Do We Regret Buying a Rivian R1S? 7 Months Later…

Okay, it's been seven months since we added Rivi to our family and there was a casualty. Turns out my fender was against a tree and when I gave it more gas, I went further into the tree and ended up doing more damage to the corner of the car. I want you guys to guess how much you think this cost to fix. At the end of the video, we'll tell you. I think you're gonna be surprised. Anybody who owns this vehicle and makes videos about it probably is singing the praises of the vehicle and they're mostly positive. And I think that's because most people who spend near six figures on a vehicle, they're going to be biased. And that's just the reality of it. In order to give a more balanced review of this car, we're going to spend a lot of time on the gripes. And I don't want this to come off as overly negative. This is kind of the things that after driving it for seven months, we've noticed. Our first impressions video, you can watch that up here. And we can see the excitement we had when we first got it. So this is the 2023 R1S quad motor with the adventure package and the off-road package, as well as the under shield. All this stuff we'll list here. We configured this back in December 2021, I think. And we took delivery June 2023. So I think there's still a wait list, but you can probably get them a lot faster than what we waited for. I'm not really a car guy. I'm not changing my car every couple of years. I drive a car and then I drive it into the ground. The last car that I had this replaced was a 2013 Volkswagen Tiguan. Having this car compared to something from 2013 is like night and day. It's an electric vehicle replacing an internal combustion vehicle. So there's all sorts of different little things that you're used to, including like regenerative braking, where you let off the gas and it automatically feels like it's braking. The electric motors in the wheel, instead of exerting force on the wheel, they're turning into little generators and they recharge the battery. But that's something to get used to because now, instead of immediately letting go of the gas and hitting the brake, as soon as a little go of gas, it starts slowing down faster than it normally would. In order to coast, you have to kind of stay pushing on the accelerator. So something to get used to. And in this particular car, it's very sensitive. Heard other reviews of this car say that that's a negative and they felt that they couldn't drive it. It was nauseating. They were jerking all over the place. But that happened to me for like the first couple of days. But as soon as you get used to driving it, that's just the nature of learning how to drive an electric car with regenerative braking. Some reviews that say that's a con, but in my opinion, that's just kind of user error and you just have to kind of get used to it. Becky's LCD screen is literally freezing now and I am also freezing. So let's go in the car. So 10 years ago, if you told me that I would buy a car off the internet sight unseen, I would not have believed you. But here we are in present day and that's just kind of normal now. When you do buy a car that way, it's kind of odd because you only essentially get to walk around and then you sign the papers and then it's yours. Whereas in the old days, you might have, you know, test drove it once, went home, thought about it, came back. You might have had a bit more time to notice things. And so on that kind of vein, I did notice after we took delivery that there was a scratch on the radio fin. It's not a big deal, but you kind of expect a brand new car is going to be flawless, especially when you pay that much for it. Panel alignment of the trunk and the rest of the car is a little bit off. And same with a panel on the roof as well. That actually isn't something that's completely unexpected because I had read some reviews and people said that this is a new car company. Many new car companies have cosmetic quality issues like that. However, I think you can bring it back to the service center, which unfortunately for us is like 300 miles away in Ohio. But that was one of the risks that we took buying a car that we knew did not have a service center that was nearby. That's the price you pay when you want kind of bleeding edge new stuff. So one of the other little quirks that we noticed was when the all-terrain mats, which, by the way, we had to buy separately. I think if you're spending $3,600 on the off-road add-on, I would assume that like a pair of rubber mats would have been included and not an extra $250. They are extra to get them. This vehicle does not come with a spare tire. Initially, I actually had pre-ordered it with a spare tire, but when they reconfigured their packages, by the time it got delivered, there was no spare tire anymore. And then when you price it out, the spare tire is extremely expensive. It's a full-size spare with the full rim, full tire. I think they want like $1,300 or $1,600 for it. I refuse to pay that. So right now, I don't have a spare tire. Well, let's hope you have a tire repair kit. You don't even have a recovery yet. Next thing we noticed was that the speaker grate