[Video] Out of Spec: Hitting The Trails For The First Time This Year With A Rivian R1T, Frontier Pro-4X, & Lexus GX!

[SASSquatch]

@OutofSpecKyle I agree with @SASSquatch's comment above. These type of videos (assuming you're going to make more) would be much more valuable and useful if you brought some rigor to them like you do for the charging and range tests and videos. Looking forward to more of your great work!

+1 for rigor.

@OutofSpecKyle - I (we) say this with love.

Your channel stands out from almost every other EV/auto review channel because you go much more into the weeds than others (literally and figuratively). That means you are going to attract a very specific kind of nerd (I mean viewer) who will have higher expectations for your content.

I won't speak for @AllInev but I will happily volunteer to be your "rigor consultant" for future videos. All it will cost you is a few joy rides in what appears to be a limitless supply of R1T test vehicles at your disposal.



That said, I also appreciate that you were just trying to get the R1T and Lexus/Nissan out there to see what they can do and this specific video wasn't necessarily designed to be a rigorously controlled experiment.

Keep up the great work!

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[MountainBikeDude]

Short but sweet!

 

[AllInev]

Have you seen the individual motor load graphics Rivian had in some of their older materials? Hopefully they add that in eventually.

The "torque" graphic shown in the upper-right corner of this Rivian video would be helpful:

Also, this clip is a great example of an R1T "feeling" its way over terrain. It's almost bull-like in it's snorting and scratching of the surface with it's short bursts of wheel spin. I love it.

 

[kneebuster]

Also, this clip is a great example of an R1T "feeling" its way over terrain. It's almost bull-like in it's snorting and scratching of the surface with it's short bursts of wheel spin. I love it.

Tires are clearly aired down which makes a huge difference. I wonder what pressure they were running.

 

[MountainBikeDude]

The "torque" graphic shown in the upper-right corner of this Rivian video would be helpful:

Also, this clip is a great example of an R1T "feeling" its way over terrain. It's almost bull-like in it's snorting and scratching of the surface with it's short bursts of wheel spin. I love it.

Agreed. They used to have the power per wheel displayed on the gauge cluster in the prototype demo. I think two good updates to the offroad side of things, would be a torque/output graphic like they show in the video, and when in off road and rock crawl modes a disabling of the pedestrian warning sound so one can drive and observe nature in peace.

 

[OrthoBlock]

...reckon airing down the tires (that segment at around 10 min where it's really struggling appears to be at normal pressure) would have done a better job given the larger surface area on the ground...

air down your tires!

If you want to “tread lightly” on the environment and your trails, airing down will help immensely. By providing better traction for your vehicle, you reduce the potential for digging ruts and tearing up the trail!!...

Tires are clearly aired down which makes a huge difference. I wonder what pressure they were running.

My 2 cents on the few comments here around airing down tires: first off, completely agree that, in general, airing down tires helps with off-road performance.

However, in the video I just watched, I don't really see that it would have made much difference. The issue, as many have pointed out, was NOT that tires in contact with the ground were spinning but did not have enough traction (a situation that might have been helped by airing down), but rather that the tires that did have traction were not spinning at all (i.e., torque limited rather than traction limited.) Lower tire pressure, on a tire that is not spinning, or that is spinning freely in mid-air, does little to help a vehicle advance off-road.

TLDR: airing down = good for off-roading, but unlikely to have not helped much here.

 

[Zybane]

My 2 cents on the few comments here around airing down tires: first off, completely agree that, in general, airing down tires helps with off-road performance.

However, in the video I just watched, I don't really see that it would have made much difference. The issue, as many have pointed out, was NOT that tires in contact with the ground were spinning but did not have enough traction (a situation that might have been helped by airing down), but rather that the tires that did have traction were not spinning at all (i.e., torque limited rather than traction limited.) Lower tire pressure, on a tire that is not spinning, or that is spinning freely in mid-air, does little to help a vehicle advance off-road.

TLDR: airing down = good for off-roading, but unlikely to have not helped much here.

Exactly. The Achilles heal of the Rivian for technical off-road will be the quad motor system that isn't mechanically linked in any way.

In an off-camber incline scenario, you could have as much as 70%+ of vehicle weight on one wheel. In that instance, you only have one motor with 227 lb of Torque and a little help from another trying to advance a 7K lb+ truck up a hill.

In say a Jeep Rubicon, you can have all mechanical advantage of the engine going through the torque converter, multiplied going through 1st gear, multiplied 4x by the transfer case, multiplied by the differentials, all going equally to all four wheels at the same speed. This is way more advantageous than the Rivian setup for technical off-roading. Oh and it weighs over 2K lb lighter.

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