Rivian owner gets stuck in the snow and needs a $2100 tow for a simple reset

PEldridge

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Interesting article. There are a lot of failure points in this incident, foremost seems to be his expectations of the vehicle vrs the reality of driving in unplowed snow and a 2 1/2 foot snow bank coupled with his unfamiliarity with electric vehicles. Too bad for him and he admits his mistakes, and kudos to Rivian for working with him. There was a post here a couple weeks ago from someone asking if they should drive up to Tahoe to see the monster snowfall. I hope they did not do that or this article could be about them in their MME.
 

Mach-Lee

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So there's more to this story, and it stems from user error:




First of all, he was a dumbass to think he could go through a 2.5' snowbank with anything other than a snowplow. Next, he hooks up a tractor to pull it out, and does so in REVERSE with nobody in the driver's seat. Car thinks it's rolling out of control and sets the parking brake. Tractor continues pulling with the rear wheels locked and Rivian freaks out more because it's still rolling. Just like the Mach-E, because of the error state the vehicle would not shut down or go to sleep, and as a result drained the battery to 0% (not clear if that was the low voltage or the high voltage battery that died). Supposedly, there was some kind of reset that involved turning off the car and letting it sit for 35 minutes with no keys around, which may have cleared the error state. And avoided a tow.

The Mach-E has a similar problem that can happen from a charge fault that requires a 5 minute sleep to fix. Turns out a lot of people turn into relentless SoBs when their car breaks and won't stop trying things or turn it off long enough, so the reset doesn't occur until it's left alone at the dealer. Then the dealer finds nothing wrong the next day. This is why I recently wrote a sticky about doing the reset procedure properly.

Part of the issue is car companies don't document this stuff in user manuals because they think it's not necessary or too much information. Electric cars absolutely need a powertrain reset procedure in the owner's manual. It saves a TON of dealer trips for simple glitches, and therefore tons of money.
 

i8iridium

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Part of the issue is car companies don't document this stuff in user manuals because they think it's not necessary or too much information. Electric cars absolutely need a powertrain reset procedure in the owner's manual. It saves a TON of dealer trips for simple glitches, and therefore tons of money.
User manual??? What's that???
 

superdave80

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Part of the issue is car companies don't document this stuff in user manuals because they think it's not necessary or too much information. Electric cars absolutely need a powertrain reset procedure in the owner's manual.
It's too bad that all of these EVs don't have a giant screen to tell us what is going on and what we should do or not do in response.

I had a 'service vehicle soon' error pop up on me, but it wouldn't tell me ANYTHING about what the issue was or how serious it was. It went away after a while, but I had to hook up a separate laptop to see what the error was. It's ridiculous...
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