Guess it was my time - 12v is dead

[RexRemus]

More power to ya, you are keeping a level head and not going ballistic.

Honestly don't understand a lot of the "outrage" over things like this. I totally understand that I'm a beta tester and early adoption (yes 2+ years into a brand new auto company is STILL early adopter - you could argue 10yrs with Tesla is early adopter for a lot of things still) comes with risk. I believe in the company, I'll hold them accountable for issues that do come up, but being pissed off and unreasonable isn't going to change that risk and I've found that truly you get more out of life with kindness and respect than you do with aggression and outrage.

In the end, it's a machine and machines break. They get fixed and life goes on. Just hoping going through this helps someone else with knowing what to expect, etc.

It'll be an interesting journey to follow regardless. Especially if the replacement can't be done or doesn't work - that's when the real fun begins ?

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[simpsonhomer]

UPDATE 1

Spoke with Service today. Vehicle is totally dead, there was nothing to be done really (as far as soft/hard reset, etc) it's just dead.

Bit of other back and forth, asking about charger, explaining the logistical challenges getting things towed, etc. Ultimate outcome is going to be a remote service visit to try and replace the 12v with the access we have to the driver's side frunk. This is currently scheduled for 5/10 (~3 weeks away) which is... not ideal, but totally expected (Chicago SC). They are going to try and push it up if any earlier slots open as we're supposed to take a trip to Ohio next weekend but I am not holding out hope. We have another vehicle but it's certainly not ideal for the trip, but it'll do, worst case.

i mentioned jumping it off the rear panel, and the verdict was - since the 12v system has probably been sitting dead or very near dead for a few days now (as originally stated, this happened while I was traveling and couldn't do anything to the vehicle) that even if it did work, they would not feel safe having me drive the vehicle or relying on the 12v system to perform normally so, not worth doing. Better to just wait for a tech to get here and see what they can do. I agree with that guidance at this point. I don't think I could trust it right now and as bad as the current issue is with location at least it's not in the middle of the road, blocking traffic, etc. So yeah. Just gonna leave it till I can get a tech out here.

Hopefully we can get an appt. pushed up a bit sooner. Otherwise I'll update again in early May...

Thanks for the update. Sorry to hear about the extended delay for service. Rivian really needs to focus on improving their service experience—too many overbooked service centers that take in cars and let them sit for days or weeks in the parking lot before they're even looked at.

Rivian should be able to put you in an Enterprise rental. Tell them you need something suitable for the trip, and tell them to up the billable rate to the max $74/day (vs. the standard $52/day). They'll also give you ride share credits to the Enterprise, too. It's nothing like having your own healthy Rivian, but better than nothing.

 

[Glembi2]

You are truly a wise person and will live a peaceful life.

 

[RexRemus]

Thanks for the update. Sorry to hear about the extended delay for service. Rivian really needs to focus on improving their service experience—too many overbooked service centers that take in cars and let them sit for days or weeks in the parking lot before they're even looked at.

Rivian should be able to put you in an Enterprise rental. Tell them you need something suitable for the trip, and tell them to up the billable rate to the max $74/day (vs. the standard $52/day). They'll also give you ride share credits to the Enterprise, too. It's nothing like having your own healthy Rivian, but better than nothing.

Good to know. They did offer, but for this trip it's ok - if it were our big Michigan summer trip... not so much, but this is definitely doable in our second vehicle with just a bit of sacrifice in creature comforts, so it'll be fine. I'd rather that money go into keeping the company afloat till the R2 production line gets up and running ?

 

[s0ysauce]

Oof, you have my sympathies. You are exhibiting a great amount of restraint imo. Hopefully they fix your vehicle quickly and won't run into this again.

 

[saylormd]

It stinks that you feel slighted. While it's not ideal for things to break...things...break.

This truck has literally thousands of unique components. Each individual component has a design intent. Those design intents include efforts through risk analysis to make them as close to six sigma reliability as possible. But regardless of where it falls on the bell curve, everything will fail. Part of it is planned obsolescence, and an even bigger part of it is making it so your 12V battery doesn't cost $1000 to make.

It's sort of like planes falling out of the sky. We don't want that to happen. But despite the best Engineering and Manufacturing approaches on the planet--things still happen.

The good news is that the odds are even lower that it'll happen to you twice, so when this is out of the way, you can breathe a bit easier knowing you have some fresh new batteries to carry you through the lifespan of your truck

The batteries that failed were also new. Unless the failure was a bad batch, the probability of it happening again is the same as the probability of the first episode before it happened, since these are "independent events".

