Greatest fear came true this morning - The Brick

[beckhome09]

Woke up to go to work, and Rivian was 100% dead in my driveway. I parked it there at 80% SoC on Thursday evening, went out of town for the weekend, back yesterday, went to drive it this morning, and it's completely dead. I considered taking the truck on my trip but thank God I didn't. I'm hoping it's one of the known issues with the 12v system and easily fixable. Now I get to review the Rivian Service when they have a real problem out there.

So far, called them at 8:00am, they requested some pictures of the location of the vehicle, and I provided them via email around 8:15am. They texted almost immediately to say the pictures were received. I called back at 1:00pm since I hadn't heard anything, elected to speak to "Service" instead of "Roadside assistance", and they said "the repair plan is in the ticket" and they are "working on scheduling towing". They also asked if I needed temporary transportation, which I don't at the moment, so I declined. However, if this goes on for awhile, I'll probably take them up on it to see how that works as well.

Fingers crossed.

Transportation for them is uber or lift credits. When i took mind in for service they gave me 300 in credit to use and when i picked it up, the remaining credits vanished, I'd only bused like 30 bucks should have give the lift driver a 50 piece, lol

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[pfbz]

Transportation for them is uber or lift credits. When i took mind in for service they gave me 300 in credit to use and when i picked it up, the remaining credits vanished, I'd only bused like 30 bucks should have give the lift driver a 50 piece, lol

Yes, any remaining credit is voided after you pick up your R1T. Credit also can not be used for tips, any tips given to the driver come out of your account, not the Rivian credit.

It's not a bad system, they usually offer more credit than you are likely to use, and I believe they will bump it up if the service ends up being extended or if you use up what they gave you initially. But they aren't funding your Uber trips after you get the truck back.

 

[RegReader]

In week 2 with no timeline given. This is a major overhaul.

I was in this camp too. Walked out to a bricked truck in the morning 2 weeks after taking delivery - I had hoped it was the software issue where the 12V wasn't topping up from the HV battery, since it had been plugged in the night before but no dice.

They towed it away, also out of a narrow driveway, by lifting each wheel up onto a little skate/dolly thing and then winching it onto a flatbed. Minor damage to some grass but otherwise a clean lift. Turned out there was something wrong between the rear drive unit and HV battery - something about the contactors but the advisor couldn't give me more information than that. Generally though, the service advisor was really communicative and good about giving me regular status updates, even if there wasn't much of a change. Basically they decided they'd have to swap out the battery and rear drive unit and some associated components.

The truck ended up being at the SC for two and a half weeks - mostly due to the wait for a battery pack from Normal. They did cover a rental for the duration since they knew it'd be a while.

This was all back in late May and I haven't had any issues with the power system since, though the truck is heading back in for service next week because we got a little too excited while off-roading and the underbody took some damage

 

[therealhoff]

