Anyone using garage tiles under their heavy Rivian?

[mkhuffman]

I installed Swisstrax eco tiles 7 years ago, and have had my r1t on them for 3 years. I have had no issues at all and they are amazing. Best mod I have done in the garage since everything drains perfecty under them and it always looks clean. Especially in our Vermont winters. The eco ones I have are lower strength and I can only see some slight groves now, but replacing where the tires drive would be very inexpensive. They have flat tops and everything rolls nice on them. I have had my truck on stands dozens of times and they don't move or dent at all. It is important to use stands with a wide base and an off road jack to distribute the weight. But that is the case with any car I lift.

How do you clean your garage floor?

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[Revin]

How do you clean your garage floor?

I pressure wash the dirt through it every few weeks and scrub it once in the spring. I have a center floor drain, so that makes it really easy. I should clean under the tiles soon, but it hasn't been a problem yet.

 

[All Rived Up]

Racedeck works great for me and WAY better than Epoxy for us in the Vegas Heat!

 

[mkhuffman]

Racedeck works great for me and WAY better than Epoxy for us in the Vegas Heat!

Why is it way better than epoxy?

 

[All Rived Up]

Why is it way better than epoxy?

The extreme heat from the tires when pulling into the Garage messes up the epoxy and it starts to look bad and just keeps getting worse over time. It then is VERY difficult and costly to repair. The Tiles are way better and if one breaks for some reason, you can just pop it out and put in a new.

 

[SANZC02]

Why is it way better than epoxy?

I’d be curious as well. I have a garage in Coachella Valley with an 11 year old epoxy coating that is still as good as the day it was done. Outside temps there in the summer frequently are north of 110 degrees.

 

[SANZC02]

The extreme heat from the tires when pulling into the Garage messes up the epoxy and it starts to look bad and just keeps getting worse over time. It then is VERY difficult and costly to repair. The Tiles are way better and if one breaks for some reason, you can just pop it out and put in a new.

I would question the installer if the happens. Maybe a DIY install might do that but a quality installer that should not happen. See my previous comment.

Edit; This is a picture in the desert, this is what the floor looked like after 8 years but looks the same today..

 

[mkhuffman]

I would question the installer if the happens. Maybe a DIY install might do that but a quality installer that should not happen. See my previous comment.

Edit; This is a picture in the desert, this is what the floor looked like after 8 years but looks the same today..

It could be poor epoxy quality as well. I imagine the good stuff is very stable at high temperatures.

 

[CrazyOne]

nice hypothetical but not sure what your point is relative to a tire's contact patch. A tire is not rigid like a screwdriver and the contact patch will spread out as pressure drops (under the same load).

A tire inflated to 48 psi and supporting 1700 lbs will have a contact patch of just over 35 sq in. At 46 psi, the contact patch expands to about 37 sq in. Regardless, for the case of the floor tile, given that the area of the tile supporting the vehicle is the same as the contact patch of the tire and that the force on the tile must exactly balance the force on the tire, the tire's inflation psi must also be exactly the same as the psi exerted on the tile.

Dump truck tires have less psi than some/most road bike tires. Testing with bicycle tires is insufficient to prove that a surface can withstand a dump truck.

 

[skyguyscott]

My garage floor is 70 years old and had some cracks that I sealed. What I assume is the original paint is well worn in places, and the concrete under the area where vehicles are parked is showing signs of weathering from where water and salt have dripped from winter parking. Luckily, there are no oil stains. I suppose for being 70 years old, it looks about as good as you could expect, but it could really use a refresh.

Currently, I have one of those car rugs under the Rivian, but they wear out after a couple years. I was thinking of epoxy originally, or this product called "nature stone," but then I thought the garage tiles would be easier, faster and maybe cheaper if they held up.

 

[electruck]

Dump truck tires have less psi than some/most road bike tires. Testing with bicycle tires is insufficient to prove that a surface can withstand a dump truck.

Dump truck tires also have a considerably larger contact patch but yes, I agree, you can't sample the flavor of an orange by eating an apple. But we're not performing engineering analogies here, we're computing the exact pressure applied to the tile by a Rivian R1 so your comment seems a bit lost in the weeds.

 

[CrazyOne]

Dump truck tires also have a considerably larger contact patch but yes, I agree, you can't sample the flavor of an orange by eating an apple. But we're not performing engineering analogies here, we're computing the exact pressure applied to the tile by a Rivian R1 so your comment seems a bit lost in the weeds.

You can't compute whether something will take weight by just looking at PSI. I have a clear example. We are not computing the pressure here, we are trying to figure out whether the tiles will crack or not.

 

[electruck]

You can't compute whether something will take weight by just looking at PSI. I have a clear example. We are not computing the pressure here, we are trying to figure out whether the tiles will crack or not.

In order to determine if the tiles will crack, we have to compare the load applied to the load which will cause the tile to crack. There are other considerations such as the impact of repeat stress cycles which we won't get into here. Swisstrax, a brand mentioned in this thread, advertises the following regarding their tiles: "Designed to handle a compressive strength of 2,500 psi and a rollover weight of 60,000lbs". Obviously 50 psi ballpark is well within the product's load handling ability. Combine that with reports from people actually parking their Rivian on such tiles without issue and one can reasonably conclude that the weight of a Rivian is not problematic on such tiles - which was the original question raised by the OP. Is that an absolute? Certainly not as all products will not be engineered to the same standards. But we can have reasonable confidence regarding this class of product.

 

[1stPlace]

I've tried my best to avoid the theoretical discussions going on in this thread and just provide my experience. I also saw someone's ~20 yr old race deck free-flow tiles recently. No cracks or whatever this theoretical physics debate is about. Even if one tile were to become cracked/break, the structural integrity of everything else is still there.

You want your garage floor to look nice or "art-adjacent" and clean once a year for a couple hours? RaceDeck (free-flow).

You want your floor to be solid flat and best for mechanic work, with more frequent quick cleaning? Epoxy.

 

[All Rived Up]

You want your garage floor to look nice or "art-adjacent" and clean once a year for a couple hours? RaceDeck (free-flow).

You want your floor to be solid flat and best for mechanic work, with more frequent quick cleaning? Epoxy.

Not to Mention, if you move you can take the Tiles with you...not so much with the Epoxy!

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