Lest my last blog convinced you that I have succumbed to my inner curmudgeon (link), today I have a happy tale to tell about automotive repair services in our area. This tale also updates my review of the Rivian R1T pickup truck (link), in which I complained that the pedestrian warning signal (a buzz broadcast at low speeds) was excessively loud and annoying. It turns out that the noise I was hearing was not the pedestrian warning signal, but a defective motor, that in the course of this tale was replaced and returned to the manufacturer to figure out what went wrong.
It all began on a sunny day in the mountains around Ouray about a month ago, when the Rivian refused to go above 20 mph. I was at home in the Four Corners, but my wife was driving the Rivian and unhappy with the speed on offer. She called me for advice, and I suggested that a reboot might be salubrious, but I had forgotten which two buttons need to be held for 5 seconds to initiate a reboot (it is intentionally hard to to). I told her to call Rivian Service and they agreed that a reboot was in order and told her how to do it. Upon rebooting, the warning message now proclaimed that the driver should stop immediately and find alternate transportation. Hearing this, Rivian Service offered us a rental truck and said they would pay for a flatbed truck to haul the miscreant vehicle to the Colorado Springs Service Center. When our R1T was repaired (gratis) we could drive the rental truck to Colorado Springs, drop it off (the rental cost would be covered by them directly; no bogus reimbursement offered) and retrieve our truck. The repair was expected to take a few days.
Naturally, the requisite replacement part (a wiring harness installed incorrectly: BAD on Rivian quality control) was not in stock at the Service Center and had to be ordered. Thankfully the Service manager called us every day to report on progress; in the course of one such call I asked him to drive the repaired truck around the block and listen to the sound it made, as perhaps the active noise cancellation was weakening, as the pedestrian noisemaker seemed to me to be getting progressively louder. He gladly did so and immediately realized that the front drive motor – not the warning buzzer – was making the sound and the motor was defective (BAD Rivian). The Service Center does not stock motors, so there was another delay.
This event did however lead me to ponder the challenges of repairing modern, heavily computerized automobiles and the benefits of having a mechanic who works exclusively on a single type of vehicle (Rivian’s three models all use the same drive train and chassis). Every day the mechanics at Rivian work 8 h on the same vehicle design and they probably come to recognize every normal sound and every unnormal sound. In my experiences with local dealerships in Durango, each dealership has one mechanic trained to work on EVs, and this mechanic normally works on all the other models, as the rare EVs seldom come in for repairs. The dealerships service dozens of different models and dozens of model years. Surely it must be a challenge to become proficient with any single configuration. Furthermore, the local dealerships complain that it is very expensive to send mechanics out of town for EV training, and once trained they tend to take a higher paying job elsewhere. And new vehicles are so heavily computerized that they are very complicated to diagnose. My experience with local dealerships is that the mechanic reads the error code on a vehicle that comes in, looks at the troubleshooting manual, and calls Tech Support to find out what part to order. If that part doesn’t fix it, they order the next likeliest part and install that too.
While waiting for the motor to arrive, the Rivian Service Center took to looking at the suspension of our vehicle. Rivian has recently redesigned the suspension on their vehicles and has supplied the Service Centers with modification kits to upgrade older vehicles (ours was purchased in January) to the new, more durable design. So, they put a new suspension in our R1T. While they were at it, they also washed the car, fully charged the battery and installed two operating system upgrades. They felt so bad about the time it was taking that they called us to offer to ship the finished vehicle back to us on a flatbed, and we could drop off our rental truck at the Durango rental agency office. We asked about an upcoming tonneau cover upgrade, which is a purchase of a new option that would ordinarily require us to drive back to Colorado Springs and wait around for a day while it is installed; instead, they offered to sign us up gratis for a fall tour of western Colorado that their mobile repair service was making to install tonneau covers at each of the distant owners’ private residences. Sign us up!
As it happens, they completed all testing on a Thursday, contracted a flatbed driver to pick it up by close of business on Friday, and the delivery driver called us from Colorado Springs at 5 PM on Friday and asked whether we wanted to stay up late enough to have the truck delivered to us that night (he drove straight through)! We opted for a Saturday morning delivery, and getting a good night’s rest, safe in the knowledge that having the nearest dealership in the Front Range is not working out too badly.
