sub
Well-Known Member
- Thread starter
- #1
I just finished a 2800 mile road trip. Towing a boat.
The Vehicles:
Range: Towing vs Non-Towing.
Towing: Rivian vs Porsche
Charging
3.4 mi/kwh! That would be 440 miles per 100%! I never averaged more than 3.0 for a full tank, but some of these road segments make me think that a 400 miles without stopping might be possible. Compared to my normal day-today consumption of 2.0 (or worse) it is really unbelievable what the vehicle can do when it wants to.
Exceeding 3 mi/kwh even in the rain.
OK Rivian, Please explain your math. If my consumption is 1.07 mi/kWh and I have a 130 kWh battery, how am I going to make it 249 miles?
Is it 1000lbs or 4500lbs? Is it 177 miles or 249 miles? Make up your mind. Or better yet, quit trying to be clever and just let me enter 5000lbs and 130 miles.
This charger layout was awesome. Even with the nice layout, it would have been difficult if this place was busy due to narrow aisles and sharp turns.
Lots of charging like this with my butt sticking out and no one around to care.
V4 chargers!
We had fun - we might even try going further next time now that I know I can do it and that it was not entirely unpleasant!
The Vehicles:
My Rivian is a 2023 Launch Edition (large/quad) R1S with 22" wheels.
The boat+trailer weighs a bit over 5000lbs according to the vehicle scale I parked it on prior to departing.
I was traveling in a caravan with a 2024 Porsche Cayenne. It has an identical tow rating (7,700lbs), a slightly shorter wheelbase (114 vs 121), and is a lot lighter (2.25ton vs 3.5ton). The Rivian used a 4" drop hitch, the Porsche used a 4" raise hitch.
We each took turns towing the boat. The Porsche did more than half of the towing both to keep things moving along and because there were some dead zones where the Rivian would just have not made it to the next charger even if I topped off to 100%. There was one 200 mile gap that the Rivan would have had no hope in traversing with the trailer attached. If I were to go it alone I would have to go somewhere else.
Range: Towing vs Non-Towing.
Even when I wasn't towing I was traveling with someone who was, so the driving speed/style remained the same. We set the cruise control at the speed limit and generally chilled in the right lane. The only difference between towing and non-towing was the drive mode. When not towing I was in Conserve/Lowest Height/Soft. When towing I was in All Purpose/Standard Height/Firm
And WOW, the Rivian loved this style of driving when I wasn't towing. My lifetime average is below 2.0 miles per kwh. On this trip I was getting 2.7-3.0 miles per kwh. That is 350-400 miles of range (at 100%). In practice that meant that our bladders usually gave out before the car did. Although I did have one segment where we went 360 miles without stopping. None of this was rolling down big hills. Max elevation I believe was around 800ft above sea level. Min was 0 (actually -11 according to the car's display)
But everything changed when I hooked up the boat. When towing the boat I got between 0.9 and 1.1 miles per kwh. So that is roughly 3x the consumption of what I was using when not towing.
In practice the distance between stops was actually much less than 1/3 of the distance when not towing. This is because there aren't fast chargers at every exit. When the 100% range is 130 miles, then a 80%-10% cycle is only 91 miles. If, for example, there are chargers every 50 miles, that means I can't skip any chargers even if I have have 50% left in the battery. When not towing, with 50 miles between chargers I would never have to stop with more than 25%.
And yes, I really did have instances where I only made it 50 miles between stops. When not towing I never had less than 250 miles between charges. So the real-world range when towing was at times only 1/5th the non-towing range.
Towing: Rivian vs Porsche
Both vehicles handled the load fine, however the Rivian felt a bit more stable. Neither vehicle had to slow down for hills, however the Rivian's extra HP was clearly evident when accelerating.
As already discussed, the Rivian's fuel consumption increased 3x when towing.
The Porsche got 26 mpg when not towing. And 11 mpg when towing. That is a 2.5x increase. A bit better than the Rivian, but not hugely different.
Of course, the big difference is that it started with a lot more range and there are gas stations at essentially every exit so it never had to stop at half a tank because it couldn't make it to the next gas station if it didn't.
