12v battery issues and jumping it

[kithjin]

Hi there,

I seem to be eating 12v batteries on my gen1 R1T every 1-2 years. Question on jumping the vehicle. First time we proactively changed the battery ahead of failure with a mobile service. This time around I went from no battery warning to dead truck. Has anyone tried jumping/charging both batteries and moving the vehicle from completely dead? It seems like service recommends just towing it for safety. The manual cautions driving it too, which makes sense. It is a pain in the ass towing my truck out of the garage though. lining up in the driveway is helpful, as well being able to get it into neutral. I am going to try the jump if this happens again, but just curious has anyone succeeded. (and knock on wood, we don't get all the way to dead battery again).

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[freshpow]

This may or may not be helpful since my G1 has the single 12v + capacitor. When my 12v died in the garage we were able to get it going again by accessing the frunk via the emergency release and hooking up the tow truck's jump pack directly to the 12v. We had previously tried it on the rear hitch leads with no success. From there, I was able to drive it out of my garage (with the hood still up) and get it in a good spot for the tow truck to hook up.

 

[kithjin]

This may or may not be helpful since my G1 has the single 12v + capacitor. When my 12v died in the garage we were able to get it going again by accessing the frunk via the emergency release and hooking up the tow truck's jump pack directly to the 12v. We had previously tried it on the rear hitch leads with no success. From there, I was able to drive it out of my garage (with the hood still up) and get it in a good spot for the tow truck to hook up.

nice, that is exactly what I am looking to do. too bad the jump on the battery by the rear hitch didn't work and you had to manually release the frunk. but at least you were able to get it moving.

thanks

 

[Nixapatfan]

Yes it's possible if the batteries aren't completely toast. What I had to do was get the batteries up to about 6v by hooking up fully charged jumper battery and just let it sit for awhile until the voltage equalized then hook up to a trickle charger with a repair/desulphation setting. Was able to get both batteries to hold charge after that and was fine for a few months before batteries got replaced.

The tricky part is the onboard computers all want to start up as soon as there is power and suck up all the juice before the batteries can be brought up to enough charge for the trickle charger to detect it. If you have multiple jumpers or batteries it will speed up the process as you can rotate them as they get depleted.

 

[twillhunt]

My R1T battery went dead when I left it on a street for a week (battery was low and we had a few days of sub-freezing temps). After I contacted Rivan for assistance, they scheduled a "mobile appointment" nearly three weeks later, then contacted me after a week to say they needed the vehicle towed to replace the 12V battery. Nearly $700 later, I was able to use my truck. This is a SERIOUS lack of engineering imagination. So.....when the battery gets depleted, even sitting next to a charging station (the house where I was parked has a charger), the solution is to tow and replace the 12V battery? Towing from my home to Rivian is around $3k (ask me how I know), so that's what I'm risking if the battery gets too low? What engineer thought that was a good plan? I'm seriously considering ditching my R2 reservation because of this. What a stuipd design.

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