Is Rivian Gear Guard Useless?

[Tony de Veyra]

The TL;DW -

My R1S was rear-ended last night. Fortunately the crash was very minor. No one was hurt. My R1S does not even appear to be damaged. I had a bike rack on, with two ebikes, and the impact dented the handle on my bike rack. The rack is still useable. The other car the rear-ended me sustained severe damage--a huge dent in their hood. It is possible there is some damage to my hitch receiver, but I won't be able to assess that until I can remove the bikes and rack. Won't be in a space to do that until tomorrow.

Right after the accident, I expected video of it to be saved somewhere in gear guard. There was no video. Nothing in the incidents, nothing in road cam, and nothing in saved clips, despite the fact that my wife and I spammed the camera record button in the upper part of the screen several times. I pulled my hard drive out and looked through the files on a computer, and found eight files whose time stamps coincide with when the crash happened. These files could not be viewed on the R1S screen when the hard drive was plugged in, and neither a windows PC nor an iOS mac have been able to play those files.

Ultimately having footage of the accident probably won't change anything. I'm pretty confident that I got out of this with no damage other than the dent on the bike rack handle. All the damage was done to the car that rear-ended me and that driver is at fault. So all of that is very fortunate. That said, I can't help but think how if things were different, if there was a way they could dispute or debate if the accident was my fault, then having that footage would be VERY useful. It would likely save me tens of thousands of dollars.

So I have to ask...is gear guard useless? If it can't provide video of an actual factual accident that involves the vehicle itself? Or is this a fluke? Or should I look into some settings on my car that aren't set right? Has anyone else had this problem with the gear guard producing corrupt/unviewable files? Or is this just because an accessory was impacted instead of the car itself?

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[Nixapatfan]

You might need to install an Mp4 codec to play it on your PC. The Rivian infotainment screen is useless for seeing roadcam videos and has been like that for years, kind of lame for a company that touts they are a software company.

EDIT: never mind I just watched your video, you clearly can watch videos, just not the ones you want so the files didn't save correctly.

 

[Dark-Fx]

Right after the accident, I expected video of it to be saved somewhere in gear guard. There was no video. Nothing in the incidents, nothing in road cam, and nothing in saved clips, despite the fact that my wife and I spammed the camera record button in the upper part of the screen several times. I pulled my hard drive out and looked through the files on a computer, and found eight files whose time stamps coincide with when the crash happened. These files could not be viewed on the R1S screen when the hard drive was plugged in, and neither a windows PC nor an iOS mac have been able to play those files.

Did you eject the drive through the gear guard menu or just unplug it? If it was still actively writing data to the drive when you unplug it, it'll corrupt whatever file it's in the middle of writing. The file can still likely be repaired with an application that can do it. VLC will sometimes be able to play these corrupted files by re-encoding it.

 

[Tony de Veyra]

Did you eject the drive through the gear guard menu or just unplug it? If it was still actively writing data to the drive when you unplug it, it'll corrupt whatever file it's in the middle of writing. The file can still likely be repaired with an application that can do it. VLC will sometimes be able to play these corrupted files by re-encoding it.

I did use the eject button on the screen before unplugging the hard drive. Also, the files on the hard drive that playback properly are from well after the accident happened, me driving up to an hour or so after it occurred. So it was writing and making new videos on the drive just fine. Only the video of the incident itself did not write properly, which is so freaking odd!

 

[Latrant]

The TL;DW -

My R1S was rear-ended last night. Fortunately the crash was very minor. No one was hurt. My R1S does not even appear to be damaged. I had a bike rack on, with two ebikes, and the impact dented the handle on my bike rack. The rack is still useable. The other car the rear-ended me sustained severe damage--a huge dent in their hood. It is possible there is some damage to my hitch receiver, but I won't be able to assess that until I can remove the bikes and rack. Won't be in a space to do that until tomorrow.

Right after the accident, I expected video of it to be saved somewhere in gear guard. There was no video. Nothing in the incidents, nothing in road cam, and nothing in saved clips, despite the fact that my wife and I spammed the camera record button in the upper part of the screen several times. I pulled my hard drive out and looked through the files on a computer, and found eight files whose time stamps coincide with when the crash happened. These files could not be viewed on the R1S screen when the hard drive was plugged in, and neither a windows PC nor an iOS mac have been able to play those files.

