Rivian’s $120K Quad Motor Is Like Off-Roading With Training Wheels

EVs are a tough business, but Rivian is still out here trying to have fun.

The California-based EV maker on Tuesday unveiled a quad motor package for its second-generation R1 truck and SUV.

The company says the cars can deliver a combined 1,025 horsepower and 1,198 pound-feet of torque. The quad-motor R1T truck starts at $115,990, while the R1S SUV starts at $121,990.

Cushioned San Francisco residents like me don’t require that much power for their commute, let alone have the spare cash to burn $120K on a large car.

Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe recognized that during a recent roundtable interview, telling Business Insider, “It’s great for the brand, but it’s sort of an exercise in unnecessary capability.”

“Unnecessary capability” is fair: The quad is a beast of a car that most people probably won’t need.

The company invited media outlets to South Lake Tahoe, California, near the end of June to demonstrate its quad R1T and R1S ahead of the public launch.

I got a chance to get behind the wheel of both cars to drive up to Tahoe’s Donner Ski Ranch, which has a summit elevation of more than 7,000 feet.

There, I took the R1S and R1T off-roading and rock crawling — essentially driving up a rocky obstacle — to test out the torque and a feature Rivian calls “kick turn,” which gives the cars the ability to do a 360-degree spin on the spot.

I’ve never been off-roading or rock crawling. My humble Mazda 3, with its low profile and 155 horsepower, isn’t really fit for those conditions, but it is very reliable for my trips to the grocery store.

The Rivian’s quad motor, however, made traversing the dirt roads and boulders a breeze.

Rivian’s climb

Above: Business Insider’s Lloyd Lee took the Rivian on what one company employee described as a moderate-level rock crawl.

Reporters were first led to two rocky mounds at a Donner Ski Ranch peak for the rock crawl. Rivian representatives endearingly called one of the mounds “Grannie’s Revenge” — a play on the much more precarious trail at “Hell’s Revenge” in Moab, Utah, and a nod to the granite rock at the Lake Tahoe summit.

For a first-time rock crawler, I was a little worried that I might flip Rivian’s cars like a pancake or pierce the undercarriage if I made the slightest wrong turn while driving over a rock.

Thankfully, that didn’t happen.

Spotters at every point of the mound were available to direct drivers on when to turn the wheel, which obviously made the rock crawls that much easier.

But aside from following directions, scaling up the mounds was a simple exercise in turning the wheel and pressing the pedal.

Both the R1S and R1T climbed over the mounds without the need for me to press down too far.

Rivian’s R1 chief engineer, Luke Lynch, an ex-software engineer for McLaren, told me that’s the benefit of having four motors.

“There’s so much control that you can have in the pedal, you realize how delicate you can be and the vehicle still reacts,” Lynch said. “When the vehicle detects some slip, it says, ‘Okay, this wheel’s not got enough traction, so I’m gonna slow that wheel down with fine motor control rather than brakes,’ which is unique to quad motor control.”

According to Oren Birwadkar, another Rivian engineer, my drive was just a sneak peek of the quad’s potential. He considered “Grannie’s Revenge a moderate-level rock crawl.

For further testing and validation, Birwadkar said the company tested the quad platform at an obstacle located at Hell’s Revenge, which attracts more extreme rock crawlers. Tesla used the same track to advertise its Cybertruck.

The ‘kick turn’

Above: Rivian demonstrated the quad motor Gen 2 cars’ new feature called the “kick turn.”

One function made me feel like I was playing an off-road video game: “kick turn.”

The kick turn is a new iteration of Rivian’s “tank turn” that was never released to the wider public. Rivian says the utility behind the kick turn is to allow drivers to make extremely tight turns without the need to do a three-point U-turn.

The mode is activated through the center console, and then the driver is directed to press the two thumb controls on the left and right sides of the steering wheel simultaneously. Press the left buttons to turn counterclockwise and vice versa. Once the system detects that both buttons are pressed, the driver presses the accelerator pedal to make the spin.

Rivian set up a course on a dirt field that directed us to drive in a square shape and drive through cones in a serpentine path.

Reader: The kick turn is one hell of a mode to experience. The driver can activate the kick turn while the Rivian is already moving in a straight path. It’s almost like drifting with training wheels.

In theory, the driver should be able to complete the course Rivian set up solely by pressing the buttons on the steering wheel, while the actual steering wheel stays at a 12 o’clock position.

Of course, a lot of the first-time drivers like me couldn’t do that. Our instinctive reaction was to turn the steering wheel every time we approached a turn, rather than solely relying on the left and right buttons.

But Rivian also took us through a narrow trail to show us where the kick turn could be useful. In those situations, you would drive slowly as you approached a tight turn, stop, and then activate the kick turn.

Wassym Bensaid, Rivian’s chief software engineer, said the kick turn was designed for “situations with tight maneuverability in off-road” environments.

“It’s mind-blowing the level of control that you can have on the car with such a feature,” he said.

I can’t immediately imagine a scenario where I would need the kick turn on San Francisco’s streets. Maybe it could help me get out of tight parking, but that’s OK — my humble Mazda does just fine.