Frustrated today with route planner and "send to vehicle"

[MrMetlHed]

Semi-related: I don't think my truck retains any of the set navigation when "recalculating." I.e. I search for a location in town and am presented with a couple of options on the screen. I tap one of the routes (not the default) because I'd like to take a different way. I start to leave the parking lot, but maybe I don't follow the _exact_ path out of the lot that the truck thinks I should. At this point, it recalculates, and sends me back on the default original path. It drives me insane.

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[shrink]

Your pic is the only other time I’ve seen someone else describing anything like what I see at times.

Our R1S occasionally shows the vehicle moving forward and overshooting the physical location after stopping at an intersection. Then it shows the vehicle backing up to correct the overshoot and displays the location properly. After that happens it shows nonsensical stuff like in the pic below if on a planned route.

It’s almost like the nav hardware is ignoring the wheel speed data from the vehicle and the GPS is making some bad assumptions. I don’t think this is typical for all R1 vehicles so I’m hoping I can get video of it when I’m a passenger one of these days. Then I’ll submit a service ticket.

Just captured some video evidence:

 

[Jccoryell]

I had a pretty frustrating and annoying trip today. I was making a 3-hour trip home from the beach with a couple of stops and knew I'd need one fast charging session. At my last stop, I used the phone app, entered my home address, and it generated a route that included 15 minutes of charging at a nearby EVGo station. I checked EVGo's app to verify availability and saw one 350kw station and one 100kw station were available. So I clicked "send to vehicle" and started following the navigation.

5 miles later I arrived at a totally different charging station, a Volta station with 28kw "fast" chargers. I was annoyed but decided to give it a try, but after only getting 14 miles in 10 minutes, I gave up and navigated to the EVGo station I wanted in the first place where I connected to the 350kw station.

My trip home became at least 45 minutes longer because of all this. This was my first time in this city (Wilmington, DE) so I didn't really know my way around and just trusted the onboard navigation to take me where I wanted to go.

I guess I'm mostly just here to complain, but also maybe to ask if others have had a similar experience? If I design a route in the app and send it to the vehicle, am I crazy to expect that the route that I planned on my phone should be the one that comes up in the vehicle navigation?!?

The Rivian knows when a trailer is attached to the vehicle yet its navigation will send you onto a parkway anyway. I have not found a way to manually tell it to keep me off parkways when towing a trailer. I am amazed that this technology fails at such a simple task

 

[Chewy734]

Rivian Nav on my new R1S is not tracking my location correctly - and it tried to direct me to the senseless route pictured below. I don't know if this is a new car thing, but my 10-month old R1T is no longer this wonky, although it was at first.

It had your safety in mind. It wanted to make sure you weren’t being followed.

 

[RoHo3]

What bothers me about this is I don’t think you could find one Rivian owner who counted “Rivian maps” as a purchase driver. Yet when talking with other Rivian owners it’s a regular pain point.

Similarly, deciding against supporting CarPlay and Android Auto is a purchase deterrent.

Rivian needs to focus and decide what it must be great at. This is basic stuff for any product management team in Rivian and I am surprised they continue to chase the sunk costs.

Maps and navigation are a commoditized solution. Instead of using or partnering with Google they seemingly are compelled to own the whole thing. But building a ground up high quality navigation and mapping system is minimally a $100B investment. Unless they are going to sell that solution to Amazon or other future Enterprise customers for their logistics needs I don’t see Rivian ever recuperating the costs, especially as downward price pressure continues to increase.

Instead of a team of however many busting their hump on a solved problem, apply that headcount to solving pain points like Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. Get out of businesses that don’t convince people to buy (or keep) their Rivian.

 

[AfroRick]

While I understand the economic reasons for not wanting to directly support Google Maps - to build one from scratch is just dumb. Building an entire car OS at the start is just dumb (Android Automotive could have been bridged to bring over a ton of the more useful Android apps... like Google Maps).

Similarly, having to bring in whole swaths of streaming audio applications because you don't support DRM is just dumb. There are so many things that go into building out the car experience - why would you do ALL of them from scratch. Kinda like how you started with motors made by Bosch until you could build your own more margin friendly ones and how you cheesed the audio system with a more margin friendly one.

It defies logic and reason.

 

[Rivinski]

But building a ground up high quality navigation and mapping system is minimally a $100B investment.

It is not quite a $100B investment although it does cost around $1B+ annually to maintain, so you need that income from somewhere, like from selling ads or smartphones. But Rivian isn’t trying to build it from the ground up, they are using Mapbox and now ABRP. I think it’s possible for them to get it into a good state but they’re pretty far off at this point.

 

[RoHo3]

Admittedly $100B is hyperbole. If we ran the numbers for a worldwide solution from scratch it’s absolutely more than $10B in startup. Nokia paid $8.1B in ‘08 for HERE. Although they screeed around and by ‘13 it was only valued at 2.1. The new map consortium is going to cost a ton even with some fundamentals lifted from elsewhere.

