$85k new electric vehicle bricks in the snow!

[leadcounsel]

As one of the resident Toyota fanboys I'll be first to point out that, while fun to watch, this was total entertainment.

Those of us in the rustbelt would have something different to say about their frame quality (more like, lack thereof).

It wasn't the frame it was the lack of any rustproofing. Toyota not only replaced the rotted ones within a timeframe, but changed their production methods to dip the frames in corrosion resistant coatings thereafter.

 

[andrew_j]

I saw a diesel F350 with NH temp plates being loaded onto a flatbread today at ski area. I guess the 5” of fresh snow in parking lot killed it? It was the fancy one too (Ranch?)

 

[SammyChevelleTypeS3]

For the record the snow is to the center of the wheels front and back. If 30" tires that's 15" of snow and the people are standing on top not sinking in. Very likely higher before the recovery started. So the snow is not powder and it was deeper. At least try be observant. There's no reason for it to be any less capable than any other midsize SUV in these conditions unless the 4wd system is faulty along with being an EV.

Just shows someone took a vehicle where neither an ICE nor an EV belonged going if the driver had sence. The snow is at the bottom of the passenger compartment! How did he expect any vehicle to move thru what looked to be at least 12" of snow. You can imagine too that the snow is down when the rescue truck is there in the photo. Some people could get a USMC M1Abrams tank stuck. Sheeshhhhh

 

[supton]

It wasn't the frame it was the lack of any rustproofing. Toyota not only replaced the rotted ones within a timeframe, but changed their production methods to dip the frames in corrosion resistant coatings thereafter.

I'd love to defend them but I know they always had frame rot problems. Maybe they "fixed" that, then Dana botched up in later years--if so, they were not doing incoming quality assurance testing on random samples to verify that their vendors were delivering as expected. Trust but verify.

My Tundra, I was careful to spray it down with FF, and I do think that year did have a good frame. It still was growing rust in all the other places (clamps, bolts, brake hardware). They also had a pretty asinine location for the oil filter (behind the faux skidplate). I liked my truck plenty, don't get me wrong, but I'm not sure just how much "better" it was than the others. I *know* I bought it largely on the nameplate (although I was pretty happy with its setup).

 

[CKN]

If you mean owned by multi-millionaires and overly photographed for advertising purposes in staged environments, I agree. And any gas truck could easily accomplish these feats. Rivian needs a 40 year old truck doing hard labor to impress me at all.

Have you watched the promotional video? It's almost entirely paved roads or dirt roads, and a few sandy beachs and a few inches of sand. LOL. I wasn't born yesterday. Rivian isn't going to show their trucks broken down or out of juice in their campaign ads. There's so much money involved in this stuff and it's universally deceptive advertising.

I posted this story as a "real world" experience from 1 user. A sample size of 1, admittedly, but it is a real world use data point.

Here's what's impressive. The 30-40 year old Toyota pickups in the harsh middle east dusty climates, or in S. African safaris or S. American jungles going along on incredibly harsh environments with minimal maintenance.

How about this indestructible Toyota Hilux featured in Top Gear. They abused the heck out this 30 year old truck to include burying it in the beach sand at low tide and retrieving it later. Then hit it with a wrecking ball, dropped it from a height, and burned it. It still worked! Now that is a quality truck!

Watch the series so you know what you are talking about.......

 

[macarose]

"Rivian needs a 40 year old truck doing hard labor to impress me at all."

Who knows. Maybe you'll change your mind when you're 112.

 

[4WD]

Not full-time 4WD. 2-speed transfer case. Limited slip rear diff.
And what's your point?

Nothing to do with 2 speed transfer case …
Loc meant you locked the xfer case - a 3rd “differential” otherwise …
NP203 was standard until 1980. I modified a 1979 to part time and changed PS/spindles with hubs …
Limited slip does not help with mud all around you … Only lockers do …

 

[edyvw]

Speaking of "need explanation"... observations suffer from the obvious logical fallacy of illusory or false correlations. Such fallacy often explain superstitions, racism, sexism, and other nonsense conclusions.

