Understandable.
I've used several of the chargers along I-90 in New York. The "Applegreen" center chargers are quite nice and seem to work well. Wish they were included in the in-dash nav though.
[/Q
Just did my first trip with my new (used) R1T where I needed to charge in order to make it back home last week. Used a tesla supercharger where I was visiting but then saw those chargers at the first rest area heading south (from Albany area) at Applegreen. Agree it would have been nice to see them on the in-dash nav. For future reference when traveling in NY:
Level 2 and Level 3 electric vehicle (EV) charging stations are available along the New York State Thruway.
- Level 2 stations are free to use and located at nine Commuter Park and Ride Lots off the Thruwayās mainline system. It takes approximately 4 hours to fully charge.
I sent this in to Rivian as a request. They sent me a nice response. But I understand the current limits and needing to be selective.
I'm new to the Rivian world as I wait for my invitation to order the R2. I own a Tesla MY now. You mention this above. "You pay the non-membership Tesla rate plus the Rivian markup." What is the Rivian markup? A set fee or a % of total or $/kwh? Thanks
Hopefully someone else can chime in with specifics - I just know that the Rivian rate is higher than the non-member Tesla rate which in turn is higher than the Tesla membership rate. If I have time in the next week or so I can at least test the Rivian rate and the Tesla membership rate. I might be able to get the non-membership rate from the app.
Thanks I appreciate that. Just trying to get a feel for what I'm in for when I have the R2. Obviously most of my charging will occur at home but I do a few longer trips per year and it looks as though a Tesla membership for the months I do is the best option and Ionna chargers seem a good choice as well. Just noticed on your profile you're from Lititz. A couple of my trips are driving back to the Harrisburg area where I grew up.
We've had our R1S for 3 years and just crossed 60,000 miles. Most of our charging is at home, but we do a couple of road trips each month so we just keep the Tesla membership active, but you can turn it off and on as needed. I've got twins who are starting their 2nd year in college so we do a lot of trips to see them. One is at Penn State (124 miles each way so we stop to charge for about 10 minutes either coming or going) and the other is at Ohio State (which is typically two partial charges each way plus a full charge while in Columbus) and the Tesla chargers are just the most convenient along those routes.
I don't think this is accurate. There is no additional rate above the non-Tesla rate that I've ever encountered. You can see the rate by going into the Tesla app, hitting the 3 lines, selecting "charge your other ev" and then picking a station.
Sorry - I wasn't clear...If you just plug in your Rivian to a compatible Tesla charger it will start charging immediately (plug & charge) as long as you have a valid credit card in your Rivian account. You will, however, be charged a higher rate by Rivian than you would get if you were charged by Tesla. I don't know what the premium is, but I know it's there.
Nice pictures.Our family of 4 took a road trip from our Indianapolis area home to coastal Maine (by way of Philadelphia and Boston for an American History tour). I have had our 2025 R1S Dual Max for about 7 months, and this is the first major road trip we've taken it on (I've had a Tesla for 3.5 years though and we've traveled with that, so I'm not new to EV road trips).
Stats according to Rivian Roamer:
- Total miles: 2171
- Efficiency: 2.28 mi/KwH (22" Sport Dark wheels with Nokian One HT tires)
- Charging spend: $457.23 (multiple networks: IONNA, Rivian, Tesla, Electrify America)
- Cost/mile: $0.21
- Total energy used: 953 kWh
- Average speed: 57mph (seems low, not sure how this is calculated by RR, maybe it's averaging it across drives rather than miles driven? The vast majority of the miles were done at or around ~70 mph. Once arriving in a city we mostly parked the car and walked.)
- Temps/weather: Most of the driving was done in 70-90F temps, usually sunny but occasional rain/clouds
TL;DR: I love Rivian but it was not all sunshine and roses. Numerous software bugs and a charging scare (where we thought we were about to be stranded) make me nervous about depending on this vehicle. I'm really on the fence about how long I'm going to keep this R1S, but right now I don't know what else I would get.
