When Michael Holbrook took delivery in Utah of his new Rivian R1T Launch Edition in June 2022, he was ecstatic. He was among the early reservation holders and had shelled out roughly $85,000 for the truck. Despite the three-year wait, it seemed all worthwhile. Between June 2022 and April 2023, Holbrook clocked approximately 7,500 miles on his R1T.
“The truck exceeded my expectations in every way possible,” Holbrook told InsideEVs. What’s not to like, right? With quad motors, 835 horsepower and sports car-rivaling driving dynamics, the R1T was a delight from behind the wheel, he said. “I’ve used it to carry skiing and mountain biking equipment, and I even towed a 5000-pound snowmobile with it,” he said.
But in April 2023, the R1T collided with a Jeep Cherokee at an intersection in Utah, after the Cherokee drove in from the right and bumped into the front right fender of the R1T.
“We were both really slow, maybe 5 miles an hour,” Holbrook said. The R1T’s front right quarter panel suffered minor damage.
Holbrook drove the vehicle to a Rivian-certified body shop in Salt Lake City to replace the side camera and repair the damaged panel. But that was eight months ago, and Holbrook said his vehicle still hasn't been returned.
After an initial assessment, the body shop found the crash had pinched the cable linking one of the side view cameras. Ideally, that portion of the wiring harness needed replacement to get the camera working again. The R1T has 11 cameras in total, covering the front, rear, both sides and bed, providing a surround view of the vehicle.
But here's where things got pretty messy: To swap out the side view camera, the body shop had to take apart the interior, yank out the seats and dismantle the dashboard to replace the entire wiring harness. The fix wasn't a walk in the park; it needed Rivian's specialized diagnostic software, "Ride." The body shop didn't have the software, nor were the mechanics there trained to use it, according to Holbrook.
Wiring harnesses are like the car's nervous system, sending power and signals to different components and systems: lights, switches, speakers, cameras. Disassembling the vehicle’s entire wiring harness to replace a small piece of equipment is unheard of.
It appears Rivian isn't the only one facing challenges related to wiring harness design. In May 2022, Lucid recalled Air electric sedans due to faulty cables linked to its gauge cluster. The cables risked getting damaged due to steering column movements. Porsche, in 2022, recalled more than 40,000 Taycans after it found the wiring harness could be damaged during seat adjustment, leading to deactivated airbags and seatbelt pre-tensioners, posing serious safety risks. Chevrolet Bolt EV owners shared similar worries on an online forum in 2021, where wiring harness failures were causing safