that and tune your suspension accordingly um yeah and as sandy mentioned you've got your two motors here looks like they went with a uh probably a pur or an eva foam so it's polyurethane eva is another blend that gives you a little bit different characteristics and then they're they're molding into that some harder plastics we haven't got a material designation on it but they would do that for two things and eric if you come over here you can probably see a better view if i peel it back with my finger right so you've got a hard layer and then you've got a thinner foam layer on the outside and then a thick layer on the inside so that inner layer does two things one it gives the part stiffness so as you go to wrap the motors you to go to install it it stays stable or in position as you go to deck it otherwise it's going to be kind of flopping around like a wet noodle it'll be difficult to manage that's one thing but more importantly that harder layer on the inside general rule of thumb the more dense a material is the higher the frequency of noise it's going to cancel out the less dense the part is the lower the frequency so as you go through an rpm range and a electric motor you're going to have a whole range of frequencies that you're trying to cancel out meaning so the driver doesn't pick up on it so they've definitely put some some effort into tuning that wrap and making sure they're trying to address a whole range of frequencies i will tell you one thing in driving this it has more motor noise than uh than the model s or or the three or the y and quite frankly i like it i i this is a truck and it should have some noise um so uh so i believe that i believe this is um i think that what they did was they there we go it doesn't like uh it doesn't like the fact that i'm underneath it i think it figures that i'm being crushed by the car or something but but i i uh i do like the fact that it makes uh it makes a little bit of noise it makes it sound like you know you're going as fast as you think you're going and speaking of going fast uh i don't know if i mentioned it but we're going to put a link to we're going to put a link to the uh a little speed test that somebody has zero to 60 or whatever uh between uh arivian um what's the the raptor and and yeah yeah so i'm pretty impressed um uh this thing basically cleaned uh cleaned everyone's clock well and it's a pickup truck i mean there's got to be a bunch of sad people out there it's interesting you mentioned the motor noise sandy i'd be really curious to see how they arrived at that decision if you're saying there's a a substantial amount of feedback that you're getting in the cabinet not subject no it just lets you know that there's a motor working sure and and quite frankly uh when we worked for jake when jaguar was part of ford and we were talking about tuning the jaguar sound or the harley sound when we worked with them or any other you know any other big engine um we wanted to have something that was distinctive something that let you know that there's a jag or this is a harley or something but this has got a distinctive sound that is not unpleasant at all it just makes you think this thing's really hauling well it's interesting they went with a you know on the point of isolation nvh or feedback in the cabin they've got a hard mounted rear cradle so it's um it's there's nothing wrong with that but it is something that we see less common in all-wheel drive unibody specifically bevs if you were to look at all the battery electric vehicles on the market the i-paces the model s the e-trons the pole stars all id4s they would have by and large muslim would have a cast slash extruded aluminum rear subframe or cradle but they'd all be isolated to the body what i mean by hard mounted versus isolated is if you look at these bolts where they go through the casting and into the body structure itself so right here you'll note that there is no bushed rubber joint in between the cradle and the body structure so it is truly hard mounted so they're not damping anything or isolating anything between the subframe and the body but obviously they'll isolate the motor itself yeah right but at the end of the day if you're if you're looking at rigidity going up or over rocks or even into the mud i want this thing as stiff as i can get so i would suppose that it's similar to that yeah just because one it's a pickup truck right so you're not necessarily sitting directly over this so any noise coming up is going into a large volume anyway which would be the bed itself and the suspension clearly has a lot of there's a lot of calories and man hours into this yeah so uh they can use it to their full potential and get the overall performance of probably having a fixed cradle you know in the rear yeah yeah i'd hate to get the edm d bill for all the development on this yeah yeah this is uh quite a marvel i will tell you um i've said this like about 40 times since i got here today this is quite frankly the beefiest um rear suspension ever so the beefiest front suspension this one's the rear suspension is huge as well um again this uh this has quite a bit of quite a bit of kneeling capability it's all it's fully extended right now but this thing will crunch up to about six inches so uh this is really uh really necessary for this kind of uh this kind of movement in this kind of a car but i will tell you i i know it was a big deal for me to move from a jeep to this but after looking at it and driving around for about a week it's really not hard to fall in love with this and uh and say goodbye to your old buddy um this is really really really a nice car it's wicked fast i i took it up a 40 at least a 40 degree angle um slow and i tried that with the jeep and that didn't really work out too well for me um that the new jeep um i i really i really think that rivien's got a hell of a car here or truck here this is uh if you're an off-roader it's going to be hard for you to say oh i wouldn't want one of these or i'd like to go back to you know an old jeep or something like that there's no way that no way and and quite frankly sue my wife and by the way um my wife is kind of extraordinary a little bit extraordinary she is an engineer she graduated from gmi and then she went back and she got a master's in manufacturing engineering then she got an mba and then she got a phd in engineering so when she says oh i really like it that's code for um she's used all the all the talents that she gathered up through all these years to uh to give her opinion um it's not just you know a casual comment so anyway we're very glad i paid quite a bit of money for this thing but um i think it's worth every penny and i probably this could be the last vehicle i ever buy yeah yeah it's it's pretty cool to finally uh get underneath one and take a look at it you know and it's it's clear that a lot as kevin mentioned right a lot of calories and ed and d engineering design and development went into this thing you know even if you if you look at the half shafts right we were talking about them earlier you'll notice that the diameter changes from the inboard side there's a step down right where my finger is there's another step down right here and so there's it's variable thickness right so you want a large diameter to manage the torque and then as you move outboard and as the packaging condition changes they change the diameter of the half shaft so people like you know we've seen people left hand right hand on the 6th gen camaro go hollow on one side solid on the other to manage axle wind up and different things but to see them do it from what it appears to be as a packaging condition scenario is as good to see they're they're pulling the uh you know major engineering lovers not just the simple stuff so it's very cool so anyway i think uh wrapping it up is that i'm pretty happy that i i bought this i'm glad it'd be nice if we could tear it down but um i'm glad that i bought it i'm keeping it for myself like i say i think this may be the last vehicle i ever buy so uh for me so anyway with that i'd like to wrap it up uh thanks for watching monroe live here on the rivian look at the vehicle kind of thing and no i'm not going to let anybody tear it down any further anyhow thanks a lot guys we'll see ya thank you [Music] you

Channel: Munro Live

Views: 211,829

Keywords: EV, BEV, Sandy Munro, Munro, Electric Vehicle, Benchmarking, Electric, Insight, Lean Design, Design, Comparison, MunroLive, MunroLive.com, ElectricCars, Review, Car Review, 2021, Automotive, Automotive Review, Teardown Titan, 2022, Teardown, Electric Car, Rivian, R1T, Truck, Electric Truck, Rivian R1T, undercarriage, Suspension, Hoist Review, independent Suspension, Air Suspension

Id: v8wCm233fXk

Length: 19min 6sec (1146 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 30 2022