R1T Overview - 2 months later
This truck is the best "dumb car" I've ever driven. Period. It's crazy fast, incredibly powerful, but also has enough space to haul five people and almost two weeks' worth of vacation gear.
Below are a lot of complaints, but I can't stress enough how awesome this truck is. The complaints are only meant to paint a realistic picture of my experience - I'd be lying if I said it was all completely perfect.
Range
We're driving our R1T just as we would any other vehicle - we're not hypermiling (purposefully drafting off of semitrucks, stopping cabin climate, or attempting to drive at slower speeds just for range).
In the city, suburbs, and just around town (in SoCal), we regularly get a range of 220+ miles at 70% SoC, and ~330 miles at 100%. That's usually in "conserve" mode with no A/C, seat heaters, defog, etc.
On our trip to the mountains (~20F, snow, "conserve" mode), we were lucky to get around 240 miles on a full charge on the highway, but we usually charged to ~90%, where we got ~215 miles on the highway. "All-purpose" mode dropped range by ~20 miles. When in the cold, we enabled defog sporadically (climate screen needs work - see software section for some context) but didn't use seat heaters or cabin climate that much.
DC Fast Charging
- After ~10 DCFC sessions, the truck just stopped charging past 33 kW. Rivian says they know about the issue (and that it should be patched with a SW update soon), but it really sucked to be at a 350kW EA station pulling just 33 kW. At that rate, it took ~3 hours to get to 90%. The rest of the points below assume this issue is resolved:
- No plug-and-charge, and you can't filter by EA chargers on the infotainment screen
- Biggest issue so far: the car doesn't precondition for a charging session - regardless of how you input the station into infotainment. From "cold and dark" to a reasonable charging rate took ~45 mins for the battery to warm up - really sucked at the EA station in the mountains. During preconditioning, the charging rate was stuck at ~25 kW.
- Max charging rate observed: 205 kW at 8% SoC - lasted for just a few seconds before dropping to ~180kW.
- Charging curve seems pretty linear - once you hit ~40% SoC, don't expect any more than 150kW. Rate continues dropping until ~40kW at ~85% SoC.
- From 10% SoC, it takes ~40 mins to charge to 80%, ~1.5 hours to charge to 100%
Build Quality
Unless you're looking for issues, the car is fantastic. However, as soon as someone points QC issues out, they're pretty difficult to not notice. There are panel gap issues, panel misalignment issues, trim peeling and paint issues, as well as various other fit and finish issues - with no shortage of small tweaks to be made.
Comparing to Tesla, this seems on-par with their perceived QC issues. However, I'll give them a pass for now. Rivian is trying really hard to ramp production, and that comes with some sacrifices.
We also took delivery of the truck with some missing components (no camp speaker, floor mats, etc) - supposedly we'll get them as parts shortages ease.
Other than the above minor fit-and-finish issues, the truck itself is rock-solid. No complaints about actual powertrain/mechanical build quality. Handled excellently in snow, rain, high wind, and ice.
Rivian Service
Roadside and Service both have excellent people manning the phones. They're all friendly, responsive, and quick to help. Service itself is kinda slow (at least right now). All of our trim/fit-and-finish issues are going to be fixed in about a month because Service is currently overloaded with deliveries.
Software
Oh boy...here we go. The software itself is just "OK". Compared to a legacy OEM's software, it's pretty good - but compared to Tesla, it leaves a lot to be desired. We're on software version 2021.45.x, and were previously on 2021.25.x. 2021.49.2 is available to install, but failed after ~30 mins.
I've seen A LOT of bugs get fixed via OTA updates. No new features, but bugs are being patched left and right - and that's great.
There are a ton of complaints and features that are needed, but here are the big ones:
- Navigation takes the weirdest paths and is just generally kinda bad. Haven't seen any advancements with OTA updates in this regard
- There is no way to see tire pressures - even though you can get a warning telling you to inflate "a tire" to 48psi.
- There's no trip odometer or any info about driving perfomance/efficiency or anything to that extent.
- The manual regularly fails to launch - either wait 5 mins or reboot the displays to fix
- Apps in general sometimes take a while to come up
- Climate control in general needs a lot of work.
- Climate randomly turns on in random zones
- Can't control defog intensity - it's either on full blast or off.
- Climate system relies on outside temp to determine heating vs cooling. If it's 30F outside, but 80F in the cabin, it'll turn on the heater when set to any temp above 30F.
- There's a noticeable lag in some physical controls:
- unlocking/locking can randomly take up to 10 seconds to unlock (with the fob)
- rolling up and down the windows has a strange lag to it (always)
- pedestrian warning system can sometimes take a few moments to turn on once moving
- The app has so much blank space. Right now, all you can do is the following:
- lock/unlock (relatively quick now, still prefer to use the fob)
- check range/SoC
- check/set cabin temp
- while charging: view charging status and curve (but with no legend or axis labels)
- request/contact service
- get current GPS coordinates of vehicle
- Alexa voice commands + road noise = bad speech-to-text (and therefore a suboptimal Alexa experience)
Phantom Drain
In the cold: left for four days, lost ~70 miles of range in freezing temps (SoC dropped ~20%). The car supposedly wasn't conditioning the battery during this time, and we only connected to it once via the app when we were ready to leave. Gear Guard was on, and recorded 2000+ 30s events (all cameras recording, so around 11k videos).
Elsewhere: left for three days in 40F-50F weather, lost ~50 miles of range (SoC dropped ~15%). Did not connect via app. Gear Guard was off.
In the garage: drops ~5 miles/day in LA weather with Gear Guard off and no app connections.
Driver+ and TACC
In the daytime, Driver+ and TACC work alright. Phantom braking is very common (especially under underpasses and on strangely patched parts of the interstate).
During the night, Driver+ has issues engaging. It'll flash available for a few moments, but then disappear seemingly inexplicably. Once engaged, it works fine. They both seem to work as well at night as they do during the day.
It's a shame Driver+ isn't available on more roads (state routes, for example), but TACC is always available. We've taken to just driving manually because of the phantom braking - but hopefully Driver+ will improve in the future!
Rivian Insurance
It's still in its infancy - most things still need to be done over the phone, and it doesn't (yet) auto-deduct my monthly premium. Rates (for this truck only) are far better than 3rd party insurance, but I guess that's to be expected. Services provided through Nationwide.
Misc
Gear Guard records so many videos! Every event lasts 30s and records and stores all five camera angles, even if nothing moved in four of the camera views. Gets kind of annoying, but it's easy enough to delete all the videos if the truck seems fine when we get back to it.
Could not figure out how to get the air compressor to work. Supposedly it needs to detect some pressure in order to activate, but that doesn't really help us when we're trying to inflate tubes or inflatable kayaks.
No auto high beams
Auto wipers work well in the daytime and alright at night (needs some manual triggers)
Rear display is still locked. Hopefully it gets unlocked in a future update!
The seats are incredibly comfortable - no complaints whatsoever.
No homelink
No remote Gear Guard video viewing or alerts - which is fine, but just something I'd like to have.
The frunk open/close button is offset to the left just a little - I can never find it on my first try. It'd be easier to find if it were in the middle of the fascia.
Summary
This truck is just...awesome. Mechanically, it's rock-solid. QC and software need a lot of work, but bugs are already being squashed via OTA updates. Overall - fantastic car, would recommend when major software issues are fixed.
Just as I finished writing this, we received 2021.49.2. It failed to install, but release notes mention fixing a few of my complaints above (namely defog controls and some app launch/transition issues).