Rivian R1T One Year Detailed Ownership Review! Here’s What I Love & Hate About My Electric Truck

hello and welcome to another out of spec reviews video you join me at home with my rivian r1t that's right we're in Colorado not on a crazy adventure um but it is time to talk about some crazy adventures and reflect on the one year of ownership of my rivian r1t launch edition uh exactly one year and two weeks ago I took delivery of this truck at the factory in Normal Illinois and it now has well over 30 000 miles lots of data gathered and a ton of fun behind the wheel if you don't want to watch the whole ownership report where at the end I'll see if I you know recommend this to you and I'll tell you what I think you should do if you should buy an r1t or r1s or a competitor product um you know uh the the short of it is this is the best vehicle I've ever owned now a lot of people say that and they've owned like Honda Civics and whatever and then they get a Tesla and they're like this is the best car I've ever owned this I'm really lucky enough that I'm able to drive everything and I've owned some pretty cool cars over the years some of which have cost way more money than this truck and truly this is the best vehicle I have ever owned by Miles uh it's been wonderful and also considering that this is the first product and a very early example of a first product and just how awesome it has held up is really impressive in my mind so in this video I'm going to walk you through all of the servicing history the things I like about it they're things I dislike about it and wish that were improved and ultimately give you my one year review it's not going to be a super long video but I'm just going to wrap up my year for you and then I'll tell you what's next to come because that is what I'm actually most excited about so stay tuned strap in it's my one year ownership review of the rivien r1t I want to thank Chesapeake climate Action Network action fund for sponsoring today's video guys remember last year we did a thing with these guys ccan and it was incredible and literally one of you won a rivian r1t all you did was go to evraffle.org bought a ticket and you literally won a truck and I thought that was the coolest thing so we're like let's do it again and this time the prizes are getting bigger and better so not only can you of course enter to win a rivien r1t or r1s now plus ten thousand dollars worth of charging I mean that you could go a long ways with that you can also choose to get a lucid air Grand Touring 138 thousand dollar value right there or a Tesla Model X plaid you can take your pick when you win the raffle there's only 5 500 tickets they're a couple hundred bucks a piece again the odds are incredible for this I was so thrilled that one of our viewers won a truck last time I can't wait to see which one of you gets to win one of these incredible Vehicles this time again head to evraffle.org and a huge thanks to Chesapeake climate Action Network action fund for sponsoring today's video first thing I want to do is tell you about the specification on this truck what exactly it is and some other versions of rivian that are just now coming on the market here in 2023 that might be worth considering this is what's considered a launch edition truck essentially it's no different to any of the other versions that have you know some options on them it's just there's some little uh cladding in there there was some extra things included with it like the wheels were a no charge option the paint was a no charge option and they had different pricing structures for launch edition than they did for the the adventure or some of the other ones but the specification on this exact truck is glacier white on Forest Edge interior and just to give you a sneak peek of the Interior it's this sort of green interior and I want to talk a lot about this interior and you know the way I got this truck some of you know was sort of a pre-gear shop situation where rivian had a bunch of trucks unsold that would go to employees or friends of employees or things like that and most of my friends got their truck this way and I was like oh cool well let me get in on that action and I did and lucky enough a friend of mine got me in the queue and I was able to get my truck now you can get your rivian right away they do the same day Sales Event in Normal Illinois No Reservations needed or anything like that they are readily available in this configuration which is the large battery pack quad motor configuration so just a little bit more on this truck it is it was really the only option that I could choose from and it really was the exact opposite of what I wanted in a rivian r1t I wanted Limestone on Ocean Coast which wasn't available at the time on the 20 inch all terrains with the skid plates underneath full off-road spec and this is like full Sports spec it had the 22 inch sport Wheels it had no underbody protection but again the launch edition came with some really nice things like the power tonneau cover which has proven to be a disaster for many owners mine surprisingly is still working without a problem and actually I think it's gotten better in recent times now that it's warming up outside so again we'll we'll talk about that when we come to the back but the specification on this truck really has grown on me and I actually like it I really didn't want a white one our review you truck was a white one I wanted to differentiate this I still think we'll wrap it in a livery and a out of spec theme Adventure theme as we work on this build out process but it's been truly great and a little bit of a blessing in disguise have been these 22-inch Wheels compared with the 20-inch all-terrains you see I've done quite a bit of off-roading on these Wheel and Tire setups specifically when I had the Nokian Outpost at Tire on here and there will also be Okie and outpost Nat versions coming very soon in all rivian sizes I believe built in America which is going to be super exciting you know really nice aggressive all-season all-terrain tire but on these 22s I really did quite a bit of Trail driving and and really ran into no major issues I scraped one wheel on a rock but other than that we've had wheels in the air six feet in the air teeter-tottering this thing really sending it off-road and and it's it's done it all on 22-inch Wheels which has just been pretty impressive but that will be changing soon the the other reason I'm glad I got the 22-inch Wheels really not for the all-terrain stuff but it's the compromise of on-road range you see we did a video maybe six months ago something like this where we compared the 2021 and 22 inch rivian wheel and tire combinations all side by side same conditions same day and what we learned was that the 20 inch wheels the all-terrains are the least efficient by far and that's really a tire selection and that definitely chugs the juice whereas the 21 road tires and the 22 inch row sport wheels and tires were actually fairly close only maybe two or three percent in between them and I really like the way these look and I've been very pleased with the tire selection and uh yeah so so I think this is the best compromise and not enough people select the 22s in my opinion everyone gets the 20s and then drives it on the street 99 of the time and you get worse tire wear worse range worse performance worse handling really only get the 20s in my opinion if you're going to go hardcore off-road which is the future plans for this truck so on the wheel topic you know we'll come to what's to come later on in the video so on the specification I've been okay with the wheels the green interior looked terrible in the configurator but when I saw it in person it's almost a little bit more gray and it really doesn't bother me much at all we've done a comparison of the green to the ocean Coast to the black as well on this channel but I really like the combination of everything you can see I have this sort of green texture really nice Rich Wood and then the black accents everywhere the one thing I wish the truck had instead of green would be a black Dash and a black headliner I think it's almost a little bit too much green to go with the green headliner up there but I have to point out a couple things that really drive me nuts in cars which are sort of folding or Rippling of the edge of the seat with leather and also dirty steering wheels now I typically stay on top of cleaning steering wheels and cleaning seats because it's just just a pet peeve to have a greasy steering wheel but I have to say the material choices on the steering wheel has made it very easy to clean it hasn't gotten that shiny it's due for another cleaning but take a look get up in there close and you'll be able to see just how nicely kept that steering wheel has been and again it's been a year as a daily driver I've loaned this vehicle to friends more impressively than the steering wheel is actually how the seat has held up this has to be the hardest wearing seat Edge I've ever seen ever I sit on this Edge unfortunately I always try and get up and over but I'll just demonstrate how I get in the truck because I don't use the Neil function when you put it in park it drops all the way I'm just worried about wearing out the air suspension components over and over raising and lowering I get into the truck and you can see I have to sit straight on the edge and then I can pull my leg in and then I can move over so literally every Ingress and egress I'm sitting and putting full pressure on this Edge which hurts me to do it but what's impressive is there's no Rippling here like seriously come back in and get up close this is probably the most impressive seat material I've ever seen in automotive some of you guys know I just bought that Pulstar one the pole star one has well under half the mileage of this and there's already two distinct ripples in that seat and we are so careful about not sitting on the edge very impressive hard-wearing seats in the back seat we've thrown the dogs back in here taking them on road trips we use it as a utility vehicle we've done nothing to protect the interior truly nothing just the occasional wipe down with leather cleaner no conditioning of course needed because it's a synthetic material and you know everything is looking top-notch Alyssa can you think of any interior blemishes that we're missing [Music] you can kind of see a little bit of a blip right there but it was fully out but they fixed that in a service appointment yeah so just a headliner alignment issue after delivery is what we noticed sort of a build quality thing but the actual seating materials have been Perfection oh yeah yeah very impressive with how well this truck is held up from an interior perspective also a friend of ours Brandon flash who has the ocean Coast interior he's actually selling his truck his interior is held up pretty well as well so I think the general consensus is like whatever rivian's doing on their Interiors if everyone else can just copy that be amazing how is it that a first run automaker this is their first product has such a great interior I have no idea but truly impressive around the back of the truck I mentioned I have the power tonneau cover which the truck just locked itself because the phone recording this got a little bit far away maybe we'll wait for it to automatically re-unlock in a second the phone key is a little bit annoying here we go now it is unlocked and I actually think it's gotten more annoying as time has gone on now it doesn't sound great it doesn't go in super smooth but the Tonneau works and I'll cycle it back again just to show you now on new production trucks they are actually not shipping with a power Tonneau I believe the manual slide-in Tonneau has just started to come in to Market and so that's coming but I love this feature this is one of my favorite parts of the entire truck hitting a button and having it slide in I think it's a real shame that the newer trucks don't have this and if your tonneau cover breaks rivian doesn't have a fix right now they claim it's coming soon but they just you know if yours breaks they push it forward and disable it so then your bed's always open and that's not great for efficiency it's not a huge difference in efficiency perhaps we'll do a video one day not on this truck because I have all the racks and stuff but showing the difference ultimately that's one of my favorite parts of the truck Power Tonneau when I need to put tires or big things in here I can open it when I want it closed and everything protected boom it's protected um we'll get into all the servicing and everything like that but the bed size has been a point of contention for me it's only a four foot four and something foot bed it's a little bit too small for what I need actually so you know I've never had a pickup truck that I've owned I've always borrowed trucks or like my dad's always had trucks and you know I would just be like oh I gotta we gotta use the truck for that kind of stuff but at least here in Colorado we've never had a truck and um what's interesting is how much I actually need a truck after having one I really use this thing like a truck I'm putting so much various stuff back here anything from hauling big batteries around I've hauled my twizzy in the bed of this back from Michigan uh drove all the way out there and my Renault Twizy fit perfectly just drove it right into the bed the tire was just sitting right on the edge here it was literally built for it and you know it's been wonderful to have a truck but I wish I had more space F-150 Lightning or Silverado EV to come has way more space in the bed and that's what you get with sort of a in between a midsize and a full-size truck this is a much smaller vehicle than lightning much smaller vehicle than Silverado EV and you know the compromise here is you just have a little bit less storage in the bed actually the truck just locked itself again because I don't know why but the phone key is really annoying it unlocks and locks constantly if you just come back closer there's two really nice functions in the bed that I want to discuss that I use more than I expected and the first is actually the onboard air compressor there we go the onboard air compressor is right here and I use this to fill up tires all the time and it's really nice I have a hose with a tire filler you can use it for whatever else you want I can dial in the pressure that I want hit start kicks on a compressor it's blowing out air right now absolutely wonderful this did fail at one point they replaced the compressor I think what happened was I drove through a big water hole or a mud hole of some kind Water started coming out of this thing and it sees the compressor that's my guess rivian wouldn't tell me exactly what happened but that's what I think happened on the other side this panel right here is another one we get a lot of use out of and there's about four 120 volt outlets on this truck they're Nema 515s not Nema 520s but it's really nice to carry power with you where you're going my again one thing I would have loved to have on the truck was a 240 volt Nema 515 excuse me Nema 1450 Outlet a full RV plug where you could just plug in a 50 amp circuit to this thing charge another vehicle have a buddy plug for an RV have some serious output power the problem is the rivian's inverter I believe has a floating ground so most even evses or electric car chargers can't actually charge on this they show a ground fault and I have a few that I've either hacked or some other units out there that ignore the ground fault as they shouldn't but they do and I'm able to charge on them but it's um yeah really kind of a weak onboard power system here I hope they have an upgrade in the future where they give us again 240 volt power both Silverado and F-150 Lightning only do seven kilowatt out which is a 30 amp connection I really think rivien and everyone else should go to a 50 amp output I mean even do it through the j1772 port or the feature naxport which we'll talk about as well on this truck just give us some juicy power out you know we got 125 126 kilowatt hours usable in this truck let me pull the energy you out and do what I want with it that would be a huge benefit rather than just a little wall outlets the two wallets back here by the way there's another one in the gear tunnel and there's another one under the screen that's really kind of about it around the back in terms of just a quick tour I want to talk a little bit about what I've done with this truck since we've gotten it so we've done a lot and we're really fortunate where we purchased a lot of vehicles about a year ago kind of all in the same few months span we first got Alyssa's Audi e-tron we then got this truck and then we got the model S plaid and out of those three vehicles