The Rivian R1T Pick-up Is Your Passport to an Electric Adventure

Rivian is the only electric I would consider buying. 0 to 60 times, and top speeds no longer get me excited, my lowly GTO can get me into plenty of trouble very quickly if I wanted, and it's a slug by modern metrics. I just want something well built, reliable, fun and able to hold its own in traffic. So far Rivian looks to be checking most of those boxes.
 
I'm excited for this. I have no idea what their pre-order situation is like but I have a feeling this truck will sell like wildfire.
 
I've been interested in how this truck would do since they first started talking about it a few years ago. I've always dug the look, glad its not vaporware. Not like I'll ever be affording one, but hey.
 

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Originally from r/Rivian

This is what the OP said

Disclaimer: I’m a big fan of Rivian and the vehicles they are producing and have been following them since I first saw them at the LA auto show in 2018.

I work right next to Rivian’s west coast office and see RJ, the trucks, and the Amazon delivery vans all the time. I think they’re awesome but just wanted to post this for other enthusiasts out there to take a look.

Not sure if it was throttle malfunction, failure of the brakes, or the guys driving it were just having too much fun on the straight away and braked too late. Cops were everywhere trying to disperse people so I didn’t have much luck asking any of the engineers who were driving.

This just happened about 30 mins ago.

Edit: brake, not break. But I guess both apply to this situation.

From The Drive article

Unfortunately, yesterday in California another R1T still clad in testing camo drove up an embankment and into a parked Ford Explorer (to much less fanfare) in what appears to be the first crash of a Rivian on public roads. At such an important moment in the company's history, a public crack-up like this has attracted a lot of attention and no small amount of speculation. In a statement to The Drive, Rivian confirmed the incident involving a prototype R1T, claiming the crash was the result of driver error, the driver (a company employee) is unharmed and that all safety systems "worked as intended."

Still, there's a lot to unpack. The crash took place near Rivian's offices in a business park outside Irvine, California (here's a link to the map). Based on photos from the scene and the trajectory of the truck, it appears the prototype R1T was headed south on Myford Road—a long, four-lane straight—when it failed to navigate a 90-degree turn at the end of the street and plowed wide into an adjacent parking lot, punting that poor Explorer out of its parking space and making contact with a Mercedes S-Class. Whether "driver error" means excessive speed, inattention or something else, we can't say. Obviously, a crash caused by a mechanical issue could have significant implications as the company rolls out the production R1T. While we can't verify Rivian's claim, the circumstances do point to human error.
 
So is it safe to assume that the Explorer was parked in that spot? And that the left-front corner of the Rivian hit the Explorer? Looks like the Rivian came down off the top rope as well.

If that's the case then why is there basically no damage to the Rivian and all the damage to the Explorer lmao. The Rivian looks like its lower plastic cladding got a bit scuffed while the Explorer is completely destroyed.
 
Okay, so,... I could buy one of these, do some off-road mountain climbing, go to a drag strip and beat some muscle cars, go to a circuit and do a track day, by changing the tyres and lowering the "air" suspension and go to work the next day, using the same truck?
 
He mentions 34 inch tires...what size are these things? A 33 for my Toyota is 285/70-17 which is pretty big. In my opinion the Rivian's wheels are at least an inch too big to have enough sidewall for hardcore off-roading so I wonder if they can fit smaller wheels. 18s would be perfect, and with 35 inch tires it would be impressively capable. Like, Sasquatch-capable.
 

The S-1 document provides a first look at Rivian’s financial data and other insights into the company as well as the risks and opportunities it faces.

Rivian reported a net loss of $426 million in 2019. Those losses more than doubled to $1 billion as the company built out its factory in Normal, Illinois, prepared to begin producing its R1T pickup truck and R1S SUV and expanded its workforce. The company now employs more than 8,000 people across several facilities in California, Michigan, Illinois and the UK.

The numbers have steepened since then. Rivian posted a net loss of $994 million in the first half of 2021 alone, far more than double its $377 million net loss the company posted in the same period of 2020.

Rivian also disclosed its long-tern business strategies, its plan to first sell its EVs and the United States and Canada and then soon expand to Western Europe. Sales in Asia will follow. Rivian said in its S-1 that it will build local facilities to support growth into those new markets.

Rivian also disclosed it had 48,390 preorders for its R1T pickup trucks and R1S SUVs in the United States and Canada as of September. Pre-orders, which requires a refundable $1,000 deposit, don’t always convert to sales. However, they can provide an indication of demand for the product.
 
