R1S Delivery Experience and Initial Impressions (SF Bay Area)

jffkm said:

The day finally came (20 days shy of the 4 year mark) and I wanted to share a few initial impressions after picking up the vehicle and having a brief opportunity to drive this weekend.

DELIVERY EXPERIENCE:
Super smooth. The on-site rep had me sign two pieces of paper confirming vehicle receipt, checked my DL and then I was out of the door in less than 1 minute. I hit horrible traffic and showed up an hour late but they were very accommodating and reached out to confirm the pick up.

INITIAL INSPECTION:
Fit and finish have improved markedly (VIN (9XX)) and the body panel misalignment gaps are basically non-existent. The hood is slightly misaligned to the point where I made a service ticket (It could easily start rubbing on the driver's side (checked with calipers and there's 1mm clearance on the drivers side and 7mm on the right). I don't really care about body panel gaps tbh (my model 3 is a joke, but it never bothered me since water only penetrated the larger gaps once, I still love the car (aside from crazy fast phantom drain (15-20% per day) which tesla still denies is a problem for my vehicle)), but I went over it with the calipers and a digital level out of curiosity and they are definitely stepping up their game. It was probably a really painful process to fix the CAPAS for gaps from the truck deliveries but, hats off to the team.

The assembly team forgot to install the cover on the middle seat latch (second row) so it fell off when testing the seat. It was a bit embarrassing for the rep but it's just a single small screw that is missing. I can fix it myself but didn't want to damage the threads on the tapped receiver b/c I don't know what kind of screw was meant to go in there. The latch also did not retract as it's designed to do. It also does not engage the middle seat without slamming with far more force than what it was designed to do I am guessing. This was the first mechanical service ticket I generated. It should take a few minutes to fix.

I didn't hear any tocking or low speed grinding (thank god...) but time may reveal these things.

The sunroof panel has a bit of a disturbing wave to it (visible in the tinting and when I examine it from the top). There is nothing technically wrong with it but it suggests something was not even during the tempering process and/or it's mechanically stressed, which makes me nervous. I submitted a ticket for this as well.

The passenger side A pillar sounds like a banshee at anything over 55mph. This was immediately noticeable on the drive so I asked them to take a look at this as well. It will drive my wife nuts if this doesn't get fixed but I am confident they can find a solution because the drivers side doesn't make any noise at all.

All in all, this should be really quick/easy to fix (service appointments are fully booked for the next two months at the SF service center...which is a bummer, but thankfully none of these issues are deal breakers or safety issues at the moment).

DRIVING IMPRESSIONS:
The comments about porpoising are correct but it's subtle (not like a transit xl or bouncy utility vehicle). I drove the R1T, have a model 3 and spent a decent amount of time in other sports car EVs (taycan) in addition to an MDX, macan, Taco, etc. They can address a lot of this by tuning the suspension settings so I'm not worried but it definitely bounces and pitches a lot on bumps. More than the truck and way more than the M3 (which is to be expected). I was surprised that the car doesn't soak up bumps as much as I expected but it's likely tuned for sport response vs comfort.

It corners like it shouldn't. I haven't pushed it hard yet but it stays rail flat. Reminds me of the macan, it's eerily flat around corners so the suspension magic is real. The macan is also incredible and is a bit more planted, but it's also a much smaller/lower car, more of a hot hatch than an SUV.

Compressors kick on a lot more than I had expected but it doesn't seem to stay on like others have experienced.

Rear cargo space is not as big as I had hoped b/c the ceiling is low (with respect to the floor). Did a few dump runs and shuttled larger items between work and home on the weekend but was a bit surprised at how little volume there was. The 3rd row seats definitely make the height lower than I had expected. An XL model would have made sense both from a battery packaging perspective and probably suspension tuning. I couldn't do the XL personally (parking is insanely hard here), but it would definitely sell well against a Yukon XL or suburban etc.

Turning radius is awesome. Way closer to the M3 than I had expected and way better than any full sized truck or suv I've driven.

UI and INFOTAINMENT:
Works really well. Cameras are still pretty crappy as they have always been, but I believe the consensus is that it's actually subsampling and cropping a portion of a wide angle image from gear guard cameras which explains the low res. Rain gets on the cameras pretty easily, picked it up in the rare bay area rain shower this weekend.

Bluetooth is a bit buggy for audio, keeps displaying the wrong album art vs. the song and I cannot change tracks over bluetooth like in my m3, need to do it on the phone.

Mapping seems spot on.

ADAS is a bit miscalibrated but I don't really use these systems in the M3 either. It shows the R1S as riding the center divider line even if I'm all the way on the other side of the lane. I may bring this up, but it's probably a quick calibration/fix.

OTHER:
PAAK has worked perfectly for me so far. I was nervous about this but it has worked flawlessly, as well as the model 3.