I think we've driven the e-tron 5 000 miles like it just kind of around town moved the dogs around we drove it across the country to get it back here we have another big trip planned with the e-tron coming up soon but that's Alyssa's daily driver and yeah really not much driving with that we haven't done many videos with it but a one-year ownership report coming on that soon then we got this truck which is just been the one we choose to drive all the time and then the model S plaid some of you know had just like a bunch of problems and issues and all these things not really Tesla's fault but if you know the story you know the story on that car again a one-year ownership report coming next month once we hit a one year with that vehicle and um out of all the vehicles we're very fortunate to have access to this has remained even including sometimes when we have test cars this has remained the vehicle that I get into the first time every time we'll have to check the exact mileage for you on it but it's well over 30 000 miles and what have we done in those 30 000 miles well again the first thing we did was a road trip on day one we picked it up in Normal Illinois stayed around the factory got to see the factory did a tour met a whole bunch of rivian employees it was truly a great delivery experience one I will never forget we have a whole video of that of course on this channel we then took this truck to Colorado we came back here and literally the next day we went Wheeling for a whole weekend up in the mountains hardcore off-road tearing this thing up in dirt using it as intended and then since then we've just done a multitude of things we've done again a lot of Adventures lots of off-road we've done a ton of highway miles mostly highway miles in this thing we've code on three major road trips now we've towed from here or from Washington what's the city Seattle Washington to Denver with the leaf we picked up the leaf there we towed that back so that did a round trip there it's then towed the Lucid to California our friend Peters lucid and then we towed the trailer back and then we just recently did a whole Towing trip from here in Fort Collins to LA to San Francisco and then back to here 3000 Miles just on that one trip so out of the 30 something thousand miles on this truck I want to say 10 000 miles of it has been Towing mileage so truly I've been using it as a working vehicle for us and uh I guess we'll touch on how does it tow the there's a few um issues with that I guess other than the towing stuff just to finish up on what we've done with this vehicle we've taken the dogs out on road trips and Adventures with we've put muddy dogs in the back of this thing I've used it as a daily driver it's the vehicle again we hop into if we just want to pick up Thai takeout food we jump in the rivian and go over there the size of the truck the power the suspension the interior makes it one of those singular vehicles that can do everything and truly this is the one vehicle that can do it all the spider web of capabilities is amazing and I'll finish up on that point here in just a moment but let's talk specifically about Towing just because I've done a ton of towing with this truck the first thing is you hook up a trailer to this truck and you don't notice it it's got you know 830 something horsepower absolutely insane Towing performance the suspension bumps up the rear to compensate for some tongue weight the whole thing is leveled out stable I have different adjustments on regen I have a built-in trailer brake controller which is really key to have because my trailer has a dual axle braking system which works perfectly with the truck and I've dialed it in where it's all great early on with the truck the towing actually was pretty poor in terms of the powertrain performance we would overheat the inverters on steep downgrades we'd basically get coming down I-70 maybe a mile of regen and then it would coast and we've shown this on road trips before now actually just through some software updates through some magic the truck has so much stronger regen for so much more time that it has meant that my actual range while Towing in the mountains has increased significantly so just the improvements there and what I am hearing is there's going to be a huge Towing update coming to help us with predicted mileage remaining because the gasometer in the truck with the trailer is just so bad and we have a video coming on out of spec motoring this weekend showing you all of this the California Towing trip from a couple weeks ago so so truly it's been wonderful there's a couple things that well first of all the one last thing I love about towing with the truck is up here and that is the charge port location it is key I think to have a front charge port location while Towing at least with today's infrastructure the reason I say that is I'm able to finagle this truck into a charging station get it near a charger and able to actually get it to charge without unhooking sometimes now if we're in a busy parking lot we do unhook because we'll block people but a lot of times we're Towing through the middle of the night which is kind of a trick so that no one's around you don't have to unhook you know it's if it's two o'clock in the morning no one's going anywhere and so that's really the key of travel the downsides of towing with this truck are also quite big towing with an electric truck is it's not what it's optimized for it's the worst use case for the vehicle you get such little range with an open trailer with a car on the back you can pretty much cut our normal range in in half or maybe cut it by 40 percent if it's slightly aerodynamic um so the range isn't great while Towing because again we only have 126 kilowatt hour usable or so compared to Hummer EV if you watch the all-electric family show which great show great show on YouTube if you're curious about camping and towing with electric vehicles we love those guys we're friends with them they just got a Hummer EV and just having that 212 kilowatt hour usable battery pack in that truck shows how much farther they can tow than we could ever dream of with this so keep an eye out for my Silverado EV reviews coming next week I think you guys will be pretty impressed with all of that but of course time will tell to see what you think about the specs on that truck back to the rivien more importantly than the towing performance is the charging performance while Towing you see when we're towing with this truck the truck's under load we're big Power output big regen hits and we're pulling into Chargers low and we need all the power possible and we're doing these deep charges and this type of usage on the vehicle really heats up the battery pack and we'll get to the actual battery pack heating issues is one of the things I dislike on the truck but it the charging performance is truly a hindrance while Towing because it hits thermal limits very quickly we have d-rated charging sessions often and it really extends the time of Towing so that's kind of what we've done with the truck we have towed with it we have off-roaded it we have daily driven it I've used it as an airport shuttle we've done everything possible and again the the real key takeaway here is we have access to a ton of vehicles uh test cars or ones that we own and this is the one that I just have fallen in love with and it's the tool that I almost can't live without at this point or at least a vehicle like this having the gear tunnel for storage has been amazing just to put little knickknacks and wiring and whatever we want to put in there has been great I really wish rivian came out with the camp kitchen but unfortunately it hasn't but we know of at least three companies working on an aftermarket Camp kitchen solution so I'm sure we'll see something coming very soon there so let's get into what I like about it and what I dislike about it and um first of all what I think what I really like about this truck in general is is the culture and the brand and the community and the enthusiasts and the people that you meet driving a rivian here in Colorado we're one of the larger States or the states with a larger amount of deliveries pretty much you know there's probably 10 rivians just in our neighborhood here and we all have gotten to know each other and you know you see rivians at Chargers and you start talking to everyone and we're all in it for the