I'm gonna look at the trends for that IPO in the first few days and see what happens. The company is going places for sure. Lucid is the only reason my "portfolio" is positive right now. In the future I plan to invest in all these American startup EV brands, screw the legacies.

Also, that little tidbit you quoted seems to ignore the fact that Rivian has an Amazon contract to produce delivery vans, 100,000 of them by 2030. Rivian is going big places, I guarantee it.
 
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Also, that little tidbit you quoted seems to ignore the fact that Rivian has an Amazon contract to produce delivery vans, 100,000 of them by 2030. Rivian is going big places, I guarantee it.
Oh yeah definitely. It is interesting the article mostly ignored Amazon while covering their losses.

Speaking of Amazon


There’s a clear recognition inside Rivian and with its investors that the van for Amazon is a priority and the pickup a sideshow until production can be ramped up to meaningful volumes. The deal gives Rivian visibility and guaranteed revenue, along with a deadline. An all-hands-on-deck edict has been issued to get the project up to speed — for now, the R1T is taking a back seat.

Rivian’s most immediate goal is to deliver 300 vans to Amazon by year-end, according to people familiar with the deal. The first 10,000 units are due by the end of 2022. The full order of 100,000 vans is due by the end of the decade. The vans, in different configurations, are principally for last-mile delivery. Each will have a range of up to 150 miles on a charge.

Over the summer, Scaringe fast-tracked testing on the R1T pickup to clear the decks for accelerated van production in the fall. In September, the company’s efforts refocused on building what is known internally as the Rivian Prime Van. The pickup is being produced in steady but modest numbers, according to people familiar with the plan.

The pickup has also faced multiple delays since the global coronavirus pandemic hit, most recently attributed to a global computer chip shortage. Rivian has promised each buyer a human point of contact, dubbed an “ambassador,” to set expectations before the vehicle is delivered. But to date that PR army has had little positive news to report.

[...]

The deal between the two companies is stacked in Amazon’s favor. Rivian's Oct. 1 filing details that Amazon’s logistics unit is not bound to buy any electric delivery vehicles from Rivian — and that it can still work with any other potential automotive partners it chooses.

Quantifying how much of a boost the Amazon deal will be to Rivian is tricky, as the specifics have never been disclosed. The unknown price of each van is just one part of the equation. The agreement between the two companies also includes provisions for recurring revenue for fleet management, such as software updates and running diagnostics, people familiar with the matter said.
 
Mmm, look at the subtle chamfers around the light and grille edges on the R1T. Mmm, good design. Even the van has larger, simpler chamfers but it still has them. That said, it does involve more complex manufacturing so you'd expect it less on a delivery van than on a Mercedes EQS premium vehicle.

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Edit: Apparently the headlights on the Van are also inset, but like the Defender you can't tell because the whole fascia is glossy.
 
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(language warning)

Laura Schwab left her position as President at Aston Martin to work at Rivian as VP of Sales and Marketing only to be fired after reporting gender discrimination to HR.

Rivian publicly boasts about its culture, so it was a crushing blow when I joined the company and almost immediately experienced a toxic bro culture that marginalizes women and contributes to the company making mistakes. I raised concerns to HR about the gender discrimination from my manager, the “boys club” culture, and the impact it was having on me, my team, and the company. Two days later, my boss fired me.

[...]

The culture at Rivian was carefully cultivated, but not in the manner it was advertised. Rivian in many ways resembled other automotive companies, dominated by men at the top; however, the most striking difference between Rivian and the other companies where I had worked was a lack of automotive experience among the other executives. The company’s founder, R.J. Scaringe, was clearly and literally in the driver’s seat, and he surrounded himself with a tight knit group of men who constantly had his ear. Many of these men had worked together before or hired one another and had created their own “boys’ club”.

The bro culture affected how the most important decisions were being made at the company. Despite my 20 years of auto experience, and my position as VP of Sales and Marketing, I was excluded from crucial meetings that impacted our mission and my team. Time and time again, I raised concerns regarding vehicle pricing and manufacturing deadlines, but no one listened, even though I have extensive experience launching and pricing vehicles. It wasn’t until my (often less experienced) male colleagues raised the exact same ideas that the Chief Growth Officer (internally called Chief Commercial Officer) would respond. Never in my years in the auto industry had I experienced such blatant marginalization.