Charging
I mostly charged at Tesla Superchargers, however I did use 1 EA station twice (once on the way out, and again coming back).
Tesla - The Superchargers lived up to their reputation. Essentially a 100% success rate. At one 24 stall Tesla location I lucked into a stall that was maxing out at 50kw. But there were 23 other unoccupied stalls so I just moved over one slot and was up and running at 200kw.
EA - The EA station I used had just finished an upgrade from 4x150kw to 4x350 stalls. And by just I mean, a few hours. According to plug share check-ins it was still under construction when I started my journey but by the time I got to it, it was open. The first time it worked perfectly. But 2 weeks later, it was already broken. 2 stalls would not activate. 1 stall would only deliver power for 2 minutes before it would reboot. And 1 stall (which was occupied) was running, but only delivering a half speed charge.
Charging with a trailer - Only one of the chargers I utilized had any trailer optimized stalls. I was worried that I would have to unhitch at every stop which would have really been annoying when combined with having to stop every hour or so. But charger utilization was sufficiently low at every location that I never had to unhook the trailer. I could just pull up and let the trailer do whatever it wanted to do. In theory I was obstructing a ton of chargers and/or the aisle. But when there are only 2-3 people at a 24 stall location, I felt 0 guilt doing so.
Thank you Tesla - I couldn't have done this trip without you. According to ABRP if I didn't have a Tesla adapter, it would turned 12 hour days into 18 hour days!
Quirks/BugsRivian's trip planner was awful.
When not towing it was super inconstant. Sometimes it would just refuse to believe that the 3.0 mi/kwh was real and would insist that I stop to charge way sooner than needed. Canceling the nav and restarting it would not fix it, even when the charger was just a few miles away and I still had more than 50% of my battery left it would insist I needed to stop to charge ASAP. Other times it did seem to get it right so it wasn't like it was just using a hard-coded efficiency number. I ended up just having to manually enter the location of the next stop and tell it not to auto-add charging. But even then it would still manage to screw things up. Since it didn't believe I would make it, it was constantly suggesting I get off the interstate and take shortcuts on slower, more direct routes because by its erroneous calculations that would be less in-the-red.
The tow mode range estimates are 100% worthless.
To start with, it could not make up its mind about how much the trailer weighed. It recalculates on each drive, and depending on the vehicles mood the trailer weighed anywhere between 1000 lbs and 5000 lbs. Why can't I just tell it how much the trailer weighs?
And then, even though the tow-mode display shows what your average consumption has been while towing, that number is totally ignored. The range estimate seems to be a fixed number based on the estimated weight that is not adjusted based on the observed real-world consumption.
When you combine these two bugs, the range displayed was worse than useless. Not only did it not reflect reality, it was off by a different amount on each leg even when the consumption was consistent.
My A2Z adapter has a defective lock.
I discovered half way through the trip that my A2Z adapter has a defective lock. I never pulled the cord mid-charge to see what bad things would happen, but that lock is doing nothing to prevent it. I reported the problem to A2Z and they said that they will replace the adapter, but I still had to use it for the rest of the trip and felt somewhat nervous doing so.
3.4 mi/kwh! That would be 440 miles per 100%! I never averaged more than 3.0 for a full tank, but some of these road segments make me think that a 400 miles without stopping might be possible. Compared to my normal day-today consumption of 2.0 (or worse) it is really unbelievable what the vehicle can do when it wants to.
Exceeding 3 mi/kwh even in the rain.
OK Rivian, Please explain your math. If my consumption is 1.07 mi/kWh and I have a 130 kWh battery, how am I going to make it 249 miles?
Is it 1000lbs or 4500lbs? Is it 177 miles or 249 miles? Make up your mind. Or better yet, quit trying to be clever and just let me enter 5000lbs and 130 miles.
This charger layout was awesome. Even with the nice layout, it would have been difficult if this place was busy due to narrow aisles and sharp turns.
Lots of charging like this with my butt sticking out and no one around to care.
V4 chargers!
We had fun - we might even try going further next time now that I know I can do it and that it was not entirely unpleasant!
Sponsored
Last edited:
