Just how good could it be? First drive Rivian R1T

Good morning, Pickup Truck Plus SUV Talk viewers. I'm Jordan Golson, and I'm here in one of the most exciting new pickup trucks you're going to find. It's the Rivian R1T. And the least interesting thing about it is that it's electric. Let's get into why. I've driven a lot of EVs, and a lot of them are great. But the problem has always been, at least in the US, is that they haven't built vehicles that people want to drive. Americans like big pickup trucks, and big SUVs, and everything that this channel is about, and all the things that Tim loves. But there aren't any electric pickups. Until now. We've got a bunch coming. We have the Ford F-150 Lightning, which I'm sure we'll get into next year when that comes out. But this is here today, and it is a little smaller than the F-150, a little bit bigger than the Ranger, so it's like almost a full-size pickup. But it's got a lot of full-size pickup capabilities, and it's extremely good off-road. When I was reading the Rivian press materials early on, they said, oh, it's going to be this off-road champion, can go adventure anywhere. And I thought it was going to be like a Subaru Forester. You know, you could go drive to the campsite down a gravel road, something like that. Well, it's not quite that. It's a little different. We took it out yesterday on some really tough trails here in Colorado. We're in Breckenridge right now, so we're just driving around, very pretty. And this is an astonishingly capable vehicle, and there's a number of reasons why. It's got a really neat trick suspension. It's got four electric motors, one on each wheel, so you get all sorts of crazy torque vectoring and pulling, and you don't need diff locks and differentials and transfer cases and all that. You just have an electric motor on each wheel, which is like embracing technology to do amazing things and explore the outdoors. It's got an air suspension that can rise up to almost 15 inches of ground clearance, and that's real ground clearance because there's nothing underneath. There's just a battery pack protected by this incredible armored plate underneath. So it's not like you have 15 inches of clearance over here and then it drops down because there is a differential and then it goes back up again. No, it's just flat underneath. It's the weirdest thing to see in front of you. So that helps a lot. And then it's got big 34-inch tires, which are pretty much the largest you can fit stuffed in there. That's what the dynamics guy was talking about. You can't really go any bigger, but you don't really need to. It can do rock crawling, it can do fording rivers, it can do anything you wanna do outdoors that probably most of the people who buy this thing aren't gonna do. But isn't it nice to know that you could? That's the whole point of all these off-road trucks. And when you combine all that together, it can ford 36 inches of water, which is ridiculous. But there's no moving components. There's no air intake to suck air. There's none of that. So you take all that technology and you combine it together and you get this amazingly capable vehicle. Whether people take it off-road or not, it doesn't really matter, but they're super focused on the adventure lifestyle. There's a lot of cool things in here to make that happen. One of them is this, and it's this little adventure bracelet, they call it. And this actually has a little chip in it, and you can use that to unlock the door and even start the car. So you don't have to bring a key with you. You just have that, go off and do your adventuring, surfing or skiing or whatever it is you wanna do, and come back and open your car door. And then some other vehicles have had that. I think a Jaguar Land Rover did it and there's been a few others, but this is an adventure vehicle. They have focused on that. Even the wifi password at the event this weekend talked about adventure. So they're big into it. And then you got this key, this key, which doubles as a carabiner. You can unlock the doors, you got buttons here, unlock and lock. You can open up the rear tailgate by pressing a button. You can open up the frunk by pressing a button. And then you can just, this comes apart and then you can just clip it to whatever you want. And then you've got these, which are little like wallet credit card size things. And if you put that in your wallet, then you can use that to open the door and start and whatever. And so what they're doing is they're trying to rethink what an automobile looks like and putting this technology in and all that and not having this legacy brand thing to hold them back and say, well, this is always how we've done it. They've rethought everything on the car. And so let's start here on the interior, big screen, big screen in the middle. We've had those before, those aren't new, but everything runs through these. There are basically no hard buttons except on the steering wheel. And these are sort of multifunction. This is actually how you would adjust the mirrors, adjust the steering wheel, gear shift over here, over here you got light controls and there's a ton of lighting controls. You got off, auto, parking, lights, lights with front fog, lights with all fog. So you got lots of choices for your headlights. And then you got a windshield wipers over here. You got auto and then you got a whole bunch of different modes to choose from, windshield washer and all those things. And that's about it. It's very minimalist in here. Everything is in this screen right here. This center screen, they've given it some ridiculous name. I think it's XMM, Experience Multimedia Module, something, I don't know. It's a big screen in