R1T Battery Cooling Louvers under the grill?

[Pixelshot]

Met up with a fellow Rivian fan here in Denver today and we stopped by the Denver Service Center to see if the R1Ts were home. They were! We noticed an interesting movement inside the small grill below the trunk that I hadn't seen before. Looks like there is a moving louver system to keep the battery cool. It was about 45 degrees (f) and the truck was plugged in to the L2 charger. We also noticed there was intermittent clicking by the chargers so it seemed that the battery/charger were in some kind of maintenance mode. Anyway, neither of us remember seeing anything about this louver system online before so I recorded a quick video so you can see what we saw. Also added some closeups of the blue color. And we also noticed what looked like factory-installed film on the gear tunnel door and vent just behind the front wheel well. Cool stuff. Anyone have any clue what the little vents are on either side? We thought it may be a passthrough to the wheel well.

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[CommodoreAmiga]

It’s all for aerodynamic. Active shutters are becoming increasingly common on vehicles — smooth when they can and allow cooling when they must. The “pass throughs” are also for aero.

 

[BigE]

Met up with a fellow Rivian fan here in Denver today and we stopped by the Denver Service Center to see if the R1Ts were home. They were! We noticed an interesting movement inside the small grill below the trunk that I hadn't seen before. Looks like there is a moving louver system to keep the battery cool. It was about 45 degrees (f) and the truck was plugged in to the L2 charger. We also noticed there was intermittent clicking by the chargers so it seemed that the battery/charger were in some kind of maintenance mode. Anyway, neither of us remember seeing anything about this louver system online before so I recorded a quick video so you can see what we saw. Also added some closeups of the blue color. And we also noticed what looked like factory-installed film on the gear tunnel door and vent just behind the front wheel well. Cool stuff. Anyone have any clue what the little vents are on either side? We thought it may be a passthrough to the wheel well.

The PPF behind the front wheel vent and gear tunnel door is from the factory. It also looked like PPF on the front bumper.

 

[Pixelshot]

It’s all for aerodynamic. Active shutters are becoming increasingly common on vehicles — smooth when they can and allow cooling when they must. The “pass throughs” are also for aero.

Can you explain about the aero? Is it to create pressure in the wheel well?

 

[BigE]

Can you explain about the aero? Is it to create pressure in the wheel well?

The vent behind the front wheel is to allow airflow (relieve pressure from within the wheel well) and allow the air to pass through and stay attached to the body and pass to the back thus improving aerodynamics

 

[thrill]

When air flows (so, under pressure) it begins to behave more like a hard to compress fluid than an easy to compress gas, hence the attachment below about the joy of studying such things from my favorite science book. As a flow, it will begin to behave chaotically if if is, err, pressured to move in a certain way, such as off an airplane wing under heavy g-force, or to exit the trapped, from its perspective, container called a wheel well. Things behaving chaotically have a mathematical definition, in that while not impossible to predict, it's hard to do so, and assumptions about models that operate normally in simpler situations then begin to give simply wrong answers. The solution, as best we have, is to do the grunt work of calculating where actual (ok, virtual) molecules will flow based on them pushing each other and running into things (called computational flud dynamics). Based on those sorts of studies, chaotic gas flow, generally called turbulence, can be better estimated where it will cause additional drag, called induced drag since it's been "created" by the flow going chaotic. That drag presents itself in several and almost universally undesireable ways, from buzzy noises to a greater surface area to the oncoming wind (so worse mileage), to actual loss of function at the extremes (like airplane wings).

So, in short, yeah it's probably an aerodynamic decision. The usual engineering tradeoff will exist in some way - it'll get full of road gunk and let it splash down the side of the vehicle, since it's got to go somewhere.

 

[VermontR1T]

Interesting. Though it definitely doesn't explain why the vent moves when I walk past it with the phone in my pocket!!!

 

[PeterSK]

Yeah I just got my R1S and noticed some sounds from the front after locking. I’ll check to see if it’s the louvers closing.

 

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Interesting. Though it definitely doesn't explain why the vent moves when I walk past it with the phone in my pocket!!!

Because the truck is waking up. You probably have PaaK enabled and it assumes you're getting ready to drive. Same as when you unlock it with the fob:

 

[VermontR1T]

Got it thanks. I guess it needs some lubrication because I never noticed it until a few weeks ago.

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