Phantom Battery Drain Issue Solved? May be frunk latch failing to fully engage and preventing Rivian from going to sleep fully

[jclicky]

Fascinating post & story from a reddit user, it seems that the trunk latch failing to fully engage prevented his Rivian from going to sleep fully.

Wonder if phantom drain could be traced to incomplete closures and/or sensor glitches on other thresholds like a door, the gear tunnel, and/or the rear hatch on the R1S.




I am wondering if the “incomplete closure” of the frunk could be linked to the removal of the magnet attachments on the top-most front plastic element in front of the frunk, above the grille, under the frunk lid [thanks Munro ]. Those connectors, now no longer high-quality magnets, are plastic snap connectors.

There’s a new “out-of-spec detailing” YouTube video (covering build issues he’s seeing on Rivians) [at ~12:00 mark, key point at ~12:50] where they pointed out the frunk interior “topper” plastic piece snap-to clasps aren’t fully engaged below, so that piece is just sitting above the grille, loose & can be easily lifted.

I’m guessing Rivian needs to add QC on the line for this new assembly point to ensure all of the pieces are fully engaged & sensors are accurately reading whether or not the frunk is fully latched closed - I’m guessing a lot of these are disengaging sleep intermittently just like this Redditor’s Rivian.

Thoughts?

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[Dark-Fx]

Wasn't Rivian going to update the phone app to get notifications about closures not being closed properly?

I'm ready to be upset that Rivian has this capability that they aren't sharing with people who actually own the hardware.

Where are my legislators that are willing to push this as a right to repair issue?

 

[jclicky]

Wasn't Rivian going to update the phone app to get notifications about closures not being closed properly?

I'm ready to be upset that Rivian has thos capability that they aren't sharing with people who actually own the hardware.

Where are my legislators that are willing to push this as a right to repair issue?

I hear you, but I also wonder if it’s a non-trivial dev effort to ensure the car routes, via their servers, to the owner’s phones, accurately (not like, say, tediously excessive unnecessary notifications that a door or latch isn’t engaged) any incompletely closed or latched thresholds, but still, I do think this probably argues for a more robust event log for debugging that I wish end-users could have access to without Rivian feeling like they have to dump all of their secrets to competitors.

It’s a tough position because so many other manufacturers are going after them that I’m sure they’re hesitant to open much up.

I know of at least one other user (was it on here or Reddit?) who used his own WiFi network to snoop on all of the Rivian’s calls homes & who built an effective log of a ton of its activities in what data it sends up, that might be a useful “event log” to lookup for anyone who can do that who is encountering Phantom Drain.

 

[Marchin_MTB]

Perhaps this explains the variety of drain seen by people in seemingly similar conditions.

the app update could start out simple, as in “is everything latched properly, yes or no?”

 

[SoCal Rob]

I’d like to know how there is an intermittent issue with a sensor on the frunk closure that either only happens when the vehicle is sitting still/locked or doesn‘t trigger a warning when the vehicle is being driven. I’m pretty sure that people have described warnings when driving if something isn’t fully closed or if a sensor issue indicates to the vehicle that something isn’t closed. Does anyone else find this odd?

edit:clarity

 

[p3ck]

Running Home Assistant with the unofficial Rivian integration is amazing. Thanks to the hard work by the community members for this. This info is available and should be made available on the phone app...

 

[Marchin_MTB]

Incidentally I am now seeing 5-6% in cold temps (used to be 1-2.5% in the summer). I am starting to wonder if this is a BMS related temperature effect, a software change (happened around the onset of colder temperatures), or if I should join Reddit so I can get Rivian to diagnose my truck!

 

[Arky]

I had reported a similar issue and got some feedback from the resident Rivian employee there that they suspected this issue in my vehicle as well. No fix yet but hopefully soon.

For what it's worth, the drain may be inconsistent. When I drive the car I actually use the frunk quite often (easier to grab groceries from the closest compartment to my front door) so while I was seeing quite bad vampire drain, it appears to not always be happening. I'd say that can make some sense given each time the frunk latches it has a chance to detect properly or not.

I heard someone mention that in the vehicle 'access' screen it may show the frunk open when it's clearly not which would indicate this bug to the user. I haven't checked that personally but I'll look next time.

 

[DTown3011]

Running Home Assistant with the unofficial Rivian integration is amazing. Thanks to the hard work by the community members for this. This info is available and should be made available on the phone app...

Please tell more about this inregration!

 

[p3ck]

Please tell more about this inregration!

https://github.com/bretterer/home-assistant-rivian

You can install it with HACS

 

[DTown3011]

https://github.com/bretterer/home-assistant-rivian

You can install it with HACS

Yikes, thats like a foreign language to me - thanks for posting, but over my head!

