R2/R3 event impressions – Rivian gets the details right
Rivian unveiled the R2 – and the surprise R3 – yesterday, and after getting back and having some time to digest the event, I’m here to talk about a lot of smaller details that I learned which didn’t get mentioned on the livestream.
The rest of the Electrek crew caught the livestream and kept you up to date in our live watch party and articles you can find on our R2 launch news hub.
But I headed down the coast to the venue itself, in beautiful Laguna Beach, California, to be on hand for the reveal.
The event was held at the Rivian South Coast Theater, a historic theater that had fallen into disrepair, which Rivian renovated and turned into a retail and event space.
And then… Rivian changed it up again to turn it into a space for the car unveiling, which had a whole new stage and screen set up, bleachers for media to stand/sit in, turntable for the cars, and so on.
And just from the very beginning of the event, Rivian started getting the details right. The stage looked great, good lighting, and the presentation actually started on time (that’s not something we’re used to in the EV world…).
But what really matters here are the cars, and Rivian didn’t miss the details there either.
One thing I was worried about with the shift from R1 to R2 is that the necessity of getting costs down would mean a lot of the “neat little things” about the car would get cut. The R1T has a lot of cool features like the bluetooth speaker, flashlight, gear tunnel, and so on. I thought maybe we would get one or two “headline neat features,” and the rest would give way to being just a normal well-made SUV.
So imagine my gradually rising surprise levels when, after the main presentation, they continued to reveal more and more neat things that I wasn’t expecting, and that weren’t mentioned during the livestream.
For example, we all saw the slide-down rear glass, which is cool enough on its own – it will reduce buffeting when the windows are down, and allows for loading very long objects into the car, especially when combined with the fold-down rear and front seats (chief designer Jeff Hammoud mentioned hauling 16-foot-long baseboards).
But beyond the rear glass, there’s a small “flip-up table” which you can reach into the window and pull up, giving you a small interior shelf to put things on – kind of like a miniature tailgate or the edge of a truck bed. Here’s a photo of what it looks like deployed – though the tailgate was up, so you’ll have to turn your head sideways to get a sense of what it will look like when its down.
Okay, so we can have a tiny tailgate party. That’s kinda cool, and surely people will find some sort of interesting use cases for that.
But a much cooler feature, with to me much more immediately apparent uses, is the slide-out cargo floor.
Like many EVs, there’s a large well underneath the rear cargo floor for more storage. Most EVs have a removable cover that functions as a flat cargo floor, but the R2 takes that to another level. The cargo floor slides about a foot out of the vehicle, and seems like it can hold a reasonable amount of weight:
This seems like a super useful feature to me. If the shelf is like a mini-tailgate, this is closer to a full-fledged tailgate. You can sit on it (though I’d be careful not to sit on the very edge…), pull out some camping chairs and use it as a table, or, as Rivian suggested, it would be useful for changing a baby’s diapers.
Better yet, it fixes one of the few problems I have with the Rivian, which is that the frunk, while deep and large, is set rather far back in the vehicle’s already-tall front-end, creating a big lift-over area which makes it hard to lug bulky or heavy items into it. That’s still the case in the R2, but the slide-out shelf in the rear makes it a bit of a moot point, because it seems like it would be really easy to load heavy things into.
For an example, I’ve recently had to move an industrial dolly and a portable saw table into the back of a Model Y, and in both situations, there’s always the worry of hitting the back of the car in the process. Having a slide-out tray would significantly reduce this worry, and it would be a lot easier to place the item down and then slide the whole tray into the vehicle.
Going back to those fold-down seats (which have a neat removable headrest, which releases with the press of a button, necessary to make enough room to fold them down), this gives a ton of room for car camping. And the cool thing about camping in an electric car is that you’ve got a lot of energy onboard to power car systems overnight, like HVAC for example. As a result, we’ve seen various electric cars gain a “camp mode” which keeps certain systems on overnight.
Rivian has its own camp mode, with some clever Rivian-only improvements (like auto-leveling with air suspension – which the R2 won’t have). But the R2 camp mode has a neat feature which changes everything about the UI, showing basic data and turning the whole screen red.
This matters because red light has less of an effect on your night vision than other wavelengths of light does. This is why red lights are used in ships at night, or if you ever go stargazing with serious astronomy-types, they’ll only let you use flashlights with red filters on them.