Here, you claim to observe trucks/jeeps/subarus are worse in the snow. When it snows, people with vehicles incapable of handling it, leave those at home, or get stuck in the driveway, or stay at home altogether, walk, take public transit, etc. Naturally, a higher ratio % of AWD and 4x4 are on the road at those times, which tend to be truck platforms and subarus. So if you perceive "more trucks, jeeps, and Subarus" are in ditches, naturally it is because of user error and disproportionate representation of vehicles on the road.

It is entertaining when people make wildly unsupported observations and post them as facts, however.

There are numerous other vehicles.
Generally, pick up truck are equipped with horrible tires for snow conditions. Usually “one size fits all” tires and lots of insecurity behind steering wheel.
Pick up trucks can push snow. However, snow driving is much more about dynamic of vehicle than whether one can attach snow plow on it. Heavy, mediocre brakes, horrible handling and oversized tires, and yeah, there is no disproportionate numbers. Physics is really hard to go against.
As for Subaru’s, it is marketing. It is astonishing on what averages Subaru driver drives on the road.

They bought Rivian and bricked. My friends JEEP broke axle in snow where I went through with Tiguan. Not fan of Rivian, but this is looking for sensation.

 

[4WD]

I saw a diesel F350 with NH temp plates being loaded onto a flatbread today at ski area. I guess the 5” of fresh snow in parking lot killed it? It was the fancy one too (Ranch?)

What do you know about that F350 ? … we know this guy‘s dream vehicle was brand new …

 

[JeffKeryk]

Yes indeed. Here's an example of an idiot getting his new
4X4 stuck in just a few inches of mud:
View attachment 146979

Shel, you ain't got nuthin' on me. I got my '93 Toyota 4wd Strippie stuck in the back yard in mud real close to the house. I was fixing the rain gutters during a storm. Luckily my friend knew what he was doing and stuffed scrap wood under the tires.

 

[Shel_B]

Gotcha.
So a multi-millionaire Hollywood movie star, using predicably product placement $100,000 Rivian EVs, filming a adventure that has probably hundreds of hours of video editing, had nothing but success with his Rivians. Color me shocked. Shocked I tell ya...

Let's back up a few years to 1988 when Tim Cahill and his driving partner (whose name escapes me at the moment) drove from Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska in 23 days to help promote the new Chevrolet Suburban. The book he wrote, Road Fever, details the adventure in exciting prose. Not a whole lot different on the face of it, yet worlds apart in reality.

 

[Shel_B]

Shel, you ain't got nuthin' on me. I got my '93 Toyota 4wd Strippie stuck in the back yard in mud real close to the house. I was fixing the rain gutters during a storm. Luckily my friend knew what he was doing and stuffed scrap wood under the tires.

Well, at least I had the good sense not to make a fool of myself in my own backyard

At the time, I was involved in some real estate projects and sales in Mendocino County. My friend who took the picture made posters of the image and sent them to several real estate agencies I was working with. Some of them hung the posters in their offices. Imagine my surprise when I walked into a small office in Laytonville and looked directly at that image. It was also hung in an office in Willits and in Mendocino. At that time, a few people in the county knew me, and I was the recipient of a lot of kidding.

 

[SubieRubyRoo]

And probably operators that were unaware of the necessity of good winter tires and over driving the capability of the tires that they had on the vehicle at the time. People think because it's got four wheel drive or all-wheel drive that it can do anything in the winter regardless of the garbage tires they have on the vehicle.

Exactly. And, just like firearms, the training is at least as important as the quality of the kit. Most ppl who buy Jeeps or Subarus think like you said, but never take them out in controlled abnormal conditions to understand how the car reacts.

First snow accumulation every year, I grab the Subie or my F150 and go do donuts and powerslides where there’s nothing around to hit, and refresh the muscle memory of suboptimal surface control.

 

[leadcounsel]

First snow accumulation every year, I grab the Subie or my F150 and go do donuts and powerslides where there’s nothing around to hit, and refresh the muscle memory of suboptimal surface control.

Excellent point.
I do notice many new vehicles come with bewilderingly bad tires, especially in the truck/SUV class. I suspect it has to do with reported MPGs and not the best tire for the vehicle. Many people get rid of the stock tires and get something better. Sadly many don't.