 

[SASSquatch]

I am wondering if the “incomplete closure” of the frunk could be linked to the removal of the magnet attachments on the top-most front plastic element in front of the frunk, above the grille, under the frunk lid [thanks Munro ]. Those connectors, now no longer high-quality magnets, are plastic snap connectors.

DAMN it, they removed the magnets? I told y'all Sandy was going to be trouble! Does anyone know when this change happened?

 

[Arky]

DAMN it, they removed the magnets? I told y'all Sandy was going to be trouble! Does anyone know when this change happened?

Plastic snap clips are used everywhere in industry it doesn't make too much sense to use a magnet for something people don't have real reason to disassemble. Frankly I don't mind working with these (they don't get all rusty crusty) and you can usually get a bag of 50 for $10 if they break anyway.

 

[SASSquatch]

Plastic snap clips are used everywhere in industry it doesn't make too much sense to use a magnet for something people don't have real reason to disassemble. Frankly I don't mind working with these (they don't get all rusty crusty) and you can usually get a bag of 50 for $10 if they break anyway.

I don't doubt that at all - and magnets were probably way overkill - although they were a very clever way to make sure assembly happens very quickly without worry about tolerances. It is more the trend of Sandy getting in their production line to cheapen things up.

Great for Rivian, not necessarily great for the consumer. For this specific issue, I agree it isn't a big deal - unless the loose fitting snaps are contributing to sensor issues leading to the phantom drain where the powerful earth magnets were not.

 

[jclicky]

I don't doubt that at all - and magnets were probably way overkill - although they were a very clever way to make sure assembly happens very quickly without worry about tolerances. It is more the trend of Sandy getting in their production line to cheapen things up.

Great for Rivian, not necessarily great for the consumer. For this specific issue, I agree it isn't a big deal - unless the loose fitting snaps are contributing to sensor issues leading to the phantom drain where the powerful earth magnets were not.

To me this example (if true, we don’t know that this assembly change is causing issues) would be emblematic of consulting failures: sometimes an external stakeholder with an incomplete picture recommends a change that is actually more disruptive to efficiency (i.e. cutting costs lowers morale on a team, or new tooling/assembly is rife with errors, etc.) than beneficial.

It’s all fine & well to recommend a big change that on paper should be better, but quite another to actually put that into practice.

Again, I have no idea if this is the root cause, but I am concerned that assembly line changes at this stage might not be worth the squeeze if they don’t dramatically safe $$$ per vehicle or dramatically save minutes in the assembly line process.

Ramp up is critical for Rivian right now and there is an opportunity cost in changing processes, parts, & protocol at this stage vs. what their lines have been sourcing, using & snapping into place.

There’s a reason why new parts are only added in on an annual basis (and let’s face it, for each model most of the time these types of changes are stacked for a model-tweak/redesign every 3-4 years) for most car manufactures; there are downstream impacts in sourcing, manufacture, & in the field. So it makes more sense to test then deploy a new build in your assembly at a fixed date/time but otherwise focus on producing as many as you can as fast as you can if demand outstrips supply.

At this point I’m a bit worried that although Rivian is severely underwater per vehicle, the groupthink response to the wall street bed-wetters (or Elon, who, ha! loves to say they’ll go out of business if they don’t cut costs ASAP) to change parts, remove/replace parts for substandard, cheaper, more inexpensive parts, will have much costlier residual impacts: lower customer perception of brand/build quality, mistakes in assembly & resulting breakages (requiring costly fixes), & a new supply chain for these parts that hasn’t been established with prior partners.

Yes Rivian has gotta manufacture 5x the annual quantity of vehicles they currently are, but I’m not sure that swapping out all of the high-quality parts on the fly for cheaper (even if, yes, industry-standard, like plastic clips) parts, they may be cutting off their nose to spite their face in a bit of a panic.

IMO, Rivian should focus on maximizing their ramp-up on current parts & pieces, and minimize part/assembly changes (nearly equivalent to a code-freeze) until they’ve hit upper-limits of assembly-line efficiency boosts with current parts/assembly/tooling.

But I think that incorporating Munro-style cost-saving tweaks in-line ad-hoc vs. on an annualized cycle just causes more headaches than it solves AND it risks undermining their biggest differentiator from Tesla: perception of high build-quality.

End rant against Munro. If they can cover costs at 70K vehicles on current parts/tooling, focus on getting that done before you swap everything out for cheap plastic, just too many unintended consequences IMO.

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