We can imagine this feature might make it to other Rivians as well via software updates, but this is the first we’ve seen of it – on any car, which really shows that Rivian isn’t just thinking about neat features that work for EVs, but how they fit into the specific “adventure” ethos the company is building.
This is also apparent in Rivian’s removable flashlight, a popular feature in the R1 which returns in the R2. It’s always good to have a flashlight handy while adventuring.
But the new detail here is that there’s not just a flashlight, but on the other side in the same spot, there’s another device of similar size which has a USB-C port and can be used as a portable backup battery for devices (as if you’ll ever run out of juice, given that the car has 8 USB-C ports – 2 front, 4 rear, 2 trunk, with a 120V outlet in the trunk to boot). This also stays charged while it’s slotted in the door, just like the flashlight does, and the units are interchangeable from one side of the car to the other.
But also the phone charger has a button on it which allows it to be used as a hand warmer (which, as a native Southern Californian, is something I hear people need when they live in places that get “cold,” whatever that is). So not only did Rivian surprise us with another cool device, but they surprised us with another cool device with an additional use on top of the initial use which already impressed us.
(Note also: the door pockets have been redesigned, with door speakers moved inboard on the car, so that the pockets are now taller and can fit your tall stainless water bottle – and they’re still expandable if you need to fit something a tad too thick in them)
And then there are all the features you heard about in the livestream, and in previous articles we wrote about the event, like the many planned accessories Rivian is working on (and which they promise won’t turn out like the Camp Kitchen and Tunnel Shuttle did last time).
The one arguable miss (depending on how you look at it) is charge port placement for the NACS charge port – it’s on the rear passenger side, rather than rear driver side like on Teslas. This means that, when charging at V3 Superchargers, Rivians may end up causing conflicts (which is why we really need the new V4 superchargers with longer cables).
Rivian had good reasons for this – compatibility with its Rivian Adventure Network (R1s park nose-in, R2s would back in) and with existing owners’ home charger installations, easier charging for those who park and charge on the street, which is common in Europe where the R2 will be launching, and perhaps most importantly cheaper wire harnesses in the vehicle due to placement of components. But we still wonder if it would have been more worthwhile to go through the troubles to place new NACS-only charge port on the front passenger side for better compatibility with the much larger Supercharger network.
Regardless, the net effect of all of these features, in addition to the ones mentioned in the livestream, is a car that just seems eminently usable. Just as I felt at the first Rivian R1 reveal event, it feels like the engineers and designers at the company really get it – they get the benefits that electric powertrains can bring, they get how people use their cars, they get how to make features that don’t just “surprise and delight” but actually have practical applications.
Most cars only have one or two of these neato features, the kind that you show your friends while saying “hey, look what this car can do!” This car, however, has enough of them to justify an 1,800-word article (sorry).
And all of that isn’t even about the car I liked most from the showing. I’m a small-car guy (and you should be too), so the surprise small-SUV-crossover-rally-car-hatchback-or-whatever-you-wanna-call-it R3 was extremely exciting to me. I love the form factor, I love that they got their inspiration from ’80s Group B rally cars (complete with funky interior), and I can’t wait to see more details on this vehicle.
There were hints of a few neat hidden ideas on the R3, like a (removable?) storage compartment on the back of the driver’s seat on the R3X and some kind of cool strap-down blanket thingy on the passenger’s seat, but since the doors weren’t open and that car is quite far from production, those will have to wait for another day.
Which brings up an important point – by the time production comes around, there’s always a chance that some of these features will go by the wayside. I already heard speculation that the fold-out rear quarter windows might not make it to production (CEO RJ Scaringe really likes them, but they’re a little redundant with the slide-down rear window), or that they might have to scale back plans for the haptic touch steering wheel knobs (this seems too crucial to the control of the vehicle to me – I bet it stays in, and eventually gets into the R1 too).
But the combined effect of these features is enough to show that Rivian really is at the vanguard of putting new ideas into design on their vehicles, and like other EV startups before them, they seem to be moving at a pace that traditional automakers are going to have a hard time catching up with.
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Along with Tennessee Tech, Tennessee-based ultralight aircraft company Whisper Aero has secured a $500,000 grant to help advance the company’s innovative electric jet motor concept off the drawing board and onto the testing phase.
Earlier this month, the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development (TNECD) announced plans to award $500,000 to Tennessee Tech and Whisper Aero through the Transportation Network Growth Opportunity (TNGO) initiative.