Update on the original issue. I had quite the Friday and I learned some things. First off, the Rivian mobile tech who came by was a pretty awesome person. If this guy wasn't absolutely relentless in attempting everything we could think of, my truck would probably be in the service center in Richmond right now instead of outside operating correctly in my work parking lot. I have lots of pictures of what went down and will post them when I have time to get them off my phone. The tech arrived with a new set of 12v batteries. To get the frunk open, he attached a 12v power source, in this case, a portable lead acid battery jumper, to the rear terminals and then opened it up. Importantly, the power coming from the 12v rear terminals is not enough to boot the main computers and get the thing running. It's just enough to unlock stuff. So the frunk is up and he goes about disconnecting and replacing the batteries. There are three or four screws that go into each battery securing various leads. When you pull them all out, the batteries themselves are pretty standard. They have one screw hole each for positive and negative. All the other screws on top hold various brackets and leads down that act as a distributor for the positive hole. The negative hole appears to have only one lead. If you are planning on taking the leads off, be very careful and have a small parts magnet. They have stacked washers, up to three of them, under the screws that look very easy to lose. So he puts the new batteries in, the R1T wakes up, and things are looking up. When it fully boots up, we try to plug the charger in and the vehicle is not accepting a charge. He goes inside, plugs a laptop into it, and says he needs to reload the software or something because when the vehicle completely dies, all the modules go into "safe mode" before they die and it takes some tricks to get things working correctly again. He rolls down the windows, closes the frunk, and goes into the driver's seat to start messing with the software. A while later, maybe 30 mins or so, the vehicle dies again. Apparently the charge on the newly installed batteries has also run below minimum to power the vehicle so everything shuts off. This is when it gets fun. I guess the software was in the middle of loading or something when it died so putting a charge on the rear leads is not opening the frunk. So now I have a dead car, all four windows down, and frunk stuck closed. The tech then takes out three bolts under the right wheel to get to the manual frunk release and we eventually get the frunk open. At this point, the process is to get a second portable 12v charger, and try to get the alligator clips onto the tiny, recessed, positive and negative poles on each battery at the same time to try to revive the vehicle. It reminded me of the game of "Operation" but instead of using tweezers, you are using huge alligator clips from jumper cables. We spent an hour trying to get all four clips positioned on the batteries and providing enough current to at least roll up the windows. At this point, he'd been there for 3 hours and it wasn't looking good. After awhile, one of his portable chargers ran out of juice and we wre just kind of looking at each other and deciding whether or not I had to grab a tarp to throw over the thing until it could get towed. I had a 12v battery charger in my garage meant for jumping and charging car batteries so I figured what the heck, let me grab that, we'll use the tech's charger remaining charger that wasn't quite dead, and try to get the windows up one more time. My charger comes off the wall so I plugged it into a 30 amp outlet, set it for 12v/30 amps, and dropped the clips on the right side battery (looking from the front). When we got both hooked up, miracle of miracles, the R1T started booting up. Taking a step back, the lights on the right side of the vehicle (looking from the front) and half the light bar were lit and the right side windows started working. Apparently, stuff on the right side of the car, light windows and headlights, comes off the right battery assembly and stuff on the left side of the car comes off the left battery assembly. There is a meter on the front of the charger and the Rivian was pulling the full 30amp at 12v. It now made sense to me why the new 12v batteries died pretty fast because the Rivian pulls a lot of current off them and if the HV isn't providing anything, they will drain quickly. The good news is that the computers booted and the guy now had the opportunity to try the programming again. So he went back to programming the thing and after about an hour, he ended up calling home base for an additional procedure. It turns out that you can't just power the right side, and then the left side, and things will work. You have to power on both "at the same time". So we pulled off the power again, he put some jumper across from one hot terminal to some other hot terminal, and like turning nuclear keys, we did a "3...2...1.." and put the clips on the ground terminals close to simultaneously. The thing booted up again, he removed whatever jumper was on there, and he continued some programming procedure inside the vehicle. About 30 minutes later, whatever he was trying to get reloaded worked, the HV system reconnected to the LV system so we were getting power from the main batteries, and we were able to pull the chargers off the LV batteries. Just to make sure, we plugged in the L2 wall charger, and the vehicle started charging successfully. All that was left was to put back all the terminals, covers, panels, and bolts taken off the access everything. He buttoned everything up, and it has been running fine since. Elapsed time was about 5 hours or so.

So main takeaways - If your low voltage batteries die, you most likely will not be able to resolve that problem without a technician. Various components go into "Safe Mode" and there doesn't seem to be an easy way back from that. The jumpers in the rear do not appear to deliver sufficient current to the LV system to boot the computer or recharge the LV batteries. The systems of the truck draw a significant amount of power from the LV system. Without bridging power from the HV system, the LV batteries will run down below the threshold voltage of operating the computers fairly quickly. I wasn't in there at the controls but turning off various systems might prolong that time.

 

[electruck]

@therealhoff do you know why the 12V system died in the first place?

 

[therealhoff]

@therealhoff do you know why the 12V system died in the first place?

Wouldn't that be nice. No idea. With both of the old 12v batteries drained down to exactly 2.7V each, I have a hard time believing that they both died due to a "battery failure" in precisely the same way at once. If I had to wager, my money is on some bug in the HV to LV charging software. The guess being that under some random, quite unusual, corner case condition, the HV stops charging the LV and the LV just dies after awhile. Assuming there are no hardware issues with the BMS or step down charging circuitry specific to my R1T, odds are a SW issue. Now I'm chicken to take the R1T on a long trip for awhile until my trust builds back up.

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