same thing we all wanted a pickup truck that's electric that's adventurous that's not as big as an F-150 Lightning that has you know full true off-road credibility with this crazy suspension system and just meeting the people being in the forums talking to people at rivien at the company it's a great culture it's a great brand and it makes you feel good to drive the truck that's my impression so I really love that that I own one and that I get to meet these cool people out at charging stations or rivien events and meetups and hope to do more soon with the Rocky Mountain rivian Club Etc the next thing I love about the truck number two is the suspension the suspension is truly Next Level and truly insane yes it makes a tiny bit of chirping noise and it has gotten slightly worse since I've gotten it it's something you don't really notice unless you hit a big impact like a speed bump or you're off-roading but the ability to turn this truck into a soft almost Rolls-Royce like comfortable cruising Behavior out on the road all the way to sports car on the track or for a canyon where it can lower down and can stiffen the damper it has hydraulic um uh hydraulic load basically sway bar if you will where the rebound and the compression and the compression the rebound are linked interchangeably on on both sides with a variable compression of the hydraulic fluid to combat roll stiffness or to increase roll stiffness or decrease roll stiffness has been insane I can take this truck in full Comfort soft mode and with the touch of a button hit an on-ramp on a highway where I'm getting full oversteer on power right on the edge of the tire and then go back to a nice comfortable Cruiser that's impressive technology but even more impressive than that is I can then hit another button raise this thing up get 15 inches of ground clearance at the lowest point and then take it crawling and go over some serious obstacles and yeah I mean I've sort of done more than the trucks qualified for I've bottomed it out at Max suspension and stuff and again I don't have the extra skid plates but I've never had an issue even with the factory under body protection and I've bottomed this thing out a bunch so I'm not sure it's even needed for most rivian owners to get the off-road pack with all of that stuff the one thing that has been very useful in terms of the off-road cred is these uh Towing eyes front and rear the hooks we've towed vehicles out our Leaf unfortunately got bricked at a charging station and I ripped it out with this truck and just having the ability to pull and Tow and you know hook up a recovery strap and pull someone out with this has been wonderful I really hope someone comes out in the future with a metal bumper and a winch option I know it's going to be a pain in the ass to engineer all of that but that would be truly wonderful so again first thing I like is the culture and the brand second thing I like is the suspension the third thing I like I got to refer to my notes because there's so many so we'll pause this clip right here because I'm drawing a blank I'll refer to my notes and then we'll come back to it okay now that I'm refreshed I did actually write down the five things I liked about this because I knew I would forget in order very rarely is anything I do scripted but this was the only one I gave myself some notes um the software is huge this truck when I bought it was good but it needed a lot of optimization and actually still does but every two to four weeks this truck improves significantly and even so one of the reasons I really wanted to get the truck was we know some of the software guys at rivien I've done some meetings with them I've told you about them when when there were some issues with the battery performance I was able to talk to the engineers and figure out what was going on and they've definitely massaged the thermal D rating and has improved that massively but the ability for them to basically and their willingness to listen to our feedback here at out of spec your feedback as rivian owners or potential Ravine owners listening to feature requests and constantly browsing Reddit the rivian forums rivian stories watching YouTube videos of these trucks and understanding what the consumer wants in their vehicles and they own r1ts or drive them as well so they're fully immersed as well and including useful new features on a consistent rollout base says has been Next Level the only other company I think that has come close to rivien in terms of listening to their consumers have been Tesla but to be totally transparent you guys know I love Tesla I own two of them I think they're wonderful I think rivian's done an even better job than Tesla at least early on to listening to Consumer feedback and providing useful and well thought out holistic software updates things that maybe should have launched with the truck which is like the ability to precondition and heat the seats and cool the seats from your phone but guess what that came and now it works and it's awesome we have pet mode now which is another thing that I like so here's the fourth item on the list is pet mode or pet Comfort where I can leave the dogs in the car can monitor the temperature and can make sure they're nice and cool inside that is one of the most convenient things on a road trip where you plug the truck into a charger again pet mode came through an over-the-air software update and we leave the dogs in there and we don't really have to worry only one time did the truck ever have a fault and shut down and that was actually I shut the truck down where I did a hard reset while I was in pet mode because we were having issues with a certain brand of charging stations which is a topic for another day and I reset the truck to get it out of turtle mode because it went into a fault state to protect the battery from what the charger was giving it and I instantly got a text message on my phone not a notification from the app I mean yes maybe I did I can't remember but a physical text message came in and said alert the truck has an issue pet mode has stopped return to your vehicle as soon as possible I forget the wording but I was like damn that's awesome because sometimes you turn off notifications for your vehicle's app and I just love that they went nope we're going to send you a text that was wonderful and it worked out really well so I love that feature there's many other things that I love about the truck and really just the the last Point here is you know creative storage you have the front trunk the gear tunnel the under seat storage in the back which is great I guess the topic of the front trunk is I'm always one saying I don't really need a front trunk in a vehicle I don't use it very often and that's very true of of my Tesla vehicles I just don't use the front trunk often in this I do and I think it actually comes down to something pretty silly you can see the temperature while temperature changes have left some condensation in here that's the first time I've ever seen that have you ever seen that I think one of of these was wet oh okay okay we may have put some wet items in here then but it has a drain at the bottom so nothing to worry about um I think the reason I use the front trunk in this vehicle so much more than I do in my model 3 as an example is the power front trunk I know it sounds so silly and it's easy to open and close the front trunk but at least I can walk up to the truck hit a button throw something in there and then walk away I think that plus the size of this makes it super useful now I do have one wish on the front trunk which is I kind of wish there would loading fight the loading height was lower sometimes I have heavy items I gotta lift up and over to get in whereas like F-150 Lightning has a big cutout down here and the whole sort of Grill moves up with the hood I think that's a better design but I still use this all the time and it's really opened my eyes to the value of a front trunk in an electric vehicle specifically a powered one the Lucid is the same way lightning is the same way others coming down the road the road will have this as well I think that transforms the truck so what don't I like about the rivien r1t I guess before I tell you that the one last thing the thing I love about this truck and I've said it multiple times in this video is it's the one vehicle that can truly do it all it's a sports car it's an