But my point was that Rivian should be making near zero investment here when there is on the shelf solutions available and there is no end-game where this helps them become profitable.

let’s cut it down to even $100M for Rivian to build and maintain a killer mapping system that solves all
The same things Google/Apple do today with some cool “adventure” features tossed in. Say they are selling 100,000 vehicles a year (double current goals if I recall). That’s still an extra $1000 in cost associated with every rig they sell. So even downplaying cost and optimistically doubling sales … it’s still a huge cost sink for something that doesn’t drive intent to buy.

There’s a good reason the Ford Model E group continues to embrace Android and Apple solutions. They know what they need to be good at. They are willing to sacrifice internal ambitions for a better customer experience and they know their $ comes from selling a vehicle people want, not from a theoretical future win by owning the e2e customer experience.

Rivian will not have an app ecosystem, RoadX, Rallista and other apps that I’d love to access in my R1T with its gorgeous screen won’t be rewritten just for our trucks. Nor will those app owners tolerate disintermediation of their brand and customer experience for such a small market.

Primarily my concern is that better and cheaper solutions exist and the opportunity cost and lack of focus is causing real customer pain points. It’s a shame their product team is trying to spread a tiny bit of peanut butter across a loaf of bread.

 

[cardad]

1000% agree the Nav System is the WORST I've ever experienced. I shown this to the guys at service here in Dallas and I've sent pictures of how it takes me 17 minutes out of my way to get home. I am hopeful that they WILL get this fixed somehow someway as otherwise I love my R1T. But it is a waste of a large screen that's for sure!

You haven’t seen the charging integration on the Ioniq 5. It is absolute garbage even compared to Rivian.

 

[Dark-Fx]

Maps and navigation are a commoditized solution. Instead of using or partnering with Google they seemingly are compelled to own the whole thing

They are using MapBox for navigation. It's not being built from the ground up.

 

[Zoidz]

Admittedly $100B is hyperbole. If we ran the numbers for a worldwide solution from scratch it’s absolutely more than $10B in startup. Nokia paid $8.1B in ‘08 for HERE. Although they screeed around and by ‘13 it was only valued at 2.1. The new map consortium is going to cost a ton even with some fundamentals lifted from elsewhere.

But my point was that Rivian should be making near zero investment here when there is on the shelf solutions available and there is no end-game where this helps them become profitable.

let’s cut it down to even $100M for Rivian to build and maintain a killer mapping system that solves all
The same things Google/Apple do today with some cool “adventure” features tossed in. Say they are selling 100,000 vehicles a year (double current goals if I recall). That’s still an extra $1000 in cost associated with every rig they sell. So even downplaying cost and optimistically doubling sales … it’s still a huge cost sink for something that doesn’t drive intent to buy.

There’s a good reason the Ford Model E group continues to embrace Android and Apple solutions. They know what they need to be good at. They are willing to sacrifice internal ambitions for a better customer experience and they know their $ comes from selling a vehicle people want, not from a theoretical future win by owning the e2e customer experience.

Rivian will not have an app ecosystem, RoadX, Rallista and other apps that I’d love to access in my R1T with its gorgeous screen won’t be rewritten just for our trucks. Nor will those app owners tolerate disintermediation of their brand and customer experience for such a small market.

Primarily my concern is that better and cheaper solutions exist and the opportunity cost and lack of focus is causing real customer pain points. It’s a shame their product team is trying to spread a tiny bit of peanut butter across a loaf of bread.

Rivian bought ABRP. They are not building a solution. They were wrapping Mapbox in their own app, and now they are wrapping ABRP, a "mature" product in their UI. ABRP has a paid premium version and support for all EVs. It's a given that Rivian will leverage this one way or another to continue to monetize mapping.

 

[azbill]

There’s a good reason the Ford Model E group continues to embrace Android and Apple solutions. They know what they need to be good at. They are willing to sacrifice internal ambitions for a better customer experience and they know their $ comes from selling a vehicle people want, not from a theoretical future win by owning the e2e customer experience.

I have a Mach E and you are correct, but in fact Ford has a really good built in nav and trip planner for EVs. I doubt they created it themselves, other than maybe the trip planner on the phone. With their app you can plan up to 10 trips, and save them in the car. They also allowed Apple to integrate with the battery status, so that you can alternatively use Apple Maps for trip planning and routing. Porsche did this too. Apple is even adding real time charger status in IOS 17 release. Ford nav already has real time charger status available on the nav screen for all the major charging networks. You can also overlay weather info, including radar.

I find the Ford and Apple trip planning to be better than ABRP. ABRP is always way to conservative, usually off by 20%. I am on my third EV and have tired ABRP with all of them, not really that impressed.

GM is going with Google, and I expect it will be decent also.

 

[AfroRick]

They are using MapBox for navigation. It's not being built from the ground up.

While this is true (https://www.mapbox.com/navigation-sdk), MapBox tends to be more reliable (and feature rich) than what we've typically seen from some of the routing issues that people are posting.

 

[Dark-Fx]

While this is true (https://www.mapbox.com/navigation-sdk), MapBox tends to be more reliable (and feature rich) than what we've typically seen from some of the routing issues that people are posting.

It's literally the same. People having weird positioning bugs likely either have a GPS issue or just a poor GPS lock as I haven't seen anything like that in my truck.

 

[quartz]

IMO, the best solution for now is to input the desired charger/stop as your destination. The nav will definitely improve over time, let's stop beating the dead screen projection horse..

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