Rivian has delivered on the desirability and drivability fronts.
Rivian is in the rarefied position of aiming to bring the first electric truck to market in the U.S., making it a vehicle that drivers will covet and doing it to scale. It’s even harder to mass-produce that vehicle all while maintaining proper fit and finish. It’s difficult for established automakers to anticipate and then tick every box on consumers’ wish lists. What Rivian has accomplished with the R1T is no small feat. I’m looking at you, odd notch that is maybe a pen holder, but certainly the soon-to-be dust collector by the wireless charging pad.
There are a few hardware details and elements on the software user interface side of things that could use a nip here and a tuck there.
That’s not to say every choice landed perfectly. On a press drive over three days, a near-production-spec R1T proved to be the electric truck none of us knew we needed. The result is a vehicle that feels right for all seasons and ready for anything. Some of the added surprises - the location of functional details like tie-downs, an air compressor and outlets - suggest that numerous Rivian employees tested the truck in real-world conditions, including camping, mountain biking and even more mundane tasks like grocery-fetching. The company’s designers and engineers helped the truck steer clear of pretension by combining form and function from tip to tail. It’s loaded with the kind of interior and exterior touches that put it firmly in the premium zone - and yet the Rivian R1T is no delicate flower. It handles rock crawling and off-camber trails with ease, can zip from zero to 60 miles per hour on a dirt road in just a few seconds without the typical back-end slippage - although there is an option to provide that drifting effect - and it can crank through winding mountain roads, pushing the edge of each corner without body roll. The Rivian R1T electric truck is neither too big nor small. On its first try, Rivian produced the Goldilocks of pickup trucks.