off-roader it's a comfortable Cruiser it looks great on the trail and pulling up to a nice restaurant it's sort of the again the one package that can do it all the next thing the next topic is what I don't like about it and the first thing which is maybe going to shock some people those who own rivians and do hardcore stuff with them understand this I don't love the four motor system the quad motor and it's been kind of an issue with me since the review truck days and they've definitely massaged it and refined the software over time but I think the four motor system isn't all it's cracked up to be first of all there's pretty big thermal limitations on it we're going to see a rivian running up Pikes Peak this weekend and talk to those guys and I'm really curious to see how The Thermals are performing for them so stay tuned for that video to come but I notice when I drive my truck hard I can get it in Turtle mode in just a few minutes you know if I'm on a Canyon Road and I'm wide open then regen coming in really working it I understand I drive quicker than most people in these types of situations and I'm on the edge of what the truck's capable of doing but it just goes into thermal d-rate very quickly the next and more important topic I can live with the thermal performance of the motors because I never run into the d-rate while Towing again they improve the regen characteristics going down steep grades I think they've done a lot to optimize this system but my main issue with this system is when I get into a hardcore off-road rock crawling situation the system is great when movement is on it does some cool torque vectoring stuff as long as you're moving you know five miles an hour plus I really have very little issues with the system sometimes you got to tell it what you want to do put your foot you know hard down to make sure the motor gets the power that you want for example I had an issue where I was driving on sort of hard packed ice and then slush mud so two completely different surface types one on the right side of the vehicle one on the left type vehicle it's called a split new Surface and the truck had a really actually hard time calibrating where all the power went in this split mu situation and what would happen is if it applied power to the wrong motor instead of the correct motor the truck would actually start to slide quite significantly and I was about that far off an edge of a major cliff and that's when I was just like okay I want a locking diff here because like life is on the line I need the power to get to the wheel with trash and I wish I could have just had a physical locker and not waited for the software delay to figure out what mode or where to send the power the next major topic that really bugs me about this is when we're going low speed off-road that's my main issue with this truck because it's a lot of what we do here in Colorado a lot of rock crawling a lot of Hardcore technical low speed big grades and for an electric motor standpoint yes they make a lot of power at zero but it's actually really hard for them to get from 0 to 1 RPM requires a lot of current to get the thing to start spinning and they run out of steam down low let me give you an example I'm crawling up the front left tire and the front right tire sink down and basically that leaves that the front passenger and rear driver wheel they're the ones that are you know buried up in the wheel well they have the traction as I apply throttle it will leave the wheels without the weight on them spinning and they're going and the truck recognizes oh yeah well we're not going to spin them to 100mph miles an hour because the truck's not moving and they're going so they let them go what would typically happen in a vehicle with lockers at that point would be to lock you know cross car you would lock your axle so that if this wheel's spinning and that one's not you'd have maybe a limited slip diff or a locking function where that if you apply power the Excess power from this wheel would essentially be transferred to the other side um and and you could crawl up your Hill very easy what happens in this vehicle is you're applying throttle throttle throttle the wheels without traction aren't doing anything for you they're just spinning up in the air and the wheels with traction the system isn't sending enough power to get me up and over the hill so what you have to do is go really hard throttle way more than you would find comfortable crawling and and occasionally what I find is if I floor it yeah then it takes a second it figures it out and gets up and sometimes even if I'm just pegged at wide open throttle on a relatively easy incline the truck just has not enough power to get up and over an obstacle and that's why I really want lockers on this truck um some of it has to do with software some of it has to do with truly there's just not enough power for a single motor to get this truck unstuck up and over an obstacle at zero RPM so in those situations what I have to do is back up get a little bit of a rolling start bump the truck into some rocks which is fairly abusive and then I can get it up and over and going and I really did a lot of videos on this we've done this with r1s off-road I've explained this many times there's only so much that can be done with software and they have done a lot and there's different Drive modes and off-road mode profile that you can put it in for example Rock crawl has the most aggressive almost locking like software and that's what I tend to drive this thing in in these technical situations but but I noticed some people who go in the sand dunes or who do some general you know light off-roading they don't run into any issues with this and truly you won't it's only when you get into crazy terrain that the four motor system kind of falls apart and that is probably the main thing I dislike about the truck from an off-road perspective the number two thing that I don't like about the truck has to do with the battery pack and its charging performance I touched on it earlier when we were talking about Towing but there's a couple things going on here first of all the truck only has a 212 kilowatt Peak charging rate excuse me 221 kilowatt Peak charging rates the most I've ever seen go into the battery on this vehicle for a battery this big my model 3 as an example as a battery pack half the size and can Peak at 255 kilowatts is the most I've seen on that vehicle so some of that limitation has to do with this truck using CCS as the connector and CCS typically has a 500 amp limitation in its current implementation today so this truck does request the full 500 amps when I first got it it only requested 450 amps and you remember we made some videos about this and then rivian unlocked the 500 amp charging profile and it's been great to get you know 500 amps into this truck but truly this truck to compete with its competition Hummer EV charges at 365 kilowatts needs to have an 800 volt system architecture it needs to rip or since now they're going to open up to the North American charging standard it needs to allow the full current like Tesla does 670 amps or even above on this truck to go the problem is even at the 500 amp level profile and especially if we go up from there the thermal systems on this battery pack cannot handle the charging performance what I mean by that is I might get one good charging session in a day and then as soon as I'm off to the next Charger on a road trip which is when I use DC fast Chargers when I'm on a trip hopping charger to charger I get huge thermal D rating now early on when when this started happening rivian implemented a software function that showed slower due to battery cooling it was a message that would come up you'd hear the air compressor rip you'd notice the charging would go slower and it would tell you it was because of the truck's battery being hot magically of course we started complaining about that so did a whole bunch of other rivian owners they removed that I think to you know sort of quiet down complaints of people with their trucks overheating so that message is removed from the truck as far as I can tell but I still notice huge drop-offs of charging performance where the truck should be charging quickly now I have some ways to access the data on this truck and I can see as soon as I hit 55 degrees Celsius Max cell temp it starts to derate now what ribby and software team has