the middle and it controls basically everything. And you've got buttons down here. You can do your navigation and you can do your music and it's got built-in apps for Spotify and a bunch of other stuff. So you can listen to things. Then you got this button, it's the drive modes. All purpose, sport, conserve. Conserve is really interesting. It entirely disconnects the rear electric motor. So it's just front drive only when you do that. Improves your range, reduces your horsepower, which we'll get to in a second. Off-road and towing. You can tow 11,000 pounds, which is astonishing for a vehicle this size. And we'll see. We're gonna have to test it out, what it does for range. But what other car companies have told me about towing is that you get a similar sort of loss that you would, efficiency loss, that you would with an internal combustion engine. So it's not gonna be as bad as you think it would be. And what really counts is not the weight, but it's the shape of the trailer. So if you've got a flatbed with a load of bricks on it, you're gonna get much less efficiency loss than you do if you've got a big brick-shaped horse trailer. And these are real drive modes. They change a lot of things. They'll change the suspension. They'll change the throttle map. They'll change the ride height. All of those things to optimize for whatever it is you're doing. And there's even subcategories you can choose here. So you got ride. And if you tap that, you can choose stiff or soft. So we're in the all-purpose drive mode right now. And so it's soft and it's a very nice ride. And this has the off-road tires on it, big thick sidewalls, and it's very comfortable. And then if you put it in stiff, it gets a little stiffer. But then if you go into sport, stiff becomes even stiffer than that, which is kind of interesting. It's not just, there's not just two drive or ride modes, soft and stiff. There's a whole bunch of them. I'm gonna sit here at the light to get on the highway here. And so now we have to get to the horsepower since what we're gonna do is we're gonna merge onto the highway. And when you put your foot down, it just absolutely takes off because all in it has 835 horsepower, which would be impressive in a hyper car, nevermind a $75,000 pickup truck. 910 pound feet of torque, which is really the number you care about with electric cars, astonishingly fast. Unnecessarily fast. But I've driven a lot of EVs. EVs are fast in a straight line. You can go buy a Tesla Model S Plaid and do zero to 60 and whatever. They say this will do zero to 60 in about three seconds, by the way, which is crazy. Shows you, you can change your charge limit, all sorts of EV stuff, change the lighting controls. And then you got, it's always on connected, of course, cause all new cars are, okay, fine. It's got all that stuff. This one has heated and cooled seats, heated steering wheel, all the luxury things. Giant glass roof, which is great. I love the big, big glass roofs. And then you get into all the little things. All that stuff is like standard luxury car stuff, right? You got a big screen, LTE connectivity and all those things. And then you get into the adventure things. You have this thing in the back called the gear tunnel and it's basically lost space in a regular vehicle, either lost to the seats or lost to the space between the bed and the main passenger cabin, things like that. And then here they decided to just put in this giant place to put stuff. And then they went even further. And there's this thing. I don't know why they came up with these names, but there's the gear tunnel. That part makes sense. Then there's the gear shuttle, which is basically a shelf that sits inside. And slides all the way out with power ports on it. So you can plug in ski boot warmers or whatever and have all your gear in there, plugged in, charged off the battery. And then they said, okay, what can we do with that? Okay, remember all the adventure stuff I talked about? They invented a kitchen that sits in the gear tunnel and slides out and you can cook on it. It's got two induction cooktops. It's got a sink with four gallons of water and it's got a full serving set, titanium, Japanese. It's a company called Snow Peak and it's like the nicest camping stuff you've ever had. And slide open these drawers and there's spoons and forks and knives and bowls and plates and pots and pans and an entire coffee making set. Just sitting there in your truck, ready for you to drive off into the wilderness, open it up and make a lobster bake or something. Why wouldn't you have that? It's an adventure truck. People take their trucks, they go outside and they adventure. You got to cook. Well, now you can do it in your truck. They partnered up with Yakima to have a tent. It unfolds, that's not special, but they've partnered with it. So you can buy the tent, which you can fit three people, they say, sort of, but really it's a big two person. So you can go out into the wilderness, drive over whatever trail is in your way, cook dinner and then go to sleep. All in your truck, all in relative luxury comfort. I mean, you can cook up a steak without having to start a fire and then make mashed potatoes and then make whatever else it is you want to make. That's pretty good, right? So you just buy this truck and you can do all that. So you buy the luxury adventure pickup and you got the cool adventure key and the adventure wristband and your camp kitchen and your gear tunnel. And then you've got the frunk, which, oh right, because it's electric. You can have all this space up front. So you've got waterproof storage space there and there's power ports in there. You can plug in and charge your whatever's. In