Recent content by Kaiju

I've seen worse welds but yeeeah, it would've failed visual under AWS before getting into any actual testing. I definitely would second not driving it. To be honest it looks like it HAS come apart and something else in the suspension or drive train is holding the bits together, or there's just a...

I don't have direct experience with failed ball joints, but I do have some with bearings that failed due to water intrusion. What they may be going on in their assertion is that faint orange rust haze. I've seen it when seals failed and there wasn't enough grease to displace the water inside...

From what I understand Rivians are vulnerable to half shaft problems because of regen braking, not specifically because of the torque or drive height. The issue is that regen braking reverses the load abruptly so accel/decel basically slams any gap in the splines over and over and it feeds...

There's Xcare if you want to weigh third party warranty options, but basically you already have the best possible bang for buck scenario that you're going to get on an R1. The original quad motors were a helluva deal. To get what you have now you'd have to find a top trim trimotor or quad...

You may have to bear with me here, however you should consider how much it costs to move on versus eating out of warranty repairs. Most people tend to feel sudden out of pocket expenses much harder than they do things like the same amount in regular payments because the normal steady state is...

Things you don't habitually use will disappear without being noticed. Offline scheduled charging and navigation have been gone going on a year now. Those weren't even mentioned in patch notes. Rivian called it a 'new feature' but if you had a dual motor prior to 2025 there was also a time when...

It's not the first time they've done it, either. Deleting features, that is. It's the curse of the modern internet. It's very hard for an on-device integrated solution to be as functional as a cloud-based one with ten thousand times the resources. So it becomes very easy to use a third party to...

To be honest I'm sitting here going "Oh so THAT'S why shit isn't getting fixed." That plan's been in the works for a long time. It makes some sort of sense for them to try to backport the software they created for the R2. For one it means they get to kill support for the original R1 software...

The oldest R1s are only four years old and they're only starting to come out of warranty on mileage. That's not enough to be cut loose, but also keep in mind the last gen 1 has been sold for a couple years now and there's not actually very many of them in automotive terms. The wheels will keep...

As much as I don't like the implications, there just aren't very many gen 1 R1s out there and since the software costs don't scale with volume that we'll be cut loose sooner than most people think, especially as most of them age out of their first owners. If you've found acceptance with the fact...

I figured for a company that harped so hard about being an adventure brand that their shit would work when cell phones didn't. The only time I've had to go up into the mountains I was warned that while I could map my path in so long as I had signal, phone GPS wouldn't work on my way back out...

Spare tires aren't completely dead. You'll find they're commonly included on various pickups still. However I think Rivian's choice with the R1T bears a little bit of forgiveness. It has a place for a full spare, but usually OE spares are a steel wheel that's a different diameter than the...

I wonder if that's more an indictment of dealers as opposed to consumers. I can't say I've ever bought a vehicle thinking about its resale value being affected by the color. The dealers are the people who want to move them as quickly as possible. The dilemma there is that they may lose that...

Skepticism from potentially biased sources aside, EV sales in general have been up because of oil prices and with the reviews by and large being positive it's no real surprise people are choosing to take what's being offered rather than wait a year or more. The launch edition is a solid deal...

I find it interesting how many people came to R1's from mostly driving cars and sporty ones at that. I too had a 96 Silverado extended cab for a time and mourn the death of the form factor. It does make me wonder how it set people's expectations. I only ever compared the R1T to other trucks.