done is completely changed the d-rate profile from early on I have clips of this truck D rating down to three to five kilowatts basically not charging at all letting it cool down and then coming back up and charging full speed and doing this huge oscillation due to temperature what they're doing now is they kind of pull us back dynamically to about 100 kilowatts that 120. once it cools down then we'll go up a little bit if it can catch up but it still is crazy to me that 125 126 kilowatt hour battery pack hits Max cell temperature and the cooling architecture cannot keep up with its charging performance even today now some rivian owners speculate that my truck might have a specific issue but Brandon flash has noticed the same thing on his truck which is a much newer vehicle than mine so maybe it's a conditions thing maybe it's how we're driving or using our vehicles or maybe truly it is a malfunction with this vehicle but rivian claims everything's fine with my battery it's operating normally the engineers have logged into my truck and we've dove into this issue with them and they're like yeah no we're just going to massage the software I truly think this is how rivians charge because we've seen it on at least three four or five different trucks now my friend Will's truck behaves the same as this vehicle does here so it's charging performance from a thermal perspective number two thing yeah really not into okay let's think about the other things that I dislike and uh I gotta refer to my notes those were the two big ones let me uh refer to notes and I'll get you the last few things I'll Breeze through the next ones the first is uh rivian driver plus has received a lot of updates and it's gotten okay for Highway Driver assistance it performed very well in our Hogback test and it's probably due time to do another repeated update with driver plus the problem for me around here is and especially where we like to go with this vehicle is the driver plus Lane centering function is only available on mapped highways pre-mapped highways and what that means is driving around here in Northern Colorado many roads including our main Highway because it's been shifted from construction is not available so when we were driving this and it's also not available with the trailer which is somewhat understandable but I was driving this the other day down to Denver to go to the airport and like halfway down the highway goes back to the original Road when it was mapped and I was like whoa this thing has driver assistance totally forgot it's probably Ten Thousand Miles since I've used it because I've either had a trailer or I've been driving on roads without pre-mapping it depends on the area of the country you live in where you go but for me I really wish they would just look at the lines and stay in the middle of the lines regardless of pre-mapping I'm not a fan of systems that require pre-mapping personally or at least do it like Ford does it which is they do Lane centering everywhere with blue Crews but hands-free Lane centering in areas that are pre-mapped that's cool because you at least get the benefit of Lane centering wherever you go the next topic was route planning and I think we all have heard the news that rivian's going to be buying a better route planner and integrating better route planning in this vehicle but it's route planning truly needs a lot of work needs some more customization it needs to allow me to get there at low state of charge it needs real-time station information piped into the system that's reliable and that is all great the next and the only final thing that I dislike about the truck and I I really hate to put this as a dislike because it's not truly a dislike but I just wanted an excuse to talk about this last item it's the rivian adventure Network the ribbian adventure Network rivian promised everyone and we were all early on I just did a video on this like no way you can build them out that fast they promised that they were going to put in Chargers in huge numbers in places that would allow us to go and enjoy our trucks some of them would be off Highway Corridor locations some of them would be adventurous locations to get us out on the trails there's only like 10 rivet Adventure Network sites right now and to be honest they're great they're very reliable they're I mean I have some issues with the layout and stuff I made a whole video about it but the one great thing about them is many of them have trailer pull through sites so we take advantage of those whenever we can but the downside is um they're not like deer Trails or anywhere we would want to go off-roading for example Moab huge glaring red flag that should have been the first spot to put a rivian adventure Network charger if you were me out here in the west we all go to Moab to go hardcore Wheeling out in the desert out in Utah it's wonderful there are no CCS fast Chargers in all of Moab there was one it's offline broken and not fixed and rivians want to go there all the time that's what this truck is built for almost impossible to get there drive around and not have to have a hotel with a level 2 charger or campsite so the rivian Venture Network I hope gets built out in more rural areas in places that will allow us to go where the public networks won't let us go and that's that okay so the next Point uh before we get into what's to come and service costs and everything which is rivian adopted North American charging standard they adopted the Tesla charger let's run around to the front of the truck where we can talk about some charging stuff and I'm so thrilled that rivien has gone in with Tesla as everyone I'm sure will in my impression at some point this will be the old connector type and rivien tells me that we'll be given an adapter and we can purchase additional ones in the gear shop where I can plug you know basically a magic dock the Tesla Supercharger into an adapter and into my CCS port and this is just huge news couldn't be more thrilled with it and I just had to give props to rivien that I'm so excited that finally we will have a place to reliably go and charge our trucks because a major downside of the vehicle and all vehicles who rely on public networks are you can't rely on them when you go on a trip it's a little bit of a gamble it's always an adventure you might be able to charge your truck but you may not get to high speed or you may have to deal with you know again d-rated or broken Chargers very often with the Tesla experience there's going to be way more Chargers way more locations and I just can't wait to be able to take this to superchargers it's going to make my road tripping so much more premium okay service costs on the truck what has happened to it since day one it has been in for service five times in the last year and let me get you the exact mileage on the truck because we haven't talked about it yet so if you hop in on the passenger side we'll show the screen as we discuss the mileage and interesting update just happened here as we're talking about software updates the truck says Hey system update ready to install so I can go to let's see about where is the system updates one vehicle connect well hold on a second software has usually got its own menu data privacy drivers Keys apps vehicle updates I must have missed that you know make sure you're not plugged into a DC fast charger this is just an example of what you get with rivien for example how about this I was just literally in this video complaining about route planning now we have the first phase of integration with a better route planner so that's how quickly rivian's listening to our feedback and adjusting right here in real time also an entirely new phone app right here driver seat and steering calibration um let's see quickened response and hot ambient conditions let's see that's very cool so Heating and Cooling improvements look at that driver plus improvements improved no longer shutting off the over okay so it no longer shuts off when you go through toll booths just amazing lots of little things so really this is what I'm talking about they just listened to the drivers listen to the consumers and this video hasn't even been posted but here we are at better route planner so we'll take that off a negative love that what I came in here to show you was the actual road tripping situation or the mileage situation now rivian used to have a tab here that would