Exclusion became a pattern, and I was left out of countless meetings where business needs and my role dictate that I should have been present. I thought that my years of experience and my deep knowledge and expertise had earned me a spot at the table, but at Rivian it did not. While my male colleagues sat in the meeting room without me, I could not even schedule one on one meetings with my boss the Chief Growth Officer. He told me he would only communicate with me by instant messenger and that would be outside office hours, ‘late in the evening’.

Finally, I asked another female senior executive to please include me in meetings regarding sales planning and volumes, which were key to my work leading the sales and marketing organization. I was stunned when she informed me that she was also excluded from these meetings, which were key to her role as well. It is unbelievable that two high-level female executives would be left out of these meetings directly impacting their work. This was not the culture that Rivian prided itself on, and I realized that to change it I needed to raise my voice.

[...]

I pointed out that there was no coincidence in my firing and my raising concerns of bro culture and gender discrimination just two days earlier. The very person I had flagged as promoting the discriminatory culture was the person who terminated me.

 
first independent testing of the Rivian R1T



0 - 60 in 3.5 sec

quarter mile in 11.9 sec @ 109 mph

60 - 0 in 117 ft

they achieved a 317 mile range (equal to long range Model Y), but it's the least efficient EV that they've tested



The euphoria around Rivian kicked into overdrive Wednesday as it debuted as a publicly traded company, with an opening share price of $106.75.

If that sticks, it would give Rivian an implied valuation of $90 billion. The opening trade was nearly 37% higher than its listed IPO price of $78. That absolute eye-popping number makes Rivian one of the largest IPOs in U.S. history and puts its market cap above GM as well as one of its backers, Ford (GM’s market cap is $86.31 billion; Ford’s is $78.2 billion).

That share price continued to rise after it began trading around 1 pm ET, hitting as high as $119 a share before falling to about $112.



Fortune reports Rivian shares hit Wall Street on Wednesday at $106.75 apiece, well above the expected $78, and they eventually peaked at roughly $119 per. In total, it raised $11.9 billion. That makes Rivian's IPO the largest since May 2012, when Facebook raised $16 billion in what remains the biggest IPO of all time. Rivian's IPO boosts its estimated value to more than $100 billion, far more than any of Detroit's legacy carmakers, with market caps of $85 billion, $80 billion, and $63.65 billion for GM, Ford, and Stellantis respectively.

This makes Rivian the second highest-valued U.S. carmaker behind Tesla, at over $1 trillion.

[...]

Despite reduced involvement from Ford, criticism of the company's human rights commitments, and allegations of a sexist work culture, Rivian's IPO likely proceeded so well due to a combination of positive reception to its electric R1T pickup and its close ties with Amazon.
 
they achieved a 317 mile range (equal to long range Model Y), but it's the least efficient EV that they've tested
That's pretty much expected. Every truck-like EV is going to suffer enormously from aerodynamics and tire friction.

I'm just glad I snagged a couple stocks below opening price. To the moon we go.
 
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Just came across these videos. (part 3 coming soon) A bit long, but not a bad watch if you have the time. The main reason I clicked is because I saw my home town in the first video thumbnail so it got my attention. A couple takeaways I got from them:
  1. We still need to work on the amount of chargers that are available to the general public. They're making this big EV push and there are just simply not enough chargers, and some of them are in really weird places. I would concentrate on placing fast chargers along most major highways for starters. Then concentrate on making sure there are chargers within ~250 miles of each other. Not everyone travels on the major highways, as shown in these videos.
  2. As the guy in the videos is finding out, for some reason the EV America chargers are limiting how much they output for some reason. And then there was the one charger in Utah that said it was sharing with the other charger that did not have a car plugged in. Made me feel like they were purposely limiting the output.


 
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@R1600Turbo I've also watched his other video where he compared this thing off-road to an old GX and a new Frontier. Both conventional trucks did better than the Rivian four-motor while rock crawling. The Rivian's four-motor traction control simply isn't aggressive enough, notably less effective than the GX's 18 year old ATRAC system.
 
But it's not as good as it gets. It has the potential to be as good as it gets, but they're current wheel slip tuning isn't good enough. Toyota's ATRAC is notably better. TFL has compared them. Quicker response, smoother response, more predictable torque delivery, etc. The two-motor R1T actually performs better off-road than the four-motor because the differentials and brake torque vectoring are more effective than the four-motor's motor control.
 



