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Rivian recalling nearly all its vehicles over loose fastener

(gentle music) – I’m Dan Edmunds, and this is a Rivian R1T, and here comes the trash truck. Hi everyone, Dan Edmunds here, and this is a new Rivian R1T all-electric pickup truck. As you may know, I come from a suspension development background, so I’m really interested to take the wheels off this one and see what Rivian has come up with. This is a four-wheel independent suspension, which isn’t necessarily what you might choose for a truck or off-road vehicle. It’s also got air suspension, which allows a wide range of height adjustment to clear obstacles. But the thing I might be most interested in is the interconnected system of left and right-hand shock absorbers that uses hydraulics instead of traditional stabilizer bars to control body roll. It’s much like what you’d find on a McLaren 720S, the idea being that you get a lot of roll stiffness when you’re cornering, but not much at all when you’re in an articulation situation. Let’s see what happens in a controlled articulation situation with a ramp travel index test on my RTI ramp. This is a 20-degree ramp, and I’ll drive the R1T up the ramp to the point where its driver’s side rear tire is just barely touching the ground. When I get to that point, I’ll measure how far it went up the ramp and divide that number by the truck’s wheelbase then multiply the result by 1000. With their suspension vehicles like this, the first thing I do is run the test in the normal default mode, whatever that is. Here, with the R1T, that score is 510 points. Now I’ll do it in the off-road rock crawl mode, which sounds like it would be the thing to use in an off-road situation. Rock crawling, am I right? But no, the score is worse. It’s 488 points instead of 510. Why did that happen? It has to do with air suspension. In off-road mode, the suspension is programmed to raise up to gain ground clearance. Makes sense. But they do that by pumping up the springs to make them stiffer. The body rises up because stiffer springs don’t compress as much at a given load, but they also don’t allow as much flex either. How does the R1T compare to other off-road trucks? Well, I’ve measured a few. As you can see, we’ve got the Ford Raptor third generation with a 37-inch tires at 537, Colorado ZR2 Bison at 501, and a Gladiator Mojave at 476. So, if we put the Rivian here, the default mode is gonna be right there, a little better than the Bison and a bit behind the Raptor, but not that much. Actually, the off-road rock crawl score of 488 isn’t really that much different from 510, but it does slot in below the Colorado but above the gladiator Mojave. Now I’d say that’s pretty good company, especially when you consider this truck has four-wheel independent suspension. Clearly, the hydraulic roll control system is getting the most articulation possible from what suspension travel this truck has, which, frankly, isn’t nearly as much as a Raptor. Well, here we are at the front of the Rivian R1T and already we can see quite a bit that’s unusual. It is a control arm front suspension. We can see the upper arm here and the knuckle here, all-aluminum, so is the lower control arm. It is an air spring that is enveloping the damper. So I guess you could call that bag over. I’m not sure. (chuckles) If you want to, you can. And of course, big Brembo calipers that are Rivian branded. Let’s get in closer. Here’s the upper control arm and it’s single upper ball joint. And as we usually see, the pivot access is inclined down towards the rear to create anti-dive break geometry when you’re on the binders. In the shadows here there’s a linkage that measures the position of the suspension for the air suspension system, but also for the adaptive dampers. What we’re looking at here is the bottom of the damper and then these two externally adjustable valves that are electronically controlled. The interesting thing here beyond that, if that wasn’t interesting and enough, are these two pipes, and these are braided stainless steel. And one of them goes to the compression valve and the other one goes to the tension valve, although I’m not sure which one is which here. But the interesting thing is, these connect to the opposite side, tension to compression, compression to tension, and that creates a hydraulic roll resistance. And there’s all kinds of valves and accumulators and software that adjust the roll stiffness based on the fluid flow in these two pipes that span left to right across the car up here and also in the back, which what’s interesting is this system and the supplier who makes it is the same as what you’ll see on a McLaren 720S. Although here, obviously, the difference is that, you know, being an off-road vehicle, they’re using this system to basically have a hydraulic way to disconnect the stabilizer bars, which there really aren’t stabilizer bars, basically to make the roll stiffness go to zero so that the wheels will articulate as much as they can. Here we can see the entire lower wishbone or lower control arm, if you prefer. The shock mounts here on a fork that’s in from the outer ball joint. This is a little extra stiffening member that’s kind of interesting. I’ll show it to you in another view, it’s a little easier. And then of course, that’s the rear pivot point and this is where the handling loads come in, because this is in line with the tire contact patch and the outer ball joint. And this forward one here, you can see the bolt, is the other connection for the control arm, but that is far forward of the contact patch. So that’s really more of a ride bushing that’s made to absorb the rearward component of impacts. Also of note, this fork at the bottom of the shock is aluminum as is most of the shock body as far as I can see it until it disappears up into the bellows. It’s hard to see because it’s back in the shadows, but the electric motors on the front, and there are two, one for each side, are back there behind the drive axle, which we can see. So this is an offset axis motor where the rotor axis is behind this considerably. And what that means, is it opens up room here in the front for the steering rack to be mounted right here. And you can see the mounting there and you can see the shaft coming in in the shadows here. And of course, here’s the tie rod end. We could have predicted that this truck had front steer, as I like to call it when the steer axis is ahead of the center of the hub as it is here, because the brakes are in the back. And the brakes and the steering tie rod end almost never occupied the same side. If the steering’s here, then the brakes are gonna be here and vice versa. So these are six piston fixed caliper brakes. 