the back, you've got a tonneau cover in some of the vehicles, including this one, which is a launch edition. So these are sold out and fully loaded. It's a power tonneau. And so depending on which truck you get, you can just press a button and it'll open or close. And so that's weatherproof as well. So you can fill the bed with stuff and there's power ports back there so you can plug stuff in. So I have a vision of taking this truck to a football game and having like a TV pop up in the back to watch the game. And then you cook the stuff on the camp kitchen and all that, and it's just gonna be absolutely fantastic. So, and then it's got all manner of safety things because of course, a modern luxury vehicle does. It's got automatic lane keep assist and forward collision, automatic emergency braking, all that stuff. It's going to have, well, right now, it has a highway drive assist, basically. So it can help steer down the road. You're supposed to keep your hands on the wheel, but if you take them off momentarily, it can sort of drive, but you have to keep paying attention. You're always in charge, all that. At some point, they are going to upgrade that and you'll be able to just watch the road. It'll work like Ford's Blue Cruise or GM Super Cruise. And it's got little cameras in here to monitor you, make sure you're watching the road, but eventually you'll just be able to sit here with your hands in your lap and it'll drive itself. That'll be great. A lot of people are coming out with that. And so no surprise that Rivian is too. So if you just look at the spec sheet for this truck, 835 horsepower, 910 torque, 11,000 pounds of towing, you would think this was some super heavy duty monster truck ready to tow the building off a foundation or whatever, instead of a little bit bigger than mid-sized truck for $75,000, which is well within the range of the luxury F-150s. And you get a tax credit, $7,500 in the US. And then depending on your state, if you're in Colorado, if you're in Oregon, if you're in a few others, you can get some more money off. It's such a comfortable ride. It's quiet. If you're a hunter, this is like the ideal hunting vehicle because you can drive into the wilderness silently. Fantastic. Or if you just want to go drive through the forest, like we did it yesterday and you were driving along and you could hear the babbling brook. The last time I was in the forest, I had a Jeep Wrangler Rubicon 392 with a 6.4 liter V8 engine. I was not hearing the babbling brook. I was hearing the babbling exhaust, which is great, but this is a little different. And until you've experienced it, you can't really understand how much of a difference it makes. And so it's an EV. So we do have to talk about range a little bit. This one was just EPA rated 314 miles. And that's the standard battery pack that they have right now. A bigger one is coming. You can charge it at fast charging stations. You can charge it at your home if you install a charger, which I think probably most buyers of this vehicle will do. There's lots of fast chargers around that will support it. Electrify America, ChargePoint, Blink. There's tons of them. And then Rivian is going the Tesla route. If you're familiar with EVs, Tesla has what they call the supercharger network, which is a ton of Tesla specific chargers spread across highways and interesting places to visit. You plug in and fast charge your Tesla. Well, Rivian is installing, here it is again, the Rivian Adventure Network. And they're going to install chargers, again, on all the highways and things like that, but also at national parks, off road trails. There's one going in at Moab already, I think. So wherever you wanna go, they want to enable you to do that. And yesterday we drove around all day and we didn't make that much of a dent in the mileage because, so when you put it in off-road mode, for example, the range estimate changes because of just how the vehicle works off-road. And the mileage estimate seemed pretty good. But when you're driving off-road, you're not going that far because you're not going that fast. At most, you're going 20 miles an hour, maybe. I mean, it depends on where you are, right? But here in Colorado, that's what the deal is. And so it's not like you're driving off-road 150 miles a day. You're just not doing that. So you need enough juice to get you in and get you out. And then we can just talk about how it is to drive. The suspension, it's very comfortable. It's, you know, I mean, it's a truck, so it's not a Rolls-Royce ride, but it's certainly competitive with other luxury cars. You put your foot down and it goes fast and it handles really well in the corners, even with the enormous tires that are on it, especially if you put it in sport because the suspension stiffens up. And, you know, when you go into the drive modes here, if you're in all-purpose or you change to sport, for example, here, we'll put it in sport. And what it does is it lowers the car. So it uses the air suspension to lower it down a little bit, and you can even go to lowest if you want. And so it's got hydraulic ride control, which can change based on the drive mode you're in. It's got adjustable dampers, air suspension. It's got all the tricks that it needs to help you with whatever you want. You want to go fast, you want to go through the corners, you want to go off-roading. If you put it in off-road mode, there's a rock crawl button. And what that does is it basically releases all the pressure in the hydraulic system, gives you the effect of disconnecting the sway bar, full articulation. Well, that's great. So this really has all the tricks that it needs to have to go off-road, which is funny because