“We look forward to using these award dollars to place students in internships working directly with Whisper Aero leaders,” said Tennessee Tech President Phil Oldham. “By learning from an electric propulsion innovator like Whisper Aero, our students will gain invaluable perspective and can take what they have learned in the classroom and apply it right here in Tennessee.”
The grant will see a Whisper Aero glider fitted with a pair of the company’s eQ250 electric-powered jet “propulsors” for UltraQuiet flight. Tennessee Tech faculty and students will carry out copper-bird ground testing to ensure the safe integration of engines, batteries, and controllers, and kickstart Tennessee Tech’s new Crossville Mobility Incubator.
Those propulsors, by the way, are super cool.
Whisper Aero’s main claim to fame is its innovative UltraQuiet WhisperDrive (above). It’s effectively an electrically spun ducted fan jet engine that uses a large number of stiff composite fan blades inside a lightweight, acoustically treated duct. With so many blades, the Whisper Aero propulsor can push more air than a conventional prop while spinning much more slowly. As such, the “blade passage frequency” moves up to more than 16,000 Hz – outside the range of most human hearing but not, supposedly, high enough to freak out the beagles.
The Whisper Aero ultralight is effectively an Aériane Swift3 glider fitted with a pair of Whisper’s eQ250 propulsors, each capable of up to 80 lbs. of thrust. The Ultralight has a wingspan of over 40 ft with a maximum L/D of 35:1 and can be stressed to a design loading of +6/-4g, making it capable of some pretty impressive acrobatic feats.
The Swift3 glider is designed for a low speed, low power cruising speed of 45–55 knots with “just” 6.5 hp. Power-off glides from a few hundred feet showed a low sink rate, and a climb rate of 1,250 ft/min with full self-launching power (in other words: the Whisper glider doesn’t have to be towed by a launch vehicle, like a conventional ultralight glider).
Quiet cool
Range under full power is about 109 miles with current battery tech, but it’s expected that range under the latest EPiC 2.0 energy batteries would rise to nearly 170 miles.
Nathan Millecam, CEO of Electric Power System, said, “EPiC 2.0’s leap in energy density and thermal performance has enabled a significant increase in range, a clear validation of our next-gen cell technology. We are impressed by what the Whisper team continues to achieve in advancing electric aviation.”
The press release concludes explaining that flight tests are expected to show that the Whisper Aero glider can be flown, “a few hundred feet away from neighborhoods without any disturbances, while carrying a 220 lbs. payload with full range,” which is all kind of ominous in today’s political climate, but still pretty neat from a purely tech perspective.
The TNGO grant follows a separate grant from NASA awarded last year, though that grant aims to develop the eQ250s – not as a propulsion system, but as a key component in future spacecraft ventilation systems.
Tennessee Tech announces TNGO grant
With support from TNECD’s Transportation Network Growth Opportunity (TNGO) initiative, Tennessee Tech University and Whisper Aero are partnering to advance next-generation propulsion technology in the aerospace industry. This collaboration will enhance aerospace research and workforce development, ensuring Tennessee remains a leader in cutting-edge mobility solutions.
SOURCE | IMAGES: TNECD; via eVTOL Insights, New Atlas.
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A Tesla Cybertruck owner believed Elon Musk’s claims that the Cybertruck would be able to “act as a boat” and “cross rivers”, and he got his $100,000 stuck because of it.
Elon Musk has often made claims about how Tesla vehicles could float and briefly serve as a boat in the past.
We have never been taken too seriously because Tesla’s warranty states something different about taking the vehicle into water.
However, the CEO doubled down on the claim specifically for the Cybertruck.
Ahead of launching the production version of the Cybertruck, Musk claimed the vehicle would be “waterproof enough” to serve as a boat and cross rivers:
Cybertruck will be waterproof enough to serve briefly as a boat, so it can cross rivers, lakes and even seas that aren’t too choppy.
The CEO added that the goal is for a Cybertruck to be able to cross the water between SpaceX’s Starbase and South Padre Island in Texas, which is about 360 meters (1,100 feet).
We have been taking the Cybertruck more seriously with water because we learned that Tesla built a ‘wade mode’ for the truck to be able to go into the water. Tesla says the mode increases the ride height to the max and temporarily “pressurizes the battery pack.”
The problem is that it is activated through the off-roading mode, which is not covered under Tesla’s warranty – so we are taking everything with a grain of salt.
Whenever Tesla’s warranty contradicts what Musk says, it is better to follow to the warranty.
A Tesla Cybertruck owner in Truckee, California, appears not to have received this sage advice since they activated the wade mode and attempted to get into the water.