Pros
Cons/Issues
- Lots of space for packing stuff
- Seats are comfortable -- no one felt particularly fatigued after long stints
- Range is decent for such a large brick-shaped vehicle
- Most of the chargers we plugged into from all brands "just worked" (until the car just refused to charge one time, more on that later), which was a pleasant surprise.
- Ride on the highway is OK
- I liked having the "charging grade" on the Rivian nav's charging station details.
- UHF (Universal Hands Free) was unreliable and unusable for a lot of the trip. I paid for Autonomy+ hoping it would take some of the pain out of the long highway segments...only to have it fail and be unusable for hours at a time (non-specific "system fault" message, or just refusing to engage in the first place). This was about 50% of the time. The remaining 50% of the time, when it did "work"/let me engage it, it often wouldn't do lane change on command. Lane change on command was "not available on this road" about 80% of the time UHF was otherwise working. This is on major interstates like I-80, not some state backroad. I'm unsubscribing from Autonomy+ and asking for a refund for this month, not because I care that much about getting my $50 back, but because I want Rivian to see that in their tickets that I was dissatisfied with its behavior.
- Even the standard cruise control wasn't all that reliable -- it did enough phantom braking to make it annoying/not relaxing to use. It would occasionally slam on the brakes for no reason. Clear day, no traffic in front. One pattern I noticed was that it sometimes freaked out from the shadow of an overpass.
- During one two-hour segment of the drive, the car repeatedly "dinged" at me because it thought one of my kids was unbuckled. Then it would detect him as buckled again and be quiet, but a few seconds later it would start dinging again. It did this for the better part of two hours. I almost lost my mind. Fortunately, it didn't happen again after the next time we stopped, because I was about to go insane.
- Absolutely infuriating navigation bugginess ā lots of little things (especially when trying to plan a route in the mobile app), but the biggest issue was one time we sent a plan from the Rivian iOS app while we were stopped to charge, because I was trying to plan out where we were going to stop and charge next while we had dinner. Somehow, this screwed up the in-car nav so badly that we couldn't edit/control the route anymore, and it wouldn't display the "next destination" card (that shows your arrival charge and route option buttons). I've never seen this before. Trying to send new destinations from the app to try and kick it out of this bad mode only confused it more, to the point that we had to just reboot the car to fix it.
- AC is so weak even though I installed a full roof shade for this trip. I canāt imagine how people in actually hot climates survive.
- Ride tends to be crap on imperfect roads (already knew that, it's my biggest long term gripe with this vehicle...I have 20" wheels as well, they don't help much).
- Periodic loss of cloud connectivity, but only from one of our accounts. Monitoring a charging session from the mobile app was therefore challenging. I never experienced this before this trip, but half the time my phone showed "no cloud connectivity" when I opened the Rivian app. Even when it did this, though, I found I could send commands to the car -- I just wouldn't receive any data. My wife's phone (exact same model) worked fine. I restarted my phone, I deleted the Rivian app and reinstalled it. No effect. I've found similar reports from others with no definitive solution. It periodically would cure itself and work fine.
- Door handles squeal like stuck pigs when they deploy/retract in the heat.
- I really understand people's complaints about the lack of faster charging on Rivians now. Especially when you've got the Max pack that you're trying to fill up.
- And here's the biggie...the car initially refused to charge on our LAST STOP before getting home. No specific error message, just the red icon after attempting to start charging and "unplug and try again". Temps normal. Tried two charging stations, a Tesla and EA. Called Rivian. After screwing around for 30 minutes, unplugging and replugging, and TWO hard resets, vehicle finally started charging (they were getting ready to mobilize a tow truck). NOT confidence inspiring, to say the least, and my wife was starting to get really nervous. Rivian has no idea what was happening or why it didn't fix after the first hard reset, but did after the second. You know the only thing worse than a bug? A bug that fixes itself without you knowing the reason.