be all about trips and distance and they've moved it into service and about which is like a settings and about which is a really I would say terrible place to put your stuff for this I think so because we've done so much Towing you can see we've averaged 1.5 miles per kilowatt hour over our 33 316.3 miles that is very poor efficiency but keep in mind a ton of it has been off-road performance driving or Towing when I have nothing on the back of this truck I get 2.1 2.2 2.3 miles per kilowatt hour easily but again a lot of our driving is high speed out here so this doesn't shock me how poor the efficiency has been again with a lot of it Towing we've put in 17 and a half megawatt hours through this battery pack and uh just just amazing to see all of this there was a period in time where this trip wouldn't calculate the energy properly so we have to do the math on this to see if the total energy consumed is the true number or if it's slightly lower than what it should say maybe they went back retroactively fixed that but trip B has been lifetime since we left the factory and there we go 33 316 point three miles in one year now the servicing has been pretty interesting and may as well go for a drive while we're not just sitting in the parking lot and the servicing's been interesting in the sense that there have been five service visits for this vehicle and the first couple service visits were do you want to get buckled up Alyssa okay so camera work nice I always put the truck in high to film it or take photos because I think it looks better with the suspension just slightly raised let's talk the service the first couple service visits were fixes from the factory the truck was news a brand new production line again we had a little bit of rattle from our speaker here headliner didn't totally fit there was I can't even remember what was new but we talked about it in our six month or ten Thousand Mile ownership update something like that going through a lot of those service visits I can't actually access my older invoices I'm sure rivian could send them to me but I wanted to prepare all this for you but my app wouldn't show me what they've actually done to the truck so I'm not sure exactly what's going on in there but really the only repetitive service issue I've had with the truck that haven't hasn't been like a trim or alignment change or something just to get the truck in Spec the repeated problem has been the half shafts on the four motor system again we come back to the four motor system as being a slight problem and having a sort of clicking half shaft situation where they're almost rocking within the teeth on the Hub side is uh it was really just annoying to drive the truck around town because you'd back up and go clunk you'd go forward and go clunk and I had them fix it once and then it came back a few thousand miles later and then I just had them fix it again I got the truck back uh you know maybe just before our Towing trip and they included a new washer in there and a permanent fix and that's been truly wonderful most of my servicing has been me bringing the truck down to Denver about an hour away to have them work on it now the truck has to go down there for suspension concerns I did have a suspension concern and they actually replaced my front less left strut that they said was slightly leaking they also replaced my air compressor on the suspension as well as the accessory air compressor for the you know accessory plug in the back so I have a lot of new suspension components here under warranty which I'm not complaining about I think that's great it helps me because I'm going to keep this truck for a long time it helps me uh you know extend the life of those components if you will and um yeah I would say the overall service experience has been um you know sort of Next Level just the best service experience I've ever had now you could say yes the rivian people know us and know we make YouTube videos and know you guys watch them so is that why is that why we get a good service experience I truly can't tell you I would say overall when I go down there everyone's super nice we can nerd out about cars as car enthusiasts they take my truck in they make sure it's right and then they give it back to me and that's all I can expect or ask for from a servicing experience I have the similar situation with Tesla here locally they're amazing but when I talk about bringing my Mercedes Sprinter in for service or Alyssa's e-tron in for service they're disasters they don't understand electric cars they don't understand the sprinters they're just so difficult to work with from a servicing experience that um you know it's it's truly amazing how the startups have pioneered the better service experience only from what I can share from what I've seen and what I've experienced so they've been great they've come up to my house once which I thought was a cool situation where they have mobile service they always offer but I'm like oh well I'm in Denver all the time anyway I'm like I'll bring the truck by and they have loners or ride share credits that we've used a couple times to ride share stuff because we have other vehicles we try not to take loaders and things like that so they've always been great and we've tried to be as easy to work with for them and they've been great to work with from our side as well um one time though I got a call from a rivian tech who happened to be in my neighborhood working on a neighbor's truck he's like oh hey Kyle I see your trucks on a list it popped up that you know your your home address is nearby do you want me to fix your uh your recall which was on a seat belt issue in the back and I wasn't even home I was like I forget where we were but I was somewhere you know not not near here a flight at least away and I was like oh yeah dude go by the house I was like I'll unlock the truck mobily you can go in and fix it and then text me when you're done and I'll lock it and that's exactly what happened and it was great I never was impacted in any way at all so that was one of the five service visits there didn't even impact my day so I can't say enough good things about rivian service and the people there and their process to and you know log everything in the app it's been truly wonderful and the truck feels solid like again 33 000 miles in a year of pretty close to abuse like we use this truck as intended it's just starting to develop small little rattles in the dashboard and noticed over some crazy washboarded roads but it's been held together amazingly well and again truly the only repeated issue I've had have been on the half shafts and ribbian tells me this new washer fix should really fix quite a bit so um sort of the next topic is what are we what have we done with this truck and what are we going to do with this truck and first of all I hope you saw throughout the beginning and middle of the video when we were outside we've already installed some modifications and that's not going to be stopping again a year to Benchmark the truck and use it has been great now I want to turn it into an off-roader an Overlander a vehicle we can go out and explore ship it to Iceland or ship it to Europe and go do some cool adventures with it and the first thing is this Overland rough racks up here we've done the full roof rack as well as the bed rack system from Sam we have a whole hour and a half long video going through the install process check it out if you'd like those have been amazing and it really allows us a base to start the build process off of and so what our plan is to do is to put a rooftop tent on the back we are going to um you know Rooftop tent accessories dog accessories a whole bunch of other stuff Max tracks up here which we need because in case you might get the truck stuck uh we got the light bar up there from rigid light bars it's just been really fun to start kitting this thing out most important next upgrade will be uh an all-terrain sort of an off-road Wheel and Tire setup we're going to go with Martian Wheels coming soon so you'll see a video about that coming it's a new wheel that Drew is offering for rivian owners built specifically for rivian's built you know forged for hardcore off-road performance I don't know much about it I have only seen it once but give it a couple weeks and we'll have a full presentation available available to you on the new Martian rivien wheel that I think is just