Ultimately having footage of the accident probably won't change anything. I'm pretty confident that I got out of this with no damage other than the dent on the bike rack handle. All the damage was done to the car that rear-ended me and that driver is at fault. So all of that is very fortunate. That said, I can't help but think how if things were different, if there was a way they could dispute or debate if the accident was my fault, then having that footage would be VERY useful. It would likely save me tens of thousands of dollars.

So I have to ask...is gear guard useless? If it can't provide video of an actual factual accident that involves the vehicle itself? Or is this a fluke? Or should I look into some settings on my car that aren't set right? Has anyone else had this problem with the gear guard producing corrupt/unviewable files? Or is this just because an accessory was impacted instead of the car itself?

If it isn’t intuitive and seemless just after an accident to show the responding officer, it’s worthless.

I hope Scout motors fixes this.

I don’t own a Tesla and never have but Tesla has this figured out.

Watch Whaam Baam Teslacam on youtube to see what I mean.

i have three cars with dashcams. Thinkware is not intuitive or easy to connect its app to view content. Viofo is better. I’d like to try blackvue because it has actual cloud connectivity (which Tesla has but Rivian Doesn’t.).

Its all frustrating that a central compute, software based company like Rivian can’t get this right.

 

[Nixapatfan]

If it isn’t intuitive and seemless just after an accident to show the responding officer, it’s worthless.

I hope Scout motors fixes this.

I don’t own a Tesla and never have but Tesla has this figured out.

Watch Whaam Baam Teslacam on youtube to see what I mean.

i have three cars with dashcams. Thinkware is not intuitive or easy to connect its app to view content. Viofo is better. I’d like to try blackvue because it has actual cloud connectivity (which Tesla has but Rivian Doesn’t.).

Its all frustrating that a central compute, software based company like Rivian can’t get this right.

Why would you think Scout will fix this? They are supposedly going to run on Rivian software so probably just more of the same.

 

[Latrant]

Why would you think Scout will fix this? They are supposedly going to run on Rivian software so probably just more of the same.

because Scout has shown promise in making choices that address all the things I don’t like about Tesla, Rivian or all EVs. I’ve seen their UI demo including cameras as well as off road cameras and it shows promise. Time will tell but Scout software and engineers are not Rivian or Tesla Engineers. Derivative but, hopefully, different and hopefully means they will fix the shortfalls, as they’ve already done with planning an EREV, knobs, handles and pano shades, spare tires, etc.

 

[SwampNut]

What you are showing here is files that were not saved/closed. Video files have an opening segment, then record in real time, and then the recorder "closes" the file by writing critical end/info data. Normally this happens if the recorder crashes, powers off, or the device (memory) is removed. This does suggest you removed it without ending the file/ejecting it. The data is there, and can be recovered with FFMPEG or similar tools. Google this.

Your post, along with recording some idiocy yesterday, and some past videos, inspired me to grab my two flash drives and get some stuff from them. First, I pulled one while recording. I got what you did; broken video files, as expected. Next I did a proper eject-wait-remove and got good usable files.

"Incidents" are when the vehicle detects something violent, and maybe your collision was too minor? Also the amount required to trigger it has changed over time. Early on, I had "incidents" simply from hard launches with a little tire spin, and some off road playtime that was a little rough. But none of that is being recorded recently.

Now I have a question, WTF is "spamming" a button??? Spam is sending an unsolicited commercial email (ad). How do you spam a button? Maybe you mean pressing it a lot, and when did spamming become "pressing a lot?" Anyway each time you press it or hit the horn, it saves --I think-- ten seconds back, and then the next two minutes. I can't remember if those are exact. It's kind of dumb, it should go BACK two minutes and forward a few seconds. If you hit it repeatedly, maybe you caused it to corrupt the files trying too hard to write too many of them.

 

[Lord Leroy]

Gear guard is notorious for missing anything of importance. My truck got hit in the parking lot and it recorded nothing. Plenty of videos of people walking by the car, but nothing of the accident. It’s kind of worthless.

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