1, 2, 3 pistons are easy to see. Here are the other ones. It’s stylized too much to make ’em out, but there’s three more here. This is an open window design, which means there’s really nothing permanent across here. There is a bridge bolt and you have to remove this bridge bolt if you wanna extract the pads, but you can pull the pads in and out of this without taking the calipers off. Of course, that only works if the rotors are pretty good, but obviously this has regenerative braking. It’s really strong. You’ll probably never use these binders. I don’t think any of this really matters. I think, you know, if you change the pads in the ownership period, I’d be surprised. Well, that’s about it for the front of the Rivian R1T. I’m gonna put the tire on and move to the back before I lose my light. Well, here’s the rear suspension of the R1T and as you can tell, it’s fully independent. There are five links back here and all of them are aluminum. And then of course, there’s the big air spring dominating the scene in the background. Like may any rear suspensions of this type, there’s just one upper link and it’s the camber link. And actually in this case, there’s actually an eccentric on the inside there to adjust camber. The 4F location of the rear hub is managed by these two trailing links, but they’re pretty short. And this has 10.6 inches of rear travel. There’s 10.2 inches in the front, but with that amount of travel this is probably getting swinged through a pretty tight arc and so the wheel base is likely to change throughout the height adjustment range of this vehicle. Between them and ahead of the hub center is this toe link. So this manages the toe in of the rear suspension throughout its travel, but it’s also where you make adjustments because of this eccentric right here. So set toe in there and of course, the camber link has a real obvious eccentric to set camber. So it’s pretty easy to dial in this rear suspension if you need to make alignment adjustments. So here’s the lower trailing link and this is where it mounts to the knuckle. Interestingly though, the shock absorber does not mount to the knuckle, it mounts to the lower trailing link somewhat in board from this pivot point. So it has a motion ratio based on the distance from the main pivot up here to here. And so, ah, if I had to guess, I’m gonna go 75%, maybe a little better than that, but of course, it’s at an angle now, it’s drooping down. It’ll be compressed a little bit more than that, a little bit closer to level, when it’s on the ground, but still that’s still gonna affect it somewhat. So here’s one of the lower links. This is the fifth one we haven’t seen yet. This has a lot of work to do. It holds the spring and this bolt is the center of the spring. So we can kind of judge the motion ratio by looking at the inner pivot and the outer pivot and this point, and it’s about 60% of the way out. So that seems to be the approximate motion ratio of the air spring. The knuckle that it bolts to, this link I mean, is also aluminum. So really everything back here is aluminum. Well, here’s the business end of the rear shocks. And like we saw on the front, there’s a couple of electronically controlled valves here and then two pipes, one connected to the compression valve, the other to the rebound valve. And they’re cross-wired to the ones on the other side. So compression here connects to rebound there and rebound here connects to compression there. And in that way you develop roll stiffness hydraulically without the use of stabilizer bars. And of course, once you do that, you can put accumulators and valves in the system and regulate the amount of roll that you want for conditions. I probably should have mentioned earlier on that the this is a body-on-frame pickup truck, but the frame and the body are bolted and bonded together. There are no rubber mounts like there are on many ladder frame pickups that we’re familiar with. And so this upper spring mount is pressing right against the frame. You can see there’s extra pieces welded here to give it additional stiffness in this area. And then of course, this is where the shock absorber mounts with lateral bolts. The bump stop’s gonna be hidden in here where we can’t see it, but yeah, shock spring. And then here’s the sub frame that carries the rear suspension links. It’s bolted directly to the frame as well. There’s no rubber bushings here, all solid mounted. The Rivian has four motors, two for the front axle, one per wheel, and the same here in the back. And that produces a very flat bottom with no protrusions hanging down. So the ground clearance is pretty stupendous even when you don’t factor in the fact we have air suspension here. One of the things I like about these wheels is they have a little rib built into ’em right here. So if you wanna pick them up while you’re pulling ’em off the car, you can put your fingers in here and you have a nice handhold. I don’t often see that. These are Pirelli Scorpion, of course, All Terrain Plus Elect, which are for electric vehicles. And they’re 275/65R-20, which translates to 34 inches. And yes, there is a full size spare in the underbed storage compartment. Now let’s see how much it weighs because that’ll play into wrestling that in and out of that hole. All right, let’s see what one of these beasties weighs. Steady it here on the scale And it says 86 pounds even. Well, so that weight of 86 pounds for the spare kinda matters because it’s way in here, and wrestling it in and out of there, you might need a friend. One thing I haven’t talked about are the rear brakes. This is a trustee single piston sliding caliper. It’s got an electric parking brake actuator on the back. These are nice ventilated rotors with a pretty good working radius, so decent breaking back here. And yeah, well, the R1T suspension, pretty cool overall. I especially like this McLaren derived hydraulic roll control system because it does indeed corner flat on the highway. And when you go off-road, it releases the articulation quite nicely, somewhere on the order of a Chevrolet Colorado ZR2 which is not bad at all. It’s not even that far away from a 37 inch Ford Raptor, even though the Raptor has 13 inches of front travel and 14 inches of rear travel with those tires on it. This has 10.2 in the front and 10.6 in the back, but I gotta tell you, the hydraulic roll control gives you every inch of what’s available. Anyhow, let me know what you think in the comments. And until next time, this is Dan Edmond saying, thanks for watching (gentle music) That stank, hooba.

