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CJdergroße

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Honest review of the highs and lows, including clearly identifying Rivian’s number one fatal flaw: The vampire power drain. (Refer to his earlier videos, it’s really bad)

Wasting power like that is against both the outdoors adventure theme and the carbon reduction theme which is driving the whole EV transition. It’s impractical when parked at a trail head or airport for a week or two. Not to mention the cost of wasted energy.

As he mentions, it will never be fixable because of the big processor architecture, a product of the software culture hubris driving design rather rather than a systems engineering approach. This problem also spills over into features like gear guard, something that consumes huge amounts of energy to do little more than a couple of GoPro cameras that can record hours of video using only tiny batteries.

I really want to like the R1, and there is a lot to like. But I cannot get past this intractable energy waste issue, so I’m probably going to walk as well.
You're honestly missing out on an amazing truck over something that, in my opinion is over-reported.

I drive my truck as my DD. It costs me LESS than 1/4 of what a Silverado Trail Boss, or Ram Rebel would cost me, what my "gas" options were. So little bit of electricity drain is NOTHING compared to purchasing overpriced dinojuice.

My 5 day-a-week work commute is ~72mi daily. And I drive a lot outside of work, I go anywhere with friends or family, they want to ride in the Rivian. Got mine in Sept, have 5400 miles on her already.

My opinion...
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Trandall

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According to the EPA numbers over the life of the Rivian it will cost about 7k dollars less to fuel than the average gas car. That’s over the lifetime and you can buy a well equipped Highlander for 45k. Post price increase R1S starts a minimum 30k over that well equipped highlander. If we are going to compare the base R1 then a Highlander starts at 36k according to their website I’m looking at right now.

You aren’t going to save the extra money on fuel compared to the Highlander and we have no clue how the durability of the R1 series will be. Are you going to be dumping a ton of money into it at 8 years? The Toyota won’t. Those run forever. Don’t fool yourself into saying a Rivian is a financially good move over a cheaper car, it’s not.

Im a big fan of my R1 but it’s more money than what’s necessary for anyone to spend on a vehicle. If you’re in a position where you can spend that extra to indulge a want that’s great, but don’t pretend this is the economy decision and don’t put yourself in a bad position to indulge a want.
Kinda agreeing with both you and @Franksmartin here. The premise of your point is that R1's are probably not the best economical choice, and I agree however, I could compare my R1T at 270 mile range and $.085 KW to charge (at home) to equal $8,469 in "fuel" to travel 200,000 miles, with a F-150 at 22mpg and $3.54/ gal. to equal $32,181 to go the same distance for a "fuel savings of $23,685 not to mention other maintenance savings. I'm sure with the proper math one could construe them to be in the same cost to own ballpark at 10 years of ownership.
 

Trekkie

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I’ve been gone for 2 weeks and checked on my Model y a few times (thus waking it up) and it has only lost 1kw over the 2 weeks (based on remaining mileage reduction) most of which was in the first two days and has since stabilized. It was 165 miles when we left. After 1 week, 161. Still 161 miles remaining. While not a perfect measure, it’s the best baseline I can get remotely. With that, looks like Tesla (model Y) has about zero drain. Super happy about that. Hopefully Rivian can figure this out before 2024 when my number is supposed to come up otherwise I’ll end up in a purse holder (Volvo)
I'm envious of your model Y drain, one of the reasons I got rid of our X was even with a big warranty job supposedly to fix it, it was still losing 5-7% a week just sitting. I even reset the computer and left it unconnected from anything and in three weeks of sitting in driveway went from 90% to 70%. Was coming up on end of warranty and didn't want the hassle.

our Polestar 2 doesn't have any drain that I have noticed. The X it was very noticeable, so I'm wondering if there was something wrong with it (2019 Standard Model, 75kWh battery). It'd sit there and click (contactors) every few minutes when it wasn't plugged in. I ended ups selling it for what I paid for it over the summer and moved on. Hoped to replace it with the R1S but still 'pending' on a delivery date so ended up with a LR Defender for now.
 

NY_Rob

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I think Rivian could get vampire drain down to almost nothing if they just cut out most the telemetric data people have documented constantly streaming to and from the vehicle.

Tesla has pretty much nailed it at this point.. our 2021 Model 3 has almost no vampire drain unless we enable Sentry mode (which we do not use at home because we have a decent HD surveillance system at home).
 

Craigins

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Kinda agreeing with both you and @Franksmartin here. The premise of your point is that R1's are probably not the best economical choice, and I agree however, I could compare my R1T at 270 mile range and $.085 KW to charge (at home) to equal $8,469 in "fuel" to travel 200,000 miles, with a F-150 at 22mpg and $3.54/ gal. to equal $32,181 to go the same distance for a "fuel savings of $23,685 not to mention other maintenance savings. I'm sure with the proper math one could construe them to be in the same cost to own ballpark at 10 years of ownership.
Thanks, I was hoping someone would point out the silly nonsense of comparing a luxury truck vs the fuel cost of an average vehicle.

