This Rivian Is Getting The Equivalent of Just 25 MPG: Here's Why That Matters!

tflev is brought to you by flowcharter maker of reliable high quality charging stations for your electric vehicle hey everybody case and I have an interesting video for you today because we recently got a very interesting email from a viewer who said his rivien r1t is getting the equivalent of 25 MPG and in this video we're going to dive into what's going on we've got some great sources we've contacted about the matter and we're going to talk about a potential issue with the rivian r1t absolutely and this is pretty dramatic because 25 MPG is worse than a Ford Ranger on the highway so we need to figure out why this number is what it is so case is going to read the email now from Jordan and we contacted Jordan we talked to him we've got kind of a good idea of what's going on with this truck why don't you dive into it yeah so he says I'm sure you've seen people complaining about the vampire drain on the r1t my situation is especially bad because I work from home and only average five miles a day driving the truck after logging my mileage and crunching the real World fuel economy numbers I was pretty upset with the outcome the r1c battery pack is 135 kilowatt hours and that's the equivalent of about four gallons of gasoline and he says to limit charge cycles he charges his battery up to 85 percent and then runs it down to 25 percent before he recharges it so that's 60 of the battery which should give him about 81 kilowatt hours of battery the equivalent of 2.4 gallons of gasoline now after 10 days of driving he's only gone around about 60 miles before hitting 25 percent he said he's done this test a number of times and always averages between 60 and 65 miles consistently before he hits 25 percent so Jordan sent us some screenshots of what his truck is showing in the trip display and he took a screenshot and from 85 to 25 percent he drove 60.4 miles which is what he says in the email averaging 11 miles an hour that's an efficiency of 1 1.81 miles per kilowatt hour and the total energy used according to the truck is 36.3 kilowatt hours 36.3 now that's a pretty big difference 36.3 because it's 81 yeah yeah 81 right which is a calculated um amount of kilowatt hours that the truck is consuming so where is that 44 and a bit kilowatt hour is going yeah that is the big question and we have some answers to this question because it's something that a lot of rivian owners are seeing and Reporting on and actually one of our Co YouTubers a friend of ours Alex Dykes from Alex on Autos has done a good bit of reporting on this as well yeah he's dove into the problem pretty thoroughly Alex is one of the most respected Automotive journalists in the industry and what we're talking about here is a potential of vampire drain which is essentially the truck running in the background while you're parked not driving it and the battery depleting itself now I actually asked Jordan I said look look there's a pretty big discrepancy between that 36.3 and that 81 kilowatt hours that you're claiming where is it going well and he said that the truck only shows the energy used while driving along in the show exactly right so Alex has run his own test this was back in August of 22 with his own personal r1t he parked the truck next to an F-150 Lightning both fully charged for 13 days and what did he find how much did the Ford lose over those 13 days and how much did the rivian you lose over those 13 days doing nothing yeah so this this is pretty surprising he got into the ravian and after 13 days it had lost 27 of its battery according to the truck's screen so that's what it told him it had lost and then he stepped into the F-150 Lightning and the lightning hadn't registered a change in its battery percentage although he had lost about four miles of driving range so the F-150 Lightning did lose some amount of battery but but nothing like what the rivian Lost yeah so according to the trucks the rivian Lost 27 the Ford lost according to the computer zero percent he also had an ev6 that he ran the same test with it lost about two percent of the battery so he noticed there was a new update which was supposed to see about a 15 in percent Improvement of this so-called Phantom drain right so we ran the update and after the update he still found a loss of about 2.33 percent per day so we actually got a hold of someone at rivian he um he got in contact and he decided to run another test because the employee at rivian suggested engaging something called shipping mode right yeah and this is supposed to shut off more of the features of the truck so that it won't use as much energy as it's sitting there so Alex did a test again over uh three days with his shipping mode on and he was losing 2.66 percent so initially his first test he let the truck sit for 13 days it lost about two percent average per day yeah then after rivian came out with an update that was supposed to give about a 15 Improvement in this vampire drain he let it sit for three days and lost on average 2.33 percent after that update and then he tried shipping mode as they recommended and lost about 2.66 percent so it actually seems like with the update and with engaging the shipping mode somehow the drain got even worse things are getting worse exactly right which is interesting now we did contact Jordan Andre talked to him on the phone for about 20 minutes he said he's experiencing about four percent battery loss a day doing nothing at all and it's worth noting too temperature could have something to affect the situation right both Alex and Jordan are in California when Alex was running his tests it was in the summer it was like peak of 85 degrees Fahrenheit so not really all that hot there shouldn't be that much load um on that battery just having it sit there so uh meanwhile when Alex was running these tests he was running other vehicles too and found almost no loss on a daily basis yeah now recently in January I've been seeing a lot of folks on the Forum also complaining about this vampire drain and this is a pretty serious amount of battery even if you are losing two three four percent right after 20 days that could add up to 60 70 percent gone just by having the truck parked uh Andre also spoke to our YouTube friend Vivian dad he finds that right now the winner parked in a carport he's losing about two percent of battery every single day but these are not small numbers right because we're talking two percent of roughly 135 kilowatt hour pack which works out to be right around 2.7 kilowatt hours which is a large amount of battery um having your car parked and doing nothing yeah and it's worth noting too that for Alex's test and for Jordan's real world experimentation with his own personal truck they had the gear guard mode turned off so it's not doing the Tesla like Sentry mode it's it's not spending energy on that and Jordan even had his automatic lock and unlock switched off so trying to conserve as much energy as possible right now of course rivian has a said they have addressed this problem via software update and that is a feature that they are able to roll out I know there's another one that's rolling out right about now for a lot of consumers and we reached out to Ravine for comment we haven't heard back yet but when we do hear back we'll post the reply in the top comment of this video so we can get a better understanding of what rivian is saying about this matter but this is something which I think needs to be addressed right now rivian works sort of similar to the Tesla Model in that there's no on switch when you get in the truck right you hop in the truck you're ready to go right um and Alex theorized Alex Dykes theorized that there's a lot more systems running in the background in these vehicles while they're just sitting compared to something like an F-150 Lightning or compared to something like an ev6 so that certainly could have an impact but what really worries me is say you park your truck at the airport you go on a long trip or you park in front of your house no charger go on a long trip three four weeks right at some point that battery could get to a point where it gets so low is it going to cause issues with the battery bricking itself I don't we don't have that answer based on the the knowledge we have here but that is something that I would be concerned about yeah it's it's not an unrealistic scenario um I mean it's it can be very difficult to get your hands on a charger at the airport because they tend to fill up pretty quickly so if you have a long drive to the airport and you have to leave your vehicle for a long time it's not unlikely at all to think that you might be in a situation where you get back and you don't have enough power to get where you need to go Plus it just sucks wasting energy right now um depending on where you charge that could be very affordable it could also be very expensive so you're just wasting dollars having your truck do nothing we've got a quick update for you since filming this video so Jordan actually contacted rivienne service the service tech said the remote Diagnostics look fine and that quote three to twelve percent standby losses over a 24-hour period are considered normal depending on the weather take that as you may well let us know what you guys think in the comment section below this has been Tommy and case we'll see you another episode of tfl EV in the near future foreign

Channel: TFLEV

Views: 121,136

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Id: kaReUeOhjC8

Length: 9min 19sec (559 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 09 2023