Most Rivian owners love their vehicles (at least according to one JD Power Electric Vehicle Owner Satisfaction Poll), but one owner decided that perhaps taking the lead wasn’t for him after long awaited Rivian R1S died after just two days of possession and a blizzard.
Chase Merrill is a 24-year-old man living in the snowy Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York. He reckons the $85,626 SUV would be the perfect replacement for his 2015 Ford Edge, even if he was initially skeptical about going all-electric. He waited three years to own the SUV. At first, he told InsidersHe loved his new R1S, but that love affair was short-lived:
Merrill drove his R1S to his family’s joint property in the mountains. He wanted to test his rugged electric SUV, so he drove it on a snow-covered road, not plowing into the property.
At first, the R1S cuts through the snow. Then a large pile of snow got in the way of the vehicle, he said.
“I hit about 2 ½ feet of snow and it stopped right there,” Merrill told Insider. “I’ve seen all of Rivian’s marketing with cars that just eat through the snow so it’s like, this is disappointing.”
Merrill said he had previously knocked cars out of the snow and asked another vehicle to help pull him out. While in the driver’s seat, unbuckling, shaking the R1S out of the snow, he said he accidentally activated a safety feature that caused the car to get stuck between parking and shifting gears.
Here’s some advice from a car geek for a young driver: Just because a car does something in advertising, doesn’t mean you should try it in real life. That’s why auto ads often come with a disclaimer along the lines of “Don’t Try: Professional Driver on Closed Road” at the bottom of the screen.
However, I’m not sure how many of us would have predicted that rocking a stuck car without a seatbelt would trigger a safety feature that would render the car undriveable. In the end, Merrill spent $2,100 to tow his SUV off the uneven road to a Rivian service center hundreds of miles away. And in the end, it wasn’t really the car’s breakdown that made Merrill unhappy with the brand, but his experience trying to get his car serviced. From Insiders:
Merrill said he later learned that a simple reset could solve the problem that caused his car to break down without the need for service. But that solution didn’t show up on his first call with Rivian customer service, he said.
A Rivian representative later apologized to Merrill and offered to pay for the repair, but the company refused to pay the $2,100 shipping fee, he said. After Insiders called Rivian this week to inquire about Merrill’s experience, a Rivian representative named Merrill offered to pay the $2,100 bill.
The ultimate trouble for Merrill, he said, came when the car was returned to him and a fatal error message displayed on his dashboard saying the Rivian needed to return to a service center. .
“All the while, the attitude from customer service is that a Rivian owner should be able to deal with this without a problem,” says Merrill. “They just think this is nothing to me and it is not for nothing.”
Rivian swears to Insiders to learn from these mistakes and solve future problems. The company still has a lot of work to do to convince users to soon stick with Rivian, after slow delivery from this time to that time. For his part, Merrill is still backing Rivian, but plans to return to a gasoline-powered vehicle in the very near future.