Your $3.54 is even low from what I was paying when I had my rebel. I save more on fuel cost than my monthly truck payment. That doesn't even include oil changes and other maintenance.

Before I got my R1T in August, I couldn't even fill up my Rebel in one credit card transaction.
 

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riviancanucknb

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Honest review of the highs and lows, including clearly identifying Rivian’s number one fatal flaw: The vampire power drain. (Refer to his earlier videos, it’s really bad)

...

As he mentions, it will never be fixable because of the big processor architecture
- I don't think he mentions that at all - at what time did he mention that?

- There is no reason to believe the phantom drain can not be solved with a software update, unless you have some further information as to why. Blaming it on "big processr architecture" is nonsense - I can shut my Macbook Pro and leave it for 2 weeks and have a battery drain of 2% or less. I open it, and it starts up instantly. "big processors" are extremely energy efficient when operating in sleep mode. If the issue is related to the software, it can almost certainly be fixed with a software update. If however, it is related to the DC power converter or something, it may need a hardware fix.
 

milliemc

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Spicy. FWIW, I appreciate Kyle's videos, but his whole schtick about "We are just normal people who make youtube videos, anyone can do it if they understand Youtube" is definitely bullshit.
 

milliemc

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Spicy. FWIW, I appreciate Kyle's videos, but his whole schtick about "We are just normal people who make youtube videos, anyone can do it if they understand Youtube" is definitely bullshit.
I worry about them becoming bankcrupt--not really worry, but wonder.
 

bearcats513

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Guys, I have to say - I'm not seeing much vampire drain.
I've had many EV's over the years, and my R1T I got delivered last Tuesday doesn't seem to lose much overnight. Less than 1%, and that's with Gear Guard enabled. Not sure why there seems to be so much variation. I am parked at home, connected to home WiFi, maybe that takes less energy then continuous LTE?
 

Yellow Buddy

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Guys, I have to say - I'm not seeing much vampire drain.
I've had many EV's over the years, and my R1T I got delivered last Tuesday doesn't seem to lose much overnight. Less than 1%, and that's with Gear Guard enabled. Not sure why there seems to be so much variation. I am parked at home, connected to home WiFi, maybe that takes less energy then continuous LTE?
In Cin, OH too? That would be surprising. Mine is losing roughly 6-7% overnight, comparable to my Model S and Model X.
 

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Guys, I have to say - I'm not seeing much vampire drain.
I've had many EV's over the years, and my R1T I got delivered last Tuesday doesn't seem to lose much overnight. Less than 1%, and that's with Gear Guard enabled. Not sure why there seems to be so much variation. I am parked at home, connected to home WiFi, maybe that takes less energy then continuous LTE?
It can vary depending on weather. When it was colder out (near freezing) I might lose 5-15 miles overnight. It’s been milder the last week or so, so it’s been much less. Keep in mind Alex on Autos may have had his parked for several days at a time, since he’s also been testing a Lightning and a EV6 at the same time, so it may have seemed worse, doing down over several days without plugging in. He also had it before and after some of the most recent software updates, sometimes the first impression is the one that sticks with you.
 

bearcats513

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kylealden

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I think Rivian could get vampire drain down to almost nothing if they just cut out most the telemetric data people have documented constantly streaming to and from the vehicle.
FWIW my Rivian drain is, or at least can be down to almost nothing. I think it's a combo of software improvements, Camp Mode, and potentially helped by me turning off the prox key a little while back, but I'm seeing almost no drain in Camp Mode (and much improved vampire losses while L1 charging).

As an example, I recently went camping for three days with temperatures in the low 20s. I left the truck in Camp Mode with the power settings at "Off" and the truck didn't lose a single % idling over the entire trip. In fact the % indicator actually went up the first morning. (I did use it to haul a couple bed loads of firewood on one of the days, so I'm omitting that from the total here).

I think some of what we're seeing is that the "low" load (with things like regular telemetry/gear guard/prox key/update polling all awake and listening) is still too high - it seems to be in the 200-500w constant draw range, which is an awful lot (desktop PC territory for what should be a Raspberry Pi's workload).

I think this comes down to Rivian software running on essentially every microprocessor component in the vehicle and no having the watt discipline of the last five decades of microprocessor discipline that we see elsewhere in the industry. I'd love to see more improvements.
 

NY_Rob

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^ very interesting!!

Have you tried camp mode at home vs. regular mode and checked/compared vampire loss?
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