New York resident Chase Merrill put a deposit down on an $85,626 Rivian R1S three years ago in the hopes of making the switch to an all-electric SUV.
But when it was finally delivered on March 10, 2023, things did not go as he expected.
The last time I had the courage to drive through the war zone formerly known as Chicago, I saw one of these bad boys in action.
I can definitely say Rivians look slick.
What's under the hood is way more important than cool LED running lights, however, and in this case, what was under the hood was a whole lot of failure. Two days after he got the SUV at his home in the Adirondack Mountains, Merrill decided to take it up to his family's property on the backroads and put it to the test.
At first, the R1S sliced through the snow. Then, a large snowdrift stymied the car, he said.
"I hit about 2 ½-feet of snow and it just stopped right there," Merrill told Insider. "I had seen all the Rivian marketing campaigns with the cars just eating through the snow so it was kind of like, man this is disappointing."
It turns out that what you see in ad campaigns is not usually what you get in real life.
But things got worse. Merrill got another driver to help him get out of the snowbank, but then the truck's software glitched.
While he was sitting in the driver's seat, unbuckled, rocking the R1S out of the snowbank, he said that he accidentally triggered a safety feature that got the car stuck between the park and drive gears.
Rivian executives said the SUV thought the vehicle was in an uncontrolled slide down a hill. The computer didn't understand that Merrill was rocking it to get it unstuck, so it completely locked him out.
"There was an unfortunate cascade of events and edge cases that led to this situation," Wassym Bensaid, Rivian's senior vice president of software development, told Insider. "But we take this feedback as a gift. It's great input for us to improve the product."
I'm glad they want to fix this problem for their customers, but I just have to point something out.
An old beat-up truck will never lock you out of the controls in the middle of a snowbank on the back side of the Adirondacks.
Merrill ended up paying over $2,000 to have his truck towed to a service facility.
The brand-new Rivian ultimately had to be loaded onto a flatbed and driven to a service center in Chelsea, Massachusetts, hundreds of miles away. The towing fee was $2,100.
The ordeal now has Merrill considering trading the R1S for a Toyota Tacoma or a similar gas-powered pickup truck, he said.
Welcome back to the family, Merrill.
If I could make a suggestion, there's really only one choice if you want a truck that'll both last forever and get through anything!
