Our family is now a proud owner of a Rivian R1S. We're now an all-electric family (on the road at least) with the trade-in of our Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid. A month, 2000 miles, a road trip and a lot of daily driving later, I have some thoughts. Most of those thoughts are interpreted through a lens of a long-time Tesla driver.
This is a "Gen 2" R1S, dual-motor, with max battery. We skipped tri-motor, performance, and all-terrain packages.
Summary
Overall, it is an amazing car, and serving well as our 7-seater, as well as our cargo carrier with two rows of fold-down seats. Highlights include an amazing powertrain, numerous delightful tech gimmicks, and simple-but-effective highway assist. Main rough edges are around the car software interface and app bugs. The clear failure here was the Gear Shop selling Rivian accessories.
Driving
It has power like a modern EV; ie. absolutely insane power instantly available at any speed. Without the performance upgrade, it "only" does 4.5s 0-60. Not quite as nimble as my Model 3 Performance, but you can drive it much the same way. No waiting for long gaps on a merge, you just hit the pedal and go. We did test-drive with the performance add-on - while a fun toy to surprise unsuspecting passengers, it's more than you should ever really be using on a vehicle of this size.
At least from my prior decidedly non-truck experience, it's very big, very high, very soft. Even compared to our minivan, it can feel like a boat. I don't think I'll ever be able to park it well (though full surround cameras do help a lot). But notably it's a very comfortable highway driver. We put it through it's paces with a full load to Southern Washington, and all passengers remained very comfortable.
I thought as an EV driver, I would be fine with High Regen. Wow, have standards changed over the years. Even on the lowest regen setting, you can almost one-pedal drive this thing, and at high regen you'd have to work to even have an opportunity to use the brake.
Highway Assist
As a Tesla Full Self Driving user since beta, it was interesting to put a competitor through its paces. The suite consists of "Highway Assist", either normal or "Enhanced" modes. It's designed to be far more constrained than the Tesla version, only operating on selected sections of selected highways.
As Tesla veers deeper into autonomy, they have taken away more and more control from the driver. You no longer control speed, barely control follow distance, and the car will aggressively and often incorrectly choose lanes for you. It can make highway driving nearly impossible as it bounces between lanes like it's playing Temple Run. You are either on-board with how their AI prefers to drive, or you turn it off.
Rivian is different. You turn it on, it drives straight. You set the follow distance, you set the speed, you set the lane. It won't do any different until you tell it to. It can change lanes for you, but only when you use the indicator to request it. While this obviously has much more limited utility than Tesla's version, it's actually quite a relief to actually have the car do what you want instead of constantly bickering with it.
We did several hundred miles on I-5 with Highway Assist, and went uninterrupted for long distances.
The distinction between Highway Assist and Enhanced Highway Assist is a bit confusing. The former just means hands-on, while the latter actively encourages you to take your hands OFF the wheel via an animated indicator - but other than that it appears to behave identically. It's an odd feeling as a driver to take hands off the wheel, and I definitely felt a bit awkward for awhile. But the car handled it with no problems and drove quite far in this mode. The downside being, there's not really any clear indication when or why you'll get Enhanced, Normal, or no assist. The transitions are smooth and you get plenty of warning, but it would be nice to know WHY some stretches of road I have to hold the wheel on.
Charging
We started with a long road trip, and we hadn't received our Tesla adapter at that point, so we were forced to slum it with the regular commercial DC fast charging networks.
The network with the most level 3 availability in our area was Electrify America. Though I'd heard horror stories, I downloaded the app. Honestly, pretty good experience over two big charging sessions! Availability was as advertised, terminals all worked. Our last session was at 151kW and $0.48/kWh, which compares favorably.
Later, we visited a brand new "Rivian Adventure Network" charger near our house. Even on our branded network, they charged a blistering $0.54/kWh! It was literally cheaper to pay retail at the Tesla Supercharger network. Though they advertised 300kW, we only got 160kW over the charging session. This isn't terrible by the standards of DC fast charging, but I was expecting to get some sort of special treatment taking my Rivian to the Rivian-branded chargers.
We have the max battery, so have 400 miles of rated range - though they recommend only charging to a surprisingly low 70% for daily use. That's still a lot of range for an EV, more than enough to overcome even the most conservative range anxiety except for road trips.
Interior and Gimmicks
Taking a move out of the Tesla playbook, the whole car is tech-forward. Digital dash plus a large center touch-screen. Phone key. Wifi. Built-in dashcam. Dog-mode climate control.
On top of that, it has a lot of the higher-end traditional car feature. Power frunk and trunk. Seat heating and cooling, heated steering wheel. Adjustable air suspension.
A few new toys we discovered:
- Chromecast support! Instead of having to integrate streaming apps one-by-one, you just cast from your phone over the car's wifi.
- Audio controls from the center row. This is quite useful, as my daughter often loves to take over the bluetooth audio.
- An optional add-on: a dimmable roof! It goes from mostly transparent-gray to a full fog in a couple of seconds. This is good on really bright days for the comfort of passengers.
One thing that really stood out though was the lack of cabin storage. There's no glovebox! The center console is average size, and opened by a strangely unreliable button. For a car this size, an almost criminally low number of cup holders too.
Even with "kneeling" air suspension, this has the height of a truck. The lack of factory-provided running boards is a conspicuous omission for a vehicle in this weight class.
Tech Reliability
I'm sad to say, you really feel the lack of software maturity on Rivian, compared to Tesla.
While phone key on any vehicle can have its ups and downs, I feel the Rivian app is particularly weak. The car does not predictably wake up in response to app commands, which is critically important when you're relying on it to leave the house in the morning.
The Rivian infotainment system is not so reliable. The navigation is the most conspicuous, where search will sometimes just break for no reason, requiring a reboot. We had a couple of days where it simply refused to center us on the map, insisting on constantly showing us a part of suburban Calgary. The routing is not as good as Google Maps, and we're often left questioning it. On a car with this much tech, you really do not expect to navigate on your phone, but that is where we frequently end up.
There's definitely a few other small issues. One that gets me the most is that it will occasionally fail to reset the seat position, requiring adjustment before I drive.
While I appreciate the built-in dashcam, it will occasionally fail to recognize to read the attached storage.
Gear Shop
What a mess!
We had some referral credits, which we used to order a ski rack. A few weeks later, a battered box arrives on our doorstep. This is a surf rack! It takes days to get ahold of them, though eventually they acknowledge the error and agree to send the right item. They simply ignore our questions of what to do with the surf rack - we eventually gave it away to someone at the local Rivian club.
A few weeks, an even more battered box arrives, a Yakima-brand ski rack. But they sent us an open-box return! Parts were just shoved into Ziploc bags. We quickly discovered what the returner had clearly already noticed - one of the mounting brackets was broken, making the entire system unusable.
Multiple tickets later, we are still waiting for an answer about what they are going to do about it. It's July now, they've only got five months left to get this right.