General notes/observations on the R1S and long range traveling with an EV in general
These are things that aren't really Rivian issues, just observations about roadtrips in an EV.
Other Comments
- As far as I can find, there's still no perfect EV trip planning tool. The big thing I want is timeboxed stops with amenity proximity. e.g., When we're setting out for the day on a long drive, I want to be able to say "find a charger near some restaurants for wherever we are during the 12-1pm timeframe on this planned trip, and plan on us charging for 45 minutes while we get lunch" and have that become part of the plan. You can kinda do this with ABRP, but it's fiddly and buggy and their UI isn't very good. If I had one wish for Rivian Assistant, it would be this kind of thing. As it is, I use the Rivan route planner, than manually pan through the route and try to guess how far we'll be around the target time, and check that in a separate app on my phone, then manually pan around the Rivian route planner to add a charger that's near restaurants for where we'll be at that time.
- Charging is not always convenient to a hotel. More than once I dropped my family off at a hotel, then drove a mile or two away to sit in the car for an hour while it charged to 100% (or close to it) so that we could start off the next morning without having to immediately stop to charge. When possible I booked a hotel with L2 EV charging, but that wasn't always in the cards.
- Charging was expensive. I didn't pick charging stations based on cost; it was more about convenience to amenities. And I knew supercharging wasn't cheap, but I was shocked at how much we spent. With the average MPG we got on our old V6 Kia Telluride (our previous large SUV), I calculate that we would have spent ~$400 on gas -- less than what we spent charging the Rivian, even with gas around ~$5/gallon. (I bought a Tesla charging membership for $12.99 before we went but as far as I can tell it wasn't "used", I'm not sure what I missed. We wound up not charging at all that many Tesla chargers anyway.)
- It's kind of annoying that some charging stations don't have windshield cleaning things like gas stations always do -- we killed a lot of bugs!
- A significant portion of the Tesla chargers we ran into had not been upgraded with the longer cables.
- Multiple Electrify America stations we went to had some chargers that were significantly slower than others (150 kW vs 350 kw). You've got to pay attention to which one you pull into. Why they wouldn't upgrade all of them to the same speed I don't know.
I know many of you go on road trips and experience virtually no issues whatsoever -- I'm glad for you. Obviously our experience wasn't so smooth.
Admittedly, a lot of the cons on their own are somewhat minor things -- the door handles, the mobile app issues, nav bugginess, etc. But add all that up, Pl ąØ¤ąØøą©±ąØ¦ą©ąØus the major issues -- namely the charging scare, where we thought we had made it nearly 2k miles only to have to get towed within hours of home -- and I have to say my overall experience was a solid "C" at best. I spent a fair amount of the trip dealing with frustrations related to the car not performing/behaving as we expected. Not relaxing. The number of issues I had on my last Tesla road trip? 0.
Immediately on getting home, I opened up a service ticket for many of the issues -- the charging hiccup, the mobile app connectivity issues, the seatbelt thing, the door handles, the UHF issues. And now I get to wait 6+ weeks until the first available appointment. Which means we are going on one more roadtrip in July (not nearly as long) with all these issues.
Conclusion
I love the Rivian in theory but in practice...this wasn't great. Any car should do better than this, let alone one that has a sticker of ~$100k. The problem is, short of going back to ICE, which I don't really want to do, I don't know what else I would get. We want three rows and lots of space to haul things. The closest thing that I find interesting is the Cadillac Vistiq (which I know has superb on-road manners), but it has 25% less range than our Max and no frunk -- two big negatives. Plus its overall design vibe is more pure "luxury" than "utility-focused but nice", which is something I really like about the Rivian.
So for now, I don't think I'm changing cars, unless we have worse experiences on a future roadtrip. But I'm keeping a close eye on the market, eagerly anticipating what Rivian might do for a "gen 3" R1S, and hoping they can patch some things up with software updates in the meantime.
P.S. Found a parking buddy in a parking garage in Philly on June 6...matte-wrapped with New Jersey plates.