 

[Shel_B]

First snow accumulation every year, I grab the Subie or my F150 and go do donuts and powerslides where there’s nothing around to hit, and refresh the muscle memory of suboptimal surface control.

An excellent approach to the situation.

I don't think enough people take driving seriously enough to practice and get familiar with their vehicles, or even know their own limits.

 

[JeffKeryk]

Well, at least I had the good sense not to make a fool of myself in my own backyard

At the time, I was involved in some real estate projects and sales in Mendocino County. My friend who took the picture made posters of the image and sent them to several real estate agencies I was working with. Some of them hung the posters in their offices. Imagine my surprise when I walked into a small office in Laytonville and looked directly at that image. It was also hung in an office in Willits and in Mendocino. At that time, a few people in the county knew me, and I was the recipient of a lot of kidding.

OMG what an incredible place. We have a place in Petaluma. For those who don't know the Mendocino Coast, we are more than Semiconductors...

 

[JimPghPA]

Btw, if like many EV's it has a big flat underside, it could be that that underside is what the vehicle is being supported by on the snow, and in that case assuming that the front tire is touching the Earth would be incorrect. And the snow could be significantly deeper than the depth from the center of the front wheel to the bottom of the front wheel tire. And therefore there is no way to determine the actual dept of the snow that the vehicle was sitting on from that picture.

 

[Astro_Guy]

You can't make this type of failure up. Watching these people with more money than brains is hilarious. It's truly no wonder why 1 out of 5 EV buyers go back to ICE after a myriad of major headaches and disappointing performance and other "back to reality" moments.

From the files of overpromising and underdelivering, the EV + nanny-state technology is defeated by a couple INCHES feet of snow.

Note my ICE pickup will move thru 2.5 feet of snow like it's barely there. Done so, many times. Snow, mud, you name it. Never been stuck. And when new it cost 1/2 the price of this Rivian, adjusted for inflation.

Edited: The article claims 2.5 feet of snow. The pictures in post #2, show about 8 inches of snow.

https://www.businessinsider.com/rivian-buyer-car-died-in-snow-after-3-year-wait-2023-3?amp

Chase Merrill ... was unsure about making the switch from his 2015 Ford Edge to a fully electric SUV, especially since he lives in a relatively remote area in the Adirondack Mountains in New York.... Got behind the wheel of the $85,626 car, .... "I was in a honeymoon phase," Merrill said in an interview with Insider. "It's an incredible car, and it handles unlike anything I've ever driven."
The honeymoon didn't last long. Two days later, Merrill drove his R1S to his family's shared property in the mountains. He wanted to put his rugged electric SUV to the test, so he drove it on the unplowed, snow-covered road into the property.
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 said. "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."

Merrill said he's dislodged cars from snow banks before, and enlisted another vehicle to help pull him out. While he was sitting in the driver's seat, unbuckled, rocking the R1S out of the snow bank, he said he accidentally triggered a safety feature that got the car stuck between the park and drive gears. His Rivian was bricked, rendering it completely useless.

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.

In an interview with Insider, Rivian executives said the car did exactly what it was programmed to do in a dangerous slide-away situation. But in this case, it wasn't sliding away.

Merrill isn't the first early Rivian fan to start souring on the company. Rivian has had trouble keeping some of its order-holders happy as it navigates the early days of full production for its three electric vehicles.

It would be nice to know exactly what "safety feature" it was that he triggered. One clue is that his seatbelt wasn't fastened. The other is the Rivian comment about a "dangerous slide-away situation." The cause appears to be a software problem as opposed to any ability to move through snow, or lack thereof.

 

[97prizm]

Somewhat Smaller cabin. Just as stupidly fast. Will easily cruise at M0.93 if asked Pratt engines are MUCH smoother

I was always surprised that Gulfstream went with P&W's. I figured GE Neo variant or IHI would have been on the table.

 

[Cujet]

Will the manufacturer conduct some type of analysis to see what went wrong? Maybe a damaged wire harness or some manufacturing glitch that could cause this to happen again?

They already know. Bottom line. 4ea secondary power computers. They operate independently in the air, and do not crosstalk. Any one of which can power the interior and equipment.

On the ground, they crosstalk, cross load software AND load software to all downstream components. About 380 per side! So when corrupted software finds its way downstream, everything bricks