here rattles. Put some foam, double-sided tape kind of wedged in there, and that seems to mostly get rid of it. This is apparently a known issue. Not a big deal. There's, I think, a free fix for it. Again, it requires me to go 300 miles to the Ohio service center, which I haven't gotten around to doing yet. The track forward button on the steering wheel requires a very firm hard press to actuate, whereas this one just a normal light tap. It's on the list of things to get addressed when I eventually go to the service station. So something I really like about the Rivian, and I talked about in the last video, was that everything is branded very nicely, and the interface is just very, very nice. The contrast to that point, though, is that it doesn't have something like Apple CarPlay. So the functionality that I'm used to from having my iPhone integrate seamlessly with my car, that's lacking. But at the same time, I hate the way CarPlay looks. It just looks very dated and looks very, I don't know. Frumpy. Frumpy. Yeah, it looks frumpy. That's a great description for it. This, like everything looks very modern, very on-brand. So it's kind of a pro and a con. The GPS is not as good as Google Maps. If I say punch in a destination, it might give me an estimate that says it might take 15 minutes, but at Google Maps it says like 25. And I feel like it's not accounting as well for traffic. And in getting back to not having CarPlay, the interface doesn't understand if you're listening to a podcast or listening to music. So when the turn-by-turn instructions would kick in, if I was listening to music, it would just duck the music. If I'm listening to a podcast, it would also just duck the volume down so I couldn't hear it and then bring it back up. So I would miss part of the podcast. Whereas normally in like, say, CarPlay, it knows you're listening to a podcast and therefore it will hard stop the podcast and then restart when those instructions are finished. So one of the cool apps this has is the GearGuard. And essentially it's the equivalent of, I guess, Sentry mode for Tesla. Automatically will continuously record on all the cams 360 around the vehicle. And then if someone approaches the vehicle, it'll save that clip so that you can see if anyone's tampering with your stuff. It's definitely a head-turning car. And even just parked in the parking lot, people will walk up to it and check it out. And of course there's cameras that you can record people doing that. So you are the type of person who wants to be a little bit more incognito and you don't want that kind of attention, then that's a negative. If you're the type of person who likes having kind of a bit of a head-turning car, then certainly that could be a positive. One of the things that I assumed before I bought the car was that if you've got a car that's internet enabled, you've got an app that you can control your car from, and you've got video recording, my assumption would have been that you could monitor the car remotely via the app so you could look through the cameras, but you can't. So GearGuard is only for use when you're in the car. There are very common products like the Nest cameras or Google Home where you can monitor your stuff remotely. So that was a bit of a disappointment, but again, not a deal breaker. One of the things I do like about having this car being so full of tech is that it's regularly getting over the air updates. So when Rivian makes a new firmware, it's not just keeping the car stable. Once you install it, there's oftentimes new features that you'll find. And they're not insignificant things either. Like one time I updated my car and the ride got smoother. They changed how the suspension works and the algorithms on the suspension. One time I updated, I got this very data-rich gauges view, which is completely new. That was a pretty neat thing. You can kind of see what brakes are doing, what the motors are doing. Are they regening? Are they exerting force and using power? What's the temperature of the battery? You have a compass, which is kind of for somebody who's an aviator like me, I like having the compass there. And I also like having my altitude. They give you a GPS altitude. That's pretty cool too. This next section, the overall theme is functionality, we'll call it. There are two things that are both very cool, but also kind of annoying about this truck. First of all, is the proximity unlocking. Every single time, because I'm not a primary driver, even though my phone is connected to the car, sometimes it doesn't register my phone being in my pocket. So I will walk up to the car to have the car unlock and it won't unlock for me until Chris approaches. It didn't update where it was supposed to improve proximity locking. For whatever reason, it didn't seem like it improved with your phone. No, I think it just stopped working. The second thing that I find very funny is there's no key. There is a key fob that comes with it. There's also a card that you can use as a key to start it as well. If your phone dies, I just use my phone. I just leave my phone in my pocket. I walk up to the car, the doors unlock. I get in, I put it in a drive and we