Battery app drain is real. I've got an iphone 14p and it has never drained on me before late night time from a full charge (even after super heavy use, video calls etc), but as soon I picked up the car and paired it with my phone it drained very rapidly. (i.e. ran down from 100% charge to 5% low power mode in less than 4 hours and was super hot). Sure enough, battery settings show the Rivian App as the cuprit. Not sure what is up here but I have resorted to closing the app manually after leaving the car for now. They'll fix this soon. I don't know if the apple NFC works with rivian's hardware but that would be amazing.

OVERALL:
Amazing initial effort from a new car company. Everything seems easily fixable so far. Fingers crossed that there is no recall-level issue with CV axels but it does seem that the majority of owners have issues there. I have not encountered it but am just counting down at this point b/c it seems so prevalent. I've met about a dozen other r1t owners in the bay area so far and all of them have the issue, so it's not looking likely that I'll dodge it completely.

Will likely put a reservation down for a dual motor r1t if we move to a different place with more parking flexibility.

Click to expand...

jffkm said:

The day finally came (20 days shy of the 4 year mark) and I wanted to share a few initial impressions after picking up the vehicle and having a brief opportunity to drive this weekend.

DELIVERY EXPERIENCE:
Super smooth. The on-site rep had me sign two pieces of paper confirming vehicle receipt, checked my DL and then I was out of the door in less than 1 minute. I hit horrible traffic and showed up an hour late but they were very accommodating and reached out to confirm the pick up.

INITIAL INSPECTION:
Fit and finish have improved markedly (VIN (9XX)) and the body panel misalignment gaps are basically non-existent. The hood is slightly misaligned to the point where I made a service ticket (It could easily start rubbing on the driver's side (checked with calipers and there's 1mm clearance on the drivers side and 7mm on the right). I don't really care about body panel gaps tbh (my model 3 is a joke, but it never bothered me since water only penetrated the larger gaps once, I still love the car (aside from crazy fast phantom drain (15-20% per day) which tesla still denies is a problem for my vehicle)), but I went over it with the calipers and a digital level out of curiosity and they are definitely stepping up their game. It was probably a really painful process to fix the CAPAS for gaps from the truck deliveries but, hats off to the team.

The assembly team forgot to install the cover on the middle seat latch (second row) so it fell off when testing the seat. It was a bit embarrassing for the rep but it's just a single small screw that is missing. I can fix it myself but didn't want to damage the threads on the tapped receiver b/c I don't know what kind of screw was meant to go in there. The latch also did not retract as it's designed to do. It also does not engage the middle seat without slamming with far more force than what it was designed to do I am guessing. This was the first mechanical service ticket I generated. It should take a few minutes to fix.

I didn't hear any tocking or low speed grinding (thank god...) but time may reveal these things.

The sunroof panel has a bit of a disturbing wave to it (visible in the tinting and when I examine it from the top). There is nothing technically wrong with it but it suggests something was not even during the tempering process and/or it's mechanically stressed, which makes me nervous. I submitted a ticket for this as well.

The passenger side A pillar sounds like a banshee at anything over 55mph. This was immediately noticeable on the drive so I asked them to take a look at this as well. It will drive my wife nuts if this doesn't get fixed but I am confident they can find a solution because the drivers side doesn't make any noise at all.

All in all, this should be really quick/easy to fix (service appointments are fully booked for the next two months at the SF service center...which is a bummer, but thankfully none of these issues are deal breakers or safety issues at the moment).

DRIVING IMPRESSIONS:
The comments about porpoising are correct but it's subtle (not like a transit xl or bouncy utility vehicle). I drove the R1T, have a model 3 and spent a decent amount of time in other sports car EVs (taycan) in addition to an MDX, macan, Taco, etc. They can address a lot of this by tuning the suspension settings so I'm not worried but it definitely bounces and pitches a lot on bumps. More than the truck and way more than the M3 (which is to be expected). I was surprised that the car doesn't soak up bumps as much as I expected but it's likely tuned for sport response vs comfort.

It corners like it shouldn't. I haven't pushed it hard yet but it stays rail flat. Reminds me of the macan, it's eerily flat around corners so the suspension magic is real. The macan is also incredible and is a bit more planted, but it's also a much smaller/lower car, more of a hot hatch than an SUV.

Compressors kick on a lot more than I had expected but it doesn't seem to stay on like others have experienced.

Rear cargo space is not as big as I had hoped b/c the ceiling is low (with respect to the floor). Did a few dump runs and shuttled larger items between work and home on the weekend but was a bit surprised at how little volume there was. The 3rd row seats definitely make the height lower than I had expected. An XL model would have made sense both from a battery packaging perspective and probably suspension tuning. I couldn't do the XL personally (parking is insanely hard here), but it would definitely sell well against a Yukon XL or suburban etc.

Turning radius is awesome. Way closer to the M3 than I had expected and way better than any full sized truck or suv I've driven.