 

[R1Thor]

The batteries that failed were also new. Unless the failure was a bad batch, the probability of it happening again is the same as the probability of the first episode before it happened, since these are "independent events".

Ok, sure, then run the stats.

If, statistically, OP had a 1% chance of having a battery--essentially--DOA, and the odds are the same, then they're NOT the same for OP.

1% x 1% = .01% chance OP gets a second DOA battery. At best they're mutually exclusive, and you can still cite the 1% (which honestly, is an egregious roundup--the actual odds are a percent of a percent).

That said, I don't know why we're arguing semantics here. The situation sucks and it'll be made right by Rivian and we'll all move on.

 

[TTedP]

Check out

Looks like a good option if willing to spend

 

[Dave Cundiff]

Ok, sure, then run the stats.

If, statistically, OP had a 1% chance of having a battery--essentially--DOA, and the odds are the same, then they're NOT the same for OP.

1% x 1% = .01% chance OP gets a second DOA battery. At best they're mutually exclusive, and you can still cite the 1% (which honestly, is an egregious roundup--the actual odds are a percent of a percent).

That said, I don't know why we're arguing semantics here. The situation sucks and it'll be made right by Rivian and we'll all move on.

Actually, @R1Thor, @saylormd had the statistical analysis exactly right. But every word in @saylormd's description is important. From this old student of medical statistics:

If nothing has happened yet, the likelihood of two independent 1% events is indeed 0.01%. But, once the first event has happened, the likelihood of a second independent event is the same 1% as the likelihood of the first event before it happened.

With a vehicle, the two events might not be independent if something in the rest of the car makes 12V battery failure more likely. If not fixed, that other factor would change the odds to make the second event more likely. Or they might not be independent if the replacement batteries were better (or worse) quality than the batteries that fail.

I agree with your last point, though. Everything I've seen suggests that Rivian will do its best to make this right.

Best wishes!

 

[R1Thor]

Looks like a good option if willing to spend

Cautionary tale: search competitor's forums: the Ohmmu battery has bricked at least one R1T to the point Rivian refused to fix it (due to using unapproved batteries). That dude was going the litigation route and we never heard from him again which means either 1- he was full of it and/or did something dumb and/or didn't actually sue or 2- his legal team told him to shut up.

I have zero other knowledge, but I just think everyone should be well informed.

 

[Stationmaster]

Geography also plays an important role. It is my understanding that LiPo batteries should not be charged below 0ºC/32ºF. Unfortunately, Colorado often has temps well below those numbers.

 

[TTedP]

Cautionary tale: search competitor's forums: the Ohmmu battery has bricked at least one R1T to the point Rivian refused to fix it (due to using unapproved batteries). That dude was going the litigation route and we never heard from him again which means either 1- he was full of it and/or did something dumb and/or didn't actually sue or 2- his legal team told him to shut up.

I have zero other knowledge, but I just think everyone should be well informed.

Interesting. Thx. I always wondered why more people didn’t consider these if having to do a replacement.

 

[simpsonhomer]

That's interesting since I suspected that the recent 2024.07.02 update had something to do w/ my failure!

Thanks for sharing. That's the first I've heard of such a claim.

Don't worry about the Rivian apologists though; the rest of us know it's not acceptable among many other issues posted here. ;-)

Turns out it was a bunch of hot air from the SC just to get rid of me (explains why they kept talking over me when I asked more about the alleged 2024.07.02 "bug" that was causing charging errors and dead 12V batteries). I started getting the same errors again when I got home and plugged in so I put in another ticket and I have to lose more work to take it back in to the SC for the same problem. This will push my car to over a cumulative month in service before it's a year old—for the most wasteful reasons possible. I've owned cars from many different makes in my lifetime—Rivian's service experience has been the worst of all of them.

 

[RexRemus]

UPDATE:

Nothing major but I had asked to see if I could get my mobile service date pushed up and the answer was no, so May 10th remains the service date.

My larger concern now is where the primary battery will be by the time that happens. I keep the max charge at 60% which is more than enough for any of my local trips and enough to reach any family/friends in an emergency situation without requiring any additional charging (that was basically my prime criteria for setting max charge - as low as I could go while knowing if I needed to jump in and get somewhere in an emergency I could still make it there (plus a 30-40 mile surplus). Anyway...