go. There's no turning the car on or turn it off. Which leaves us with a really funny predicament that anytime Chris drives my truck, he just gets out. It's still running. And it's still running. And he just walks away from it. And I'm like, hello, are you going to turn off the truck? The wipers, the windshield wipers, they're automatic, but I do find that they don't kick in fast enough. Now, Rivian apparently sent an over-the-air update to allow you to change the sensitivity on how fast or slow the wipers kick in. I haven't played with that yet. But the one gripe I do have is that when it's raining very heavily, and we do get heavy rain here in Western New York, the fastest wiper setting is not as fast as I'd like it. I would say it's not fast enough to keep up the rain. Right, yeah, like I've actually had to actively slow down when I'm driving in heavy, heavy rain. And I'm not driving fast in heavy rain, so that might tell you something about how slow the wipers are actually going. They seem slower than most cars I've driven. I'm not sure if they can fix that with a software update. Also, while we wanted to wait to make this video was to see what it's like in the winter. And surprisingly enough, I've actually found that this car performs very well in the winter. I was really worried about having an electric vehicle in the snow or in the cold, I should say, because a lot of people seem to be afraid of the lower battery performance. My efficiency is still very good. We drove this all the way up to Ottawa, Gatineau, Quebec. We didn't have any issues with range being noticeably different. I'd probably estimate just off the top of my head, my efficiency is maybe 70% of what it was in the summer, which is not as bad as I thought it was gonna be. Someone asked us a question if we've had any issues with the door handles freezing because they pop out and pop back in. No, we have not. I do park in a garage, but at work, I park outside and it's been rained on, it's frozen, it's snowed, it's sleeted, it's hailed, whatever, and they've been fine. And we sort of touched on this in the last video, but the wireless charging that's built into the center console here is absolute garbage. It is borderline unusable. We bought an aftermarket charger and that works great. So despite complaining about not being able to remotely monitor the cameras from the app, I do find that the app is quite functional. That was one of the over-the-air updates is now you can schedule your climate controls. You can open and close the hood. You can do most things from the app. Another thing about functionality is towing. The truck tows great, but one quirk is I noticed that the electrical hookup is only a seven pin hookup. Whereas if I'm towing with Becky's F-150, I can plug in either a four pin plug or a seven pin plug. So when it came time to tow this trailer that we had rented, I didn't have the ability to hook it up because I didn't have a seven pin to four pin adapter. So I had to go back to the hardware store and then go back home and then I could connect everything up. The air suspension is another cool function of this car. And not just that you can change your ride height on the fly, but in camping mode, it will take advantage of the fact that it can change the height of each wheel independently. And it can level the car in both axes so you can have a nice flat area to camp. So that's pretty neat. That's a novel thing that I haven't seen on any stock cars. While talking about the camping mode, it's great. There's functions that you can turn off the outdoor floodlights to be sort of courteous to other campers. You can turn off the main display, but leave all of the things running like HVAC. So if you're in the back, you obviously wanna keep the air circulating and keep it climate controlled, but you don't need the screens to be on for the entire night. So you turn those off and you'll save, I guess, battery that way and also darker for you. My gripe, however, is that I don't have a great way to control those things without leaning over the center console, which is a very awkward maneuver. One of the things they could have done was, there's literally a screen for your rear passengers. They could have easily repurposed that, that you turn into camp mode or something. And all of a sudden this screen will allow you to control all the things like turning off the main display, turning on the camp mode, all that stuff. But despite that, camping in this vehicle is very fun. It's kind of more glamping. It's just, it's very comfortable. It's another way that we can sort of enjoy being outdoors without just having to pitch a tent. I think kind of Becky alluded to in our last video, it sort of expands the seasons. In the middle of the summer, and it's super sweltering hot, having the option to be able to camp in the Rivian is sort of a nice option to have and keep things comfortable. I like the option of having multiple different ways to camp because I think it keeps the videos interesting. And also it keeps camping interesting. Do we want to go in the Rivian and then stripping down that kit and making it smaller? Or do we want to go full-blown palace? What size