Is my muffler falling off!? (Lol). What is this noise!

[ARMadventures]

6k miles now, and I have a strange new issue. Turtle mode, and rear drive motors disabled.

it sounds like a muffler about to fall off and obviously the car doesn’t have one. Scheduled to go in for service on Monday and I’m not looking forward to having to drive a rental vehicle.
Anyone else experience anything similar to this sound?

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[Dark-Fx]

Sounds like it could be a broken halfshaft rattling around. Easy to check if that's what it is from the underside of the truck when it's all the way up.

 

[ARMadventures]

Sounds like it could be a broken halfshaft rattling around. Easy to check if that's what it is from the underside of the truck when it's all the way up.

Awesome! Thanks for the tip, I'll be checking that out as soon as I get home

 

[R1Tom]

Countdown to someone saying ,"early adopter tax"..."or everybody is posting nitpicky problems"...or "all new vehicles drop half shafts....even Lexus".....in 5......4.....3......2....

 

[ARMadventures]

Sounds like it could be a broken halfshaft rattling around. Easy to check if that's what it is from the underside of the truck when it's all the way up.

You were right!! Rear passenger side broken half-shaft.

 

[PappaBolt]

Do you recall an event or circumstance that might have led to this? Or just a random bad luck fail?

 

[s4wrxttcs]

Am I interpreting this correctly that the vehicle is still drivable despite a fairly major part being broken?

 

[Dark-Fx]

Am I interpreting this correctly that the vehicle is still drivable despite a fairly major part being broken?

Yeah, common enough failure. Rivian will just disable the rear motors if anything weird like this happens. Not sure if they will the front ones since they don't have the ability to disconnect them. In a normal 4WD ICE vehicle, it's equivalent to disconnecting the driveshaft and driving on just the front transfer case.

This looks like the half shaft just pulled out though, didn't get broken. Hard to tell for sure. Might be possible to just push it back together but it could be that the axle spring retainer is messed up or missing.

 

[Kuro-Rivian]

This looks like the half shaft just pulled out though, didn't get broken. Hard to tell for sure. Might be possible to just push it back together but it could be that the axle spring retainer is messed up or missing.

Maybe, a lot of flung grease back there. But that could be from boot getting ripped after came out.

 

[ARMadventures]

Do you recall an event or circumstance that might have led to this? Or just a random bad luck fail?

Took a 600 mile road trip through Ohio for work, and drove all of day 1 in conserve mode with two stops for fast charging . The hotel I parked at overnight only had Tesla destination chargers (haven’t bought an adapter yet) but I had 160 Mi of range and only about 10 miles to go in the morning for my meeting so I figured it would be no issue.
The temperature was in the low teens overnight and it snowed. Pre-heated the cabin early in the morning before walking out to the car. The roads were slick so before I pulled out of the parking spot I switched to snow mode and as I was pulling out of the parking spot I got the alert that all wheel drive was not available and then turtle mode was enabled, and vehicle performance was limited.
Drove to my meeting, car sat for 6 hours. Got back in and still had turtle mode but no other issues. I drove 45 min to a charging station to charge up for the trip home and called Rivian service. Walked thru full reset several times, and as long as I kept the car in conserve mode the light would stay off. When switched to any other mode then the lights would come back on and I would have to do a full reset to get them to go away.
Drove home and parked the car. The next day same issues but the noise in the video started happening and then became more consistent.
No idea what caused it to happen as I never heard anything strange before the issue and was driving on conserve mode in an effort to increase range.
Only speculation could be that after 400+ miles in a day, that was snowing / slushy wet and VERY cold, with the rear drive units not being used, maybe there was ice build-up that had them solidly frozen, and then when engaged it contributed to the failure. I’ll be interested to see what service has to say after it gets to the shop.
It is pretty cool that this type of failure didn’t ground the whole vehicle, and it is still able to function fairly normally with just the front drive units.

 

[Blackhatch]

Snap a-doodle do.

Who makes the adapters for Tesla chargers?

 

[PappaBolt]

Took a 600 mile road trip through Ohio for work, and drove all of day 1 in conserve mode with two stops for fast charging . The hotel I parked at overnight only had Tesla destination chargers (haven’t bought an adapter yet) but I had 160 Mi of range and only about 10 miles to go in the morning for my meeting so I figured it would be no issue.
The temperature was in the low teens overnight and it snowed. Pre-heated the cabin early in the morning before walking out to the car. The roads were slick so before I pulled out of the parking spot I switched to snow mode and as I was pulling out of the parking spot I got the alert that all wheel drive was not available and then turtle mode was enabled, and vehicle performance was limited.
Drove to my meeting, car sat for 6 hours. Got back in and still had turtle mode but no other issues. I drove 45 min to a charging station to charge up for the trip home and called Rivian service. Walked thru full reset several times, and as long as I kept the car in conserve mode the light would stay off. When switched to any other mode then the lights would come back on and I would have to do a full reset to get them to go away.
Drove home and parked the car. The next day same issues but the noise in the video started happening and then became more consistent.
No idea what caused it to happen as I never heard anything strange before the issue and was driving on conserve mode in an effort to increase range.
Only speculation could be that after 400+ miles in a day, that was snowing / slushy wet and VERY cold, with the rear drive units not being used, maybe there was ice build-up that had them solidly frozen, and then when engaged it contributed to the failure. I’ll be interested to see what service has to say after it gets to the shop.
It is pretty cool that this type of failure didn’t ground the whole vehicle, and it is still able to function fairly normally with just the front drive units.

Thanks for the details. It sounds like on your outbound trip you were driving in conserve mode and somewhere along the way the half shaft slipped out. No way to know if it was due to cold weather or bad roads and articulation of some sort. Let us know what you learn from the SC. It’s also interesting this isn’t detectable while in conserve mode. I suspect if it had been a front shaft you’d have had to have a tow to the SC.

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