going to be next level and also functional and reasonably priced for what you're getting so it's really fitting into I would say the perfect point in the market and I think it looked really cool from what I saw but I haven't seen it with a tire on there yet so coming soon and uh you know stay tuned for our announcement video If you will of course this is a teaser and so that's really what's to come I'd love to get a winch on this thing with a metal bumper when someone makes that I'd love to maybe get some skid plates we have the rock sliders coming from dce very soon uh and overall then it's just about having fun with this thing maximizing what we can do with it figuring it out and going hardcore there's a few different rivians on sale so before if I tell you what I recommend let's just walk through the future versions that are coming the first is what I think is almost most interesting is going to be the lfp base battery pack that might be the one to go for for like 80 percent of people because this truck has a ton of range you'll notice I only charge it to 50 every day because I don't like to let the battery sit High which is a new software function where I can have a slider and set the truck to charge wherever I want again my truck always sits at relatively low state of charge when I'm not using it but when I do use it I use the hell out of the battery pack I paid for it I'm going to use it but I'm not going to let it sit at 80 90 100 for long um so that's that's interesting the lfp battery pack could be more durable more cycle life perhaps better charging perhaps better thermals and a better price point this is again the large battery pack with the four Motors there will also be a dual motor version that I'm very much looking forward to trying out I hope to be able to drive it soon and see if it's better in some ways than the four motor I hope it's a little bit quieter and more efficient which is what I'm kind of hearing it's going to be because these motors do Make Some Noise which I like but like my mom is not looking for a whole bunch of motor noise the r1s as an example so I think that's going to be really interesting to play around with also sometimes the forward Collision warning is a little bit exuberant it goes off for no reason occasionally um yep so that'll be interesting and then what I'm most interested in seeing is what the heck is going to be in the max pack is it going to be truly uh you know 200 kilowatt hours usable what's going to be in that battery pack will it be high voltage how will it charge will it be you know we don't know anything about it and I think that's what I'm holding off for to figure out what to do I think ultimately we're going to keep this truck for the foreseeable future we were lucky enough to have it early we've done a ton of miles in it and we're just not going to sell this one but I have a reservation in for a Max pack that has just been sitting there for a long time that we may choose to go for if it is truly that much better than this truck if it is not going to be that much better next level Tech next level usability then we'll just keep this as the rivien and this will be our main Adventure vehicle but if it's got like twice the capacity twice the towing range twice the charging performance I hope it does we'll have to see um you know that then that's worth getting another truck for those types of situations because I do use this truck well beyond its normal capabilities often when charging and towing that's when it feels limited to me um so those are the versions to keep an eye on the dual motor powertrain should be really interesting the big battery's most interesting to me and then of course the smaller battery pack is going to be the one most people will go for as a general daily driver so would I recommend that you get a rivian after my one year with it well I would say it's the first thing I tell people to go and get when they say hey I want a premium electric vehicle for here in Colorado it's just I've told my whole neighborhood a lot of them have them now like this is the perfect vehicle for here because it's so nice and buttery smooth to cruise around town and we have some poor roads as well nice Model S on Martian Wheels actually not my truck with Arizona plates whoa that looked good um okay so we got some other Tesla enthusiasts in town this week I don't know who that is but that car looked awesome lowering links and stuff that things sat great um I you know I recommend this vehicle to everyone truly it is one of the best vehicles ever and it's just shocking to me that this is the first product that rivien has ever produced that it's built this well it's held up this incredibly well again my only major concern was with the half shafts if that's my only major concern they're doing pretty damn good they've had the best software releases a proof right here in this video when we had the other software release coming I'm going to update my truck as soon as we get home and it's been Next Level having a rivian r1t has changed the way I've thought about getting around and using a vehicle and being able to have one car to truly do it all which is you know I keep saying Next Level epic all these words it is it is uh it is one of those great cars great trucks great pieces of Automotive History that will forever change the trajectory of electric vehicles I think truly a huge impact on the planet because we have so many more people who would have never considered driving electric driving rivians and enjoying them and changing the perception of what electric can do and they've been wonderful at it so I can't thank the rivian engineering team enough for making such a great vehicle again I said at the beginning of this video and I say it all the time the best vehicle I've ever owned objectively doesn't mean that's the one I love the most I love the pole star and I love my old classic Range Rover more but those are inherently really not good cars in many ways pole star ones really just complicated and feels like it's going to explode at any moment Judy has exploded many times the old Range Rover so you know in terms of when I think objectively this is just it this is everything you need in a vehicle and cannot recommend it highly enough based off of my experience so there you go my one year with the rivien r1t it's been truly amazing it's the vehicle I drive more than any other in the driveway and I can never get enough of it and it keeps getting new and fresh with these great releases from Wasim and the whole team and the on the software team at rivien they've been truly incredible so thanks so much for watching this what I thought was going to be a 10 minute video it has turned sorry but I'll at least put some chapters in thank you so just before we end the video you have two items that you said I missed yeah um these little guys the center caps yeah the center caps and we think we've traced it down to our car wash yeah I think it's because of Auto Wash and then it's a touchless high pressure one yeah it's hardcore yeah but they fall off all the time the last thing in the end of it an issue is that this piece right here always catches my hair and pulls it every time and it hurts right you get like one string of hair and it gets stuck in the seat it hurts so bad okay but that's it I love the truck though I wish we could do we need to do a little bit more I want to make it a little bit more dog friendly uh because uh back seat and with the two dogs they want to have the full back seat so we got to figure out a solution for that yeah but you drive the truck almost more than me sometimes I know I really do love driving the truck and especially now with these on people have more looks because I mean these are so popular around yeah um and then they're like oh wow that's a chick and I'm like yeah it's a chick this is a very feminine car in my opinion but uh not to break anybody's heart there but it's stuff well you named it Brock it is Brock Brock The Jock yeah yeah all right well thanks for thanks for that Alyssa well we'll end the video foreign

Channel: Out of Spec Reviews

Views: 119,756

Keywords: Car, Review, Acceleration, Braking, POV, Handling, Test, VS, Comparison, Interior, Exterior, Supercar, Hypercar, Sedan, SUV, CUV, TFL, Redline Reviews, Motor1, sports car

Id: P_QBzK4wq04

Length: 63min 53sec (3833 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 22 2023