![]() The location of the Rivian service center….sucked. There are also training sessions going on in Brooklyn for new and upcoming service and delivery centers for places like Boston and Cleveland. While it was packed to the gills with R1Ts, there were only a few employees around, and that’s the current bottleneck for delivering vehicles in Brooklyn. The service center itself was nice with many (15-ish?) bays for repairs to get done and a nice big comfortable room for waiting for deliveries. There were zero R1Ses, however, but I was told that a few deliveries were happening – though those are likely for employees. I was told there were at least double that many R1Ts. When I arrived at the showroom/service/distribution point in Brooklyn, I guessed there were 100 Rivians in the lot. While Rivian has made a few R1S SUVs, it is currently making 100x more R1T pickups, and that’s what we are looking at here. ![]() That’s important because the auto industry is scrambling for battery supply now – which is and will continue to be – the bottleneck of EV production over the next few years. The flip side to giving Amazon some of the control is that they now have an almost limitless runway of cash to scale their operations. It also has an influence on decisions in Rivian’s product, like including its Alexa voice recognition and smart speaker technology – for better or worse – that we’ll go into much more detail later. The Amazon relationship goes beyond delivery vehicles in that the online retail behemoth owns a significant share of Rivian. Rivian, an EV startup that has never produced a ICE vehicle, produces delivery vehicles for Amazon and two consumer vehicles, the R1S SUV and the R1T pickup. So backing out a little bit, it is important to discuss Rivian’s place in the automotive world. We took it from the Brooklyn delivery center through New York City, into the Adirondacks, and back through the mud, suburbs, and traffic.įor background, we’re already gushing over the R1T from our first drive of it, naming it Electrek’s vehicle of the year 2021, but now we’ve gotten some alone time with it and have seen some of the software updates that have moved into production vehicles – and we’ve got a whole new appreciation. Rivian gave us a loaner R1T for four days last week to drive around and enjoy.
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