When then-CEO Jeff Bezos announced a deal with the EV startup in 2019 to buy 100,000 vans, he said they should be on the road by 2024. Now, Amazon projects to hit 100,000 vans on the road by 2030, but they should be on the road soon in cities including Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Kansas City, Nashville, Phoenix, San Diego, Seattle, and St. Louis — and reach 100 cities by the end of this year.

Rivian-powered deliveries started in earnest last year with a few of the vans in Los Angeles, but now they’re spreading out. Amazon said delivery tests since last year covered over 90,000 miles and 430,000 packages while Rivian tweaked performance, safety, and driver comfort features.


I tried applying to an Android Software Engineer position last month but I got rejected lmao. I have a friend who knows someone working in Rivian and from what I heard, they've have a hiring pause a while ago and more recently had some layoffs.
 
I have a friend who knows someone working in Rivian and from what I heard, they've have a hiring pause a while ago and more recently had some layoffs.
Tesla is sort of doing the same thing. Laying off some but also still hiring others. I had an interview for a NVH position in Austin but have not heard back. Didn't seem like it went very well, their definition of an NVH technician is way different from what I'm currently doing at Nissan.
 

Welp, it's official

Rivian has started laying off about 6% of its workforce as part of a restructuring plan, according to an internal email from founder and CEO RJ Scaringe.

The companywide email, which was sent out Wednesday and viewed by TechCrunch, alerted all employees that those affected would receive an email invite from their manager with more context and details. Scaringe reiterated that the manufacturing operations team working at its Normal, Illinois plant would not be impacted.

“Over the last six months, the world has dramatically changed with inflation reaching record highs, interest rates rapidly rising and commodity prices continuing to climb — all of which have contributed to the global capital markets tightening,” Scaringe wrote in the email. “We are financially well positioned and our mission is more important than ever, but to fully realize our potential, our strategy must support our sustainable growth as we ramp toward profitability. We need to be able to continue to grow and scale without additional financing in this macro environment. To achieve this, we have simplified our product roadmap and focused on where it is most impactful to deploy capital.”

[...]

Scaringe apologized in his email to the employees who will lose their jobs and noted that severance packages include 14 weeks of regular pay and health coverage, Rivian-paid COBRA benefits and continuation of mental health and fertility benefits through the end of the year, job placement assistance and this quarter’s equity vesting.

“To those leaving Rivian, I am genuinely sorry,” he wrote. “Thank you for pouring so much of yourself into what we’re building. You will always be a part of our story and continue to be an important part of our community.”
 
...severance packages include 14 weeks of regular pay and health coverage, Rivian-paid COBRA benefits and continuation of mental health and fertility benefits through the end of the year, job placement assistance and this quarter’s equity vesting.
Layoffs suck but all of this news is huge. In case you don't know about COBRA, it's a program that allowed laid-off employees to maintain their employee-sponsored healthcare through the government...at full price. It's the most useless program ever and is completely unaffordable lmao. And it sounds like Rivian is paying for their COBRA even after two months of continued coverage during a job search. Full pay and a bonus as well. I don't know if Rivian's factory is unionized but these benefits are impressive. Nary a corporation offers anything like this unless they're unionized.
 
Layoffs suck but all of this news is huge. In case you don't know about COBRA, it's a program that allowed laid-off employees to maintain their employee-sponsored healthcare through the government...at full price. It's the most useless program ever and is completely unaffordable lmao. And it sounds like Rivian is paying for their COBRA even after two months of continued coverage during a job search. Full pay and a bonus as well. I don't know if Rivian's factory is unionized but these benefits are impressive. Nary a corporation offers anything like this unless they're unionized.
Rivian needs all the good publicity they can get right now.
 


R1X

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Our Rivian sources tell us the company is hard at work building a rally-inspired performance SUV designed to be as capable as a Wrangler and Defender off-road and as quick as a Cayenne Turbo on pavement. We expect the R1X to be a slightly shorter two-row SUV than the R1S it's based on

The R1X will ride on a slightly shortened version of Rivian's familiar R1 platform, but its motors and batteries will be new. Sources tell us the R1X will use four of the new house-built motors that just debuted in the two-motor R1S SUV and R1T truck. These new motors feature carbon-sleeved rotors, which allow them to spin at higher rpm and develop more power. We're told total system output will be 1,200 hp and 1,200 lb-ft of torque. The quad-motor R1X will be backed by its own in-house battery pack.
 
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