The Cybertruck owner quickly got stuck. The local California Highway Patrol (CHP) shared some pictures of the aftermath (via Facebook):
CHP Truckee helped with the recovery and commented on the incident:
Cybertruck activated “Wade Mode”… and waded a bit too far… We’re all for testing boundaries… but maybe not the waterline. Remember folks, “Wade Mode” isn’t “Submarine Mode.” If your plans include exploring the great outdoors, make sure to know your limits and the terrain.
There’s no detail on the damage to the Cybertruck, if any.
As we recently reported, repair costs for the stainless steel electric pickup truck can increase rapidly.
This Cybertruck owner is also not the first one to get stuck in water. We previously reported on a Tesla Cybertruck sinking into the water when launching a jet ski.
Electrek’s Take
At the risk of stating the obvious, this is clearly more of a user error than a Cybertruck problem.
I think the verdict is clear: Cybertruck is far from the best electric pickup truck for off-roading.
However, in general, you shouldn’t expect a truck to get out of water on a muddy bank.
I think a lot of Cybertruck owners are new to trucking and off-roading, and they are making the truck look worse than it is at off-roading.
If you want to take your Cybertruck off-road, I recommend to first go with an off-roading guide that can help avoid some simple mistakes like this.
Also, in general, don’t take Elon Musk’s claims at face value when he says that Tesla vehicles can do something that sounds like an exaggeration. It probably is an exaggeration.
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The latest Chinese EREV to arrive in the west, the Omoda 9 SHS crossover hopes to shake things up in the hyper-competitive class with a top-shelf tech package, more horsepower than a Porsche 911 GT3, and a €39,900 price tag.
Established in 2022 as an upscale electric sub-brand by the Chinese car giant, Chery, Omoda has global ambitions – a fact that’s underscored by launch of the new Omoda 9 SHS (for “Super Hybrid System”) SUV shown here. And, with up to 535 hp in the top EU-market trim, Spanish auto enthusiast site Motorpasión reports that nothing cheaper is more powerful.
To put those 535 hp into context, Porsche’s motorsports-focused 911 GT3 supercar generates “just” 502 from its 4.0L flat-six engine. The Omoda’s 535, meanwhile, are generated by a single electric motor powering the SHS’ front wheels and a pair of electric motors at the rear – good enough to rocket the SUV from 0-62 mph (100 kmh) in just 4.9 seconds.
Under the hood
The SHS version of the Omoda packs a 34.46 kWh battery pack that lets Omoda 9 SHS go 145 km (a little over 90 miles) on pure electric power. Once the battery is depleted, the 1.5 liter turbocharged ICE unit (shown, above) kicks on, providing an additional 935 km of driving for a combined 1,100 km of “range” from a full tank and battery.
That said, this is a PHEV/EREV with more than enough all-electric range to handle all but the most extreme of edge-case daily driving needs – and, as such, Omoda expects the 9 SHS it to be used more like an EV. To that end, it’s capable of DC fast charging at up to 65 kW, charging from 20% to 80% in under 30 minutes.
Omoda execs, for their part, seem pretty proud of themselves. “The OMODA 9 represents a significant advancement for our brand, embodying modern living with its beautiful design, intelligent engineering, and usable technology,” says Victor Zhang, UK Country Director for OMODA. “Our SHS technology demonstrates the progress in hybrid vehicles, offering performance, range, and seamless integration into daily life. We believe the OMODA 9 delivers the comfort, power, and quality that today’s drivers expect.”
To meet those expectations, the Omoda 9 SHS offers drivers a dual 12.3″ curved screen display, a 540° rear-view camera, and a Sony sound system with HD speakers integrated into the front seats’ Nappa leather headrests. Those leather seats also feature fully electric adjustment, as well as heat, fan, and massage functions.
The 9 SHS is one of several new models introduced at this week’s Shanghai Auto Show, and is available for order in the UK and EU for delivery later this year.
Electrek’s Take
We can talk about tariff this and trade war that all day long. The real message here, however, is that China is objectively, unequivocally, and obviously years ahead of the US when it comes to American EVs in terms of manufacturing efficiency, battery and charging technology, and value. And, as long as they have a system that takes the burden of pensions and healthcare and other basics of life off the manufacturer, they’ll probably keep pulling ahead.
Head on down to the comments and change my mind.
SOURCE | IMAGES: Omoda; via Motorpasión.
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