one of the guys was telling me the CEO of the company was never an off-roader, had never really gone off-roading until the week before this event when they took him out. He didn't even know what his own truck was capable of. But now he does, and he loves it even more. Oh, so I just got a warning. Coming down this big hill, it said, regen reduced, use brake pedal to stop. When you're going downhill, you have the effect of engine braking. And this is set to max regen. And what it does is it'll charge the battery as you're going downhill just to slow down the vehicle. But if you're going down a very long hill, like here in Colorado, you'll slowly start to heat up the electric motors, you'll start to heat up the battery, and to protect everything, it'll temporarily reduce or eliminate that regeneration just to make sure everything keeps working. But it pops up a little warning there so that you know what's going on. But it's just the interesting little things that are different with an EV. But you don't have to worry about really coolant and transmission temperature and oil pressure and all those things that you might have to worry about in a regular vehicle. So you've got trade-offs. So yeah, there's different things going on, but a lot fewer moving parts. It should be much more reliable. And as long as you're, you know, not too much of a punk and run the battery down, the battery's plenty large. So I've only had about six-ish hours behind the wheel, a little bit on the road, a lot off-road yesterday. This thing's great. This is probably my favorite EV right now. I mean, the F-150 Lightning is gonna compete with it, but that feels more like a work truck. This is a solid luxury vehicle. And I really haven't found too much to dislike about it, except for the fact that if I order one today, I'm not gonna get it for a year. Production just began at their plant in Normal, Illinois. Rumors are that another plant is coming to increase production. And next year, the R1S, the SUV version of this is coming, which should be even better off-road because it'll have a shorter wheelbase. Other than that, it's gonna be pretty similar, similar interior, just SUV shape. And again, we'll have EVs that people actually want to buy. Couple other nice things it has. It actually has a full-size spare tire. There's a floor in the bed that you can open that up and access it so it doesn't drop out the bottom, which is great until the bed is full of stuff and you have to remove that in order to get to your spare tire. But still, you get a full-size spare tire. That part's nice. Also worth calling out is the 18-speaker Meridian audio system. This has the premium audio, and I'm not gonna demo it for you because it wouldn't demonstrate anything. But subwoofers under the seats. It's got speakers in front of you. It's got speakers on the ceiling. You get this 3D surround sound effect. It sounds amazing. That's really cool. You got three wheel options on this. You got 20, 21, and 22-inch wheels. And the 20-inch are the ones that are on here. Those are the off-road tires. And then there are 21 and 22-inch street tires. The 21-inch are the super hard max range tires. Haven't tried those, but I hear that the ride is noticeably less nice than it is in here. And then you got the 22-inch, which is the sporty, you know, street version. All right, so I just parked to show you one other thing. If you open the door, maybe it's late at night. Maybe it's dark out. You press a little button, flashlight comes out. Look at that. 1,000 lumens, super bright, and it charges when it's in the little storage thing in the door. So you always have a charged up flashlight whenever you need to get out. That's fantastic. Rolls-Royce gives you an umbrella. Rivian gives you a flashlight. And here's one other cool thing. Down here in the middle, you pull this. They call it the camp speaker. It's a Bluetooth speaker, and it automatically syncs up with your phone because your phone is connected to the car. And you can just take this outside and listen to your tunes. That's so cool. And then you can put it back. It'll automatically charge it. And there's a little magnet in there that holds it in place to keep it from flying out when you're driving. This is perfect for adventures. I love it. We don't know about build quality yet. We don't know about longevity, things like that. But this company has been funded by Amazon and Ford and a whole bunch of really big names in finance. They have plenty of money. This truck is here. And they have an order for 100,000 electric vans from Amazon. So between the luxury stuff, the electric motor, all the clever storage bits, the adventure key, all that stuff, this is a fantastic truck. If you're gonna go off-road, if you just want a pickup and you want something luxury, this is your only choice. I don't even know of a competitor vehicle for this. I mean, maybe the F-150 or the other big trucks if you load them up, but this one's smaller. It's faster. It can tow 11,000 pounds, which is nuts for a truck this size. I'm blown away. This thing's great. We'll have to wait to get a longer drive and we're gonna get one for Tim so he can see what he thinks. And if we can convince him, boy, this would be quite something. But Rivian R1T, super impressed so far. You can place a order for it online, get into the queue for it. The camp kitchen's a $5,000 option, which if you're gonna go outside is so worth it. Other than that, Rivian R1T, thanks for watching. And mash that like button down beneath so that Tim will keep hiring me to do these videos or at least subscribe so you can see Tim's videos. We really appreciate it. It means a lot. Thanks guys. Thanks for watching.