I am one of the people with fairly consistent 2-3% daily vampire drain. Sometimes a little less, but 2% a day is a fairly safe number. This incident happened somewhere overnight around the 15/16th of April, my last vehicle check-in was 59% charge. it has been unable to initiate charge since that point - it's just dead.

So if we go with 2% per day it will be ~25 days since the battery saw any kind of charging - so...main battery pack could be under 10% remaining. If we go 3% or even just 2.5%... we're in trouble

Now there are things that likely mitigate this - I have to assume there is some kind of HARD shutdown to preserve the battery pack at like 1-2% remaining charge. And we know there is surplus capacity in the pack such that when the vehicle "usable" amount is 0% the pack itself is not ENTIRELY drained, it's just very low. Further... with the 12v system dead and no phoning home or other systems waking the vehicle - it's possible that vampire drain is actually significantly reduced and there will only have been minimal losses. One concern I have about that though is if there is some kind of "fault" and the BMS is trying to REALLY get that 12V system up and running again and wasting a bunch of energy pumping into it.

But I guess this is all a bunch of unknowns at this point... I am not aware of anyone with 12V issues who didn't get towed or otherwise serviced pretty quickly. And I'm aware of people leaving (functioning) vehicles for 3-4 weeks only to find significant vampire drain - I don't know of any reported cases here of 12V failure AND 3-4 weeks sitting idle without charge. Maybe I missed it, or maybe I'm the first. Either way this is what's troubling me now. Is the pack itself going to suffer in some way from extremely low discharge? And I know this will be on Rivian to repair... but all the same, I just want the vehicle back and working. Waiting for a full pack swap is not something I'm terribly excited about.

All I can do at this point is wait and see. So I will update again on the 10th when service happens. Just wanted to let people know that is now confirmed as the soonest they can get to it.

 

[simpsonhomer]

UPDATE:

Nothing major but I had asked to see if I could get my mobile service date pushed up and the answer was no, so May 10th remains the service date.

My larger concern now is where the primary battery will be by the time that happens. I keep the max charge at 60% which is more than enough for any of my local trips and enough to reach any family/friends in an emergency situation without requiring any additional charging (that was basically my prime criteria for setting max charge - as low as I could go while knowing if I needed to jump in and get somewhere in an emergency I could still make it there (plus a 30-40 mile surplus). Anyway...

I am one of the people with fairly consistent 2-3% daily vampire drain. Sometimes a little less, but 2% a day is a fairly safe number. This incident happened somewhere overnight around the 15/16th of April, my last vehicle check-in was 59% charge. it has been unable to initiate charge since that point - it's just dead.

So if we go with 2% per day it will be ~25 days since the battery saw any kind of charging - so...main battery pack could be under 10% remaining. If we go 3% or even just 2.5%... we're in trouble

Now there are things that likely mitigate this - I have to assume there is some kind of HARD shutdown to preserve the battery pack at like 1-2% remaining charge. And we know there is surplus capacity in the pack such that when the vehicle "usable" amount is 0% the pack itself is not ENTIRELY drained, it's just very low. Further... with the 12v system dead and no phoning home or other systems waking the vehicle - it's possible that vampire drain is actually significantly reduced and there will only have been minimal losses. One concern I have about that though is if there is some kind of "fault" and the BMS is trying to REALLY get that 12V system up and running again and wasting a bunch of energy pumping into it.

But I guess this is all a bunch of unknowns at this point... I am not aware of anyone with 12V issues who didn't get towed or otherwise serviced pretty quickly. And I'm aware of people leaving (functioning) vehicles for 3-4 weeks only to find significant vampire drain - I don't know of any reported cases here of 12V failure AND 3-4 weeks sitting idle without charge. Maybe I missed it, or maybe I'm the first. Either way this is what's troubling me now. Is the pack itself going to suffer in some way from extremely low discharge? And I know this will be on Rivian to repair... but all the same, I just want the vehicle back and working. Waiting for a full pack swap is not something I'm terribly excited about.

All I can do at this point is wait and see. So I will update again on the 10th when service happens. Just wanted to let people know that is now confirmed as the soonest they can get to it.

If it's any consolation, when my Rivian suddenly died w/o warning, it was towed to Gaithersburg where it sat for 10 days before they looked at it. When they finally replaced the 12V battery and it woke up to communicate, it had lost no charge at all (tracked via ElectraFi); I presume the contactors were left open, so the HV battery was just sitting there at 70% charge the entire time and not trying to charge a broken 12V battery for over a week.

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