UI and INFOTAINMENT:
Works really well. Cameras are still pretty crappy as they have always been, but I believe the consensus is that it's actually subsampling and cropping a portion of a wide angle image from gear guard cameras which explains the low res. Rain gets on the cameras pretty easily, picked it up in the rare bay area rain shower this weekend.

Bluetooth is a bit buggy for audio, keeps displaying the wrong album art vs. the song and I cannot change tracks over bluetooth like in my m3, need to do it on the phone.

Mapping seems spot on.

ADAS is a bit miscalibrated but I don't really use these systems in the M3 either. It shows the R1S as riding the center divider line even if I'm all the way on the other side of the lane. I may bring this up, but it's probably a quick calibration/fix.

OTHER:
PAAK has worked perfectly for me so far. I was nervous about this but it has worked flawlessly, as well as the model 3.

Battery app drain is real. I've got an iphone 14p and it has never drained on me before late night time from a full charge (even after super heavy use, video calls etc), but as soon I picked up the car and paired it with my phone it drained very rapidly. (i.e. ran down from 100% charge to 5% low power mode in less than 4 hours and was super hot). Sure enough, battery settings show the Rivian App as the cuprit. Not sure what is up here but I have resorted to closing the app manually after leaving the car for now. They'll fix this soon. I don't know if the apple NFC works with rivian's hardware but that would be amazing.

OVERALL:
Amazing initial effort from a new car company. Everything seems easily fixable so far. Fingers crossed that there is no recall-level issue with CV axels but it does seem that the majority of owners have issues there. I have not encountered it but am just counting down at this point b/c it seems so prevalent. I've met about a dozen other r1t owners in the bay area so far and all of them have the issue, so it's not looking likely that I'll dodge it completely.

Will likely put a reservation down for a dual motor r1t if we move to a different place with more parking flexibility.

Click to expand...

the long way downunder said:

Thanks for putting the effort into capturing and sharing your experience.

Good idea to submit a ticket for all defects and get them on the warranty paperwork. That roof will presumably fail – having them acknowledge it's a defective until will avoid the "how did you break the sunroof" questions.

The banshee noise is caused by the design of the quarter vent windows. So far, there's no fix other than some people ignore it and some vehicles are more "flying Valkyrie" and less "howling banshee" … my R1T is a pair of howler monkeys above about 55 mph. Absolutely pathetic that the vehicle got through early R&D, let alone through pre-production sign-offs with this design flaw. It's one of the few showstoppers I've experienced.

On-road handling is impressive. Up to a point. Go beyond "quick" into "spirited" and (the R1T on 20s) is quick to communicate its limits and the limits of the tires to deal with 800hp and 7000lbs, plus the steering loses the plot when called upon, so feeling the thresholds is a dulled intuition. I wouldn't recommend being too adventurous at higher speeds. At least it has great brakes.

I'd add the compressor to the checklist for service. I practically never hear the compressor, even with Kneel Mode, it seems to handle the work. Of course you can hear it while outside the vehicle when you close a door and it gets a chance to catch up on leveling out the ride height.

I've had no trouble with bluetooth. The camp speaker code hasn't been written – that's something I'd like to see working with a little more functionality than just a dumb speaker.

ADAS is ok on my R1, but the side cameras are not aligned or calibrated, so I don't trust it's blindspot and in reverse, it's pointing off by 5-10 degrees on the passenger side compared to the door mirror using landmarks.

PAAK is garbage on my R1T. Slow, erratic, finicky, indecisive, and there's no control in the software to just make it stay open or stay closed. Good to hear it's "fixed" in the S. I think they'll need software and maybe hardware to get it working on the R1T. I wonder why not put a simple line of code in the app to pop up a button that says "stay locked till next time" or "stay unlocked till I manually lock" etc. Why not a line of code to check the door handles – if someone manually levers the door handle open, go into "stay open" mode. etc. I put PAAK under a long list of "they didn't finish, they stopped."

I have an Android and haven't encountered app drain. I'll have to check that out in case I'm just not noticing some loss. My phone is workhorse and on the charger till it's above 70% at all times (I treat it like an EV battery.)

I think the variable CV joint, axle spline noise is in part due to exercising wide open throttle acceleration from a standstill. My R1T remains quiet. I imagine once I get it off-road, that will change.

Do you have squeaky suspension at low speeds over things like speed bumps?

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thunderdeep said:

"...service appointments are fully booked for the next two months at the SF service center...which is a bummer..."

Interesting. This might be a reason for delays in R1S deliveries if there are lots of these little issues... which it sounds like there are.

I'm annoyed to be delayed but then I hope they iron all this out. I had some of this when I got my Model 3 in the initial run in 2018... AC rattling noise (was a leaf), dash bubbling (ended up drying out), drivers seatbelt rattle, etc.

All the little stuff gets annoying and till they clear the backlog they probably are redistributing trucks/suvs to different less bogged down centers...

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