Navigation is BAD

[Msg43]

I love the R1S. I understand why, for business reasons, they won’t allow Apple Car Play. It isn’t a customer friendly decision but business is about trade offs.

On that basis I expected Alexa navigation to be slightly worse than Google Maps. Specifically, if google maps selects the proper location from a verbal search and navigates to that address using the optimal route 100% of the time, I figured Rivian would be 80%. Mind you, anything below 90% means I don’t completely trust the results and if it matters I will double check the results. But I figured the system would rapidly improve with OTAs and close the gap.

Unfortunately I would say the navigation is about 50-60% accurate. It is so bad at selecting the right address from a verbal search is basically useless. The routing aspect of the navigation system isn’t as bad. But it is still frequently wrong. I would say it is at best right 75% of the time. That means 25% of the time it is sending me on a sub optimal route to my destination. It usually *thinks* the route it chose is going to be much faster than it actually is. I imagine this is because it doesn’t have the traffic data that google does so it’s approximations are much more rough.

Overall the navigation is a massive shortfall in what is otherwise a great vehicle. Since I assume this is a problem that won’t be fixed anytime soon due to political reasons I always warn people who stop me and ask about the truck. For this price I believe customer experience should come first, but I recognize that Rivian needed Amazon and this was part of the price Rivian had to pay.

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[Shawnybs]

Agreed; Alexa is useless in general. Spoken navigation is a no-go in my experience and makes hands free usage of the infotainment near impossible. So I guess I share your feelings ha.

Also, where is text message reading and replying? I don't do a lot of it, but man carplay makes it easy (and safe!) to reply to the occasional text message.

 

[Dark-Fx]

Rivian uses Mapbox. I don't think "Alexa Navigation" is a thing.

I've reported minor issues and they generally have fixed them within a few days, and as soon as they say they fixed them, the next drive it shows up on the truck.

https://docs.mapbox.com/help/troubleshooting/reporting-a-problem/

 

[kurtlikevonnegut]

I've found so far that the "send from phone" capability fixes most of the issues with the nav because Google is sending location data directly to the car. Routing is going to be pretty similar to Google even if the traffic algorithms aren't as robust as Google's.

Honestly that function has been a game changer for using the Nav.

 

[Msg43]

Agreed; Alexa is useless in general. Spoken navigation is a no-go in my experience and makes hands free usage of the infotainment near impossible. So I guess I share your feelings ha.

Also, where is text message reading and replying? I don't do a lot of it, but man carplay makes it easy (and safe!) to reply to the occasional text message.

I just say “Hey siri

Rivian uses Mapbox. I don't think "Alexa Navigation" is a thing.

I've reported minor issues and they generally have fixed them within a few days, and as soon as they say they fixed them, the next drive it shows up on the truck.

https://docs.mapbox.com/help/troubleshooting/reporting-a-problem/

Thanks for your comment. What I referred to as “Alexa navigation” is some combination of Alexa’s ability to correctly hear my spoken request and Alexa / Mapbox’s ability to select the most logical search result(s) and Mapbox’s routing algo. All of which seem quite inferior in my experience.

 

[Dark-Fx]

I just say “Hey siri

Thanks for your comment. What I referred to as “Alexa navigation” is some combination of Alexa’s ability to correctly hear my spoken request and Alexa / Mapbox’s ability to select the most logical search result(s) and Mapbox’s routing algo. All of which seem quite inferior in my experience.

Sometimes Alexa completely nails it, but other times, I agree it's totally useless. It just sucks it's going to always be at a time where I don't have the opportunity to really dig into the issue right then.

 

[DTown3011]

I've found so far that the "send from phone" capability fixes most of the issues with the nav because Google is sending location data directly to the car. Routing is going to be pretty similar to Google even if the traffic algorithms aren't as robust as Google's.

Honestly that function has been a game changer for using the Nav.

This ^^^^

Search for it on your phone in Google Maps, then share it to Rivian. I do this on my Tesla all the time and it's awesome. This came with the last update.

 

[kurtlikevonnegut]

This ^^^^

Search for it on your phone in Google Maps, then share it to Rivian. I do this on my Tesla all the time and it's awesome. This came with the last update.

I tried it out a few times right when it came out and have used it almost exclusively since without a single issue. This is after multiple instances of Rivian's nav taking me to the wrong place (even if the address in their database was correct).

 

[Msg43]

This ^^^^

Search for it on your phone in Google Maps, then share it to Rivian. I do this on my Tesla all the time and it's awesome. This came with the last update.

I agree that this avoids the address search part of the problem. However:

1. By the time I do that it’s a few steps faster to just navigate from my phone.

2. “This standard tool is broken. Use our competitor’s tool” isnt ideal when the roadmap to fix doesn’t exist.

3. It doesn’t solve the routing problems.
Just for fun I just selected a destination while I was on the highway as an example. Rivian is always more “optimistic” in its route times and often offers multiple routes but not the route Google Maps offers.

I was going to post the map screenshots but decided not to for privacy reasons.

 

[Donald Stanfield]

I don't use voice anything on anything I own because it's all garbage. I can type much faster than I can mess with that garbage. The send to truck feature from Google maps makes the navigation work great in the Rivian. Honestly it's leaps and bounds better than Audi's native navigation without the send to feature.

I might be on an island here but I like the native navigation on the Rivian. It is fast enough, finds most things and now anything it doesn't find can be fixed by sending it from google. Traffic works okay as well.

 

[Mjl]

Mapbox frequently messes up underpasses. Any complex routes and it totally loses where you are. In a lot of these cases it's hard to quantify how they'd fix. For roadtrips I'm going to just use a phone mount and google maps.

 

[frostbit3]

I don't use voice anything on anything I own because it's all garbage. I can type much faster than I can mess with that garbage. The send to truck feature from Google maps makes the navigation work great in the Rivian. Honestly it's leaps and bounds better than Audi's native navigation without the send to feature.

I might be on an island here but I like the native navigation on the Rivian. It is fast enough, finds most things and now anything it doesn't find can be fixed by sending it from google. Traffic works okay as well.

I like the UI of the navigation, it's fast enough and it works from a UI perspective. The issue I have with it is the reliability of it. Last time I depended on it was at a Rivian event in the DFW area, I assumed if it was an event that Rivian themselves were hosting i'd be good. Routed to the place the nav took me to, only to not see anything about Rivian around it. Pulled it up on google maps and it said I was still half a mile away.

I wasn't aware that the "Send to Rivian" sent the actual location data, not just the address. So i'll give that a shot in the near future to see if that works better for me.

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