Rivian recalling nearly all its vehicles over loose fastener

Electric truck and SUV maker Rivian Automotive said Friday it is recalling almost all the vehicles it has delivered to customers in order to tighten a loose fastener that could potentially affect drivers’ ability to steer.The company, which was founded in 2009, said it is recalling about 13,000 vehicles because a fastener connecting the vehicles’ front upper-control arm and steering knuckle may not be torqued enough.There have been seven reports potentially related to the issue, but no injuries have been reported, Rivian said.”If you experience excessive noise, vibration or harshness from the front suspension, or a change in steering performance or feel, you should call immediately,” Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe wrote in a letter to vehicle owners.The company based in Irvine, California, said the fix would only take a few minutes, and it expects to have finished the repairs on all of them in about 30 days, with customer collaboration.Rivian is aiming to take advantage of a growing appetite among consumers and investors for electric vehicles. It is among a long line of companies, both new and old, trying to peel away market share from Tesla.It went public last year, and its market value quickly soared past that of Ford and General Motors to become the second-most valuable U.S. automaker behind Tesla. But that is no longer the case: The company’s stock is down 67% so far this year.Last month, Rivian said it was partnering with Mercedes-Benz to build a factory in Europe that will produce electric vans for both companies.

IRVINE, Calif. —

The company, which was founded in 2009, said it is recalling about 13,000 vehicles because a fastener connecting the vehicles’ front upper-control arm and steering knuckle may not be torqued enough.

There have been seven reports potentially related to the issue, but no injuries have been reported, Rivian said.

“If you experience excessive noise, vibration or harshness from the front suspension, or a change in steering performance or feel, you should call immediately,” Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe wrote in a letter to vehicle owners.

The company based in Irvine, California, said the fix would only take a few minutes, and it expects to have finished the repairs on all of them in about 30 days, with customer collaboration.

Rivian is aiming to take advantage of a growing appetite among consumers and investors for electric vehicles. It is among a long line of companies, both new and old, trying to peel away market share from Tesla.

It went public last year, and its market value quickly soared past that of Ford and General Motors to become the second-most valuable U.S. automaker behind Tesla. But that is no longer the case: The company’s stock is down 67% so far this year.

Last month, Rivian said it was partnering with Mercedes-Benz to build a factory in Europe that will produce electric vans for both companies.