is the palace? How many people? Palace is a six-man tent or rooftop. We can go rooftop tent, but they all have different functionality and it's fun to have different ways to camp. Whether you want to do glamping in the Rivian or if you want to do back country remote camping in our backpacking tent. They're going to say, I want to say something not related to this video. I like camping. All right, so the accent in the back, the anti-collision sensors are off when you're in off-road mode. That escaped me. There's a tree behind the D pillar, I guess it is. And I thought I was going up on a rock. I gave it more acceleration, didn't go. I was like, oh, this is a really, this is a really large rock I'm trying to get over. Gave it more and all of a sudden I heard a crumple. And it turns out that it was not a rock that my tire was on, but in fact, a tree that my D pillar was on. So that's how the accident happened. It was relatively low impact. So it was something that probably could easily have happened if you were in a fender bender, like if someone ran into your car or backed into your car. I've seen similar levels of damage on forums from just normal accidents. When I called Rivian, they said, we only recommend you go to Rivian authorized third-party repair centers. So collision centers that are not Rivian, but that are recommended by Rivian that know how to work on Rivian vehicles. Well, that rear quarter panel is not just that one spot, but it spans the entire side of the vehicle. It will require disassembling it fairly significantly, unwelding the whole side of the vehicle, because that rear quarter panel goes all the way to the front door well. Welding a new one on and then putting the whole vehicle back together. They quoted me $19,643.73. That is a significant amount of money. It's almost a quarter of the cost of the vehicle. That's insane. I could not justify spending that. These companies that are in these closed ecosystems, kind of like Apple, and they wanna keep everything within. Everything works nicely, but when something goes wrong, you pay a price. And that's, I think, the one thing that you gotta keep in mind too. And that doesn't go just for Rivian, but any of these newfangled car companies that are selling vehicles, and even Tesla to a degree. You gotta look at how hard is it gonna be to repair these things. I didn't pay that. I was initially gonna go through insurance. My insurance broker said, look, you make this claim now, and there's a high chance that the underwriter will not renew your policy next year. If it's not too expensive, I would just pay for it. But I'm not gonna pay 20 grand to fix a dent. So I went to a local body shop. It's technically not a Rivian authorized service center, but they do work on Teslas. They're like, look, we're familiar with electric vehicles. We can repair this dent. It'll cost 3,500 bucks, which is still a kick in the pants, but it's far better than $19,600. I've begrudgingly paid the $3,500, and the dent's fixed. It's been rewrapped. Can't even tell it happened. It literally looks brand new. Anybody who's watching this who has a Rivian and has done something similar, I would recommend just going, getting it repaired at a non-authorized third party, and it's probably gonna be fine. Overall, this video might come off as a bit negative, and that's not the intent. I wanted to kind of give a balanced view and say, look, there are some cons to this. This vehicle may not be for everyone. Here are the things that I've noticed, and then use that information and make your own decision on if it's worth it for you. I guess back to the original question, do I regret buying the Rivian? Absolutely not. I think that having expectations that this car or any car for that matter is going to be absolutely perfect is only gonna set you up for disappointment. Nothing is perfect in life. You're gonna always have some quirks, some gripes, but I think that all in all, this car is incredibly fun to drive, incredibly nice to drive. I really enjoy the feel of the car, how fast it is, how responsive it is, just how nice all of the interfaces are. And for a guy who came from a 10-year-old 2013 Volkswagen Tiguan, it was definitely, there's no comparison. So very happy with the purchase. I would definitely do it again. I really do love it, specifically camp mode, off-road mode, the air suspension. I think that that is for me an absolute highlight. I have a big booger hanging out of my nose, I think. When it comes to what people were talking about with the lurching, I don't find that. Chris is really good at driving this. He's gotten used to it. But when I drive it, there's definitely a lot of this going on because I'm not driving it all the time. Me driving it with the Regen is like you leaving the truck on and getting out and walking away. Exactly, yeah. Leaving the keys in it and everything. That's it for this one. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next Sunday for another one. And we wanted to do the... Shut up, Rivi. Don't be mean. The proximity lock. I'm like standing right on the cusp of the proximity locking. I'll be staying close enough too as it doesn't keep twitting at me. Okay.