Can a garage floor support 2 Rivians?

[9527]

This might sound stupid for some but I do have a little bit of concern. My house was built in the early 80s and it has a normal sized 2-car garage.

Cars are getting heavier and heavier. 2 modern, large SUVs in the garage equals maybe a little more than 10,000 lbs. Now comes the age of EVs. Looking at the R1S, something the size of a Range Rover can now weights 2,000+ lbs more. 2 Rivians in the garage is 16,000 lbs.

I’m no builder or engineer. Will my 40 year old garage floor be able to house two 8,000 vehicles? Should I be worried in the long run?

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[SeaGeo]

I can't really answer that without knowing more about the soils in your area and info about the garage floor, but most likely if it's performing fine now, it will continue to.

 

[Laurent]

Your garage floor will not support that much weight. I'm afraid you'll have to park your 2nd Rivian in my garage.

 

[crashmtb]

We will need a geotechnical analysis of the soil under your garage floor…

but really, a regular 4” reinforced concrete slab is fine as long as there was proper compaction done first.

 

[ksujeff99]

You’ll likely never know unless you do a core sample of your garage floor to determine its thickness. But even then there’s no way to know the support structure of the slab itself. The soil under your garage, if built the same as every garage slab I’ve seen in my life, was backfilled and then the slab was poured over that. That soil wasn’t compacted when the slab was poured so the slab itself is no longer by the soil underneath-it’s long since compacted. All that supports the slab now is the foundation perimeter and a concrete column or two in the middle.

This is likely a question for the home building sub or something like that on Reddit. There are codes of course but what would they have been in the 80s?

 

[9527]

Your garage floor will not support that much weight. I'm afraid you'll have to park your 2nd Rivian in my garage.

This could be my solution by you live kinda far away.

And thanks for the input guys. I doubt I’ll have 2 Rivians but if I have 16,000 lbs of cars in the garage in the future, I guess I’ll find out the hard way when the slab starts cracking.

 

[SeaGeo]

We will need a geotechnical analysis of the soil under your garage floor…

but really, a regular 4” reinforced concrete slab is fine as long as there was proper compaction done first.

Literally my job. ?

And... usually that would be fine. I would not be surprised if a home building didn't do squat for subgrade prep though.

 

[SeaGeo]

This could be my solution by you live kinda far away.

And thanks for the input guys. I doubt I’ll have 2 Rivians but if I have 16,000 lbs of cars in the garage in the future, I guess I’ll find out the hard way when the slab starts cracking.

Honestly, fixing it after the fact would likely be less expensive than actually investigating and properly evaluating it.

 

[Davethadog]

Concrete is dope. If you’ve got a 4” slab properly reinforced you can safely assume a ground poured slab can hold 5000kg/m2 and some engineers will double that. When we poured the floors as my shop where e have a ton of very heavy equipment 4 would have been sufficient but not to code, we ended up doing double that but only for vibration reasons. You’re fine, your bigger problem will be getting two Rivians to do the test.

 

[crashmtb]

Literally my job. ?

And... usually that would be fine. I would not be surprised if a home building didn't do squat for subgrade prep though.

If the garage floor is currently flat and not heaved then I’d say there was an adequate layer of beer cans

 

[schwartz83]

My garage floor is cracked down the middle and slopes to each side a bit. My hope is the weight of the Rivian will level that out. ?

 

[crashmtb]

My garage floor is cracked down the middle and slopes to each side a bit. My hope is the weight of the Rivian will level that out. ?

Currently my garage door will only close without assistance when there is a car inside parked on a certain bump on the slab.

 

[xcb5]

I’ve actually been thinking about this a bit. Would a concrete garage with a basement be able to support 2 EVs?

 

[crashmtb]

I’ve actually been thinking about this a bit. Would a concrete garage with a basement be able to support 2 EVs?

Why is a mouse when it spins?

 

[yizzung]

Several (big) SUVs are in the 6,000 lb range and Rivians are just north of 7,000, I think. Not that huge of a gap. And while I’m no structural engineer, I think your slab has to support 1/4 of the weight of each vehicle spread across the contact points of each tire on each vehicle. I’m summary, random internet guy says you’re fine… But seriously though, the risk here is actually about zero. We’re talking about maybe an ugly crack at most but the trucks aren’t going to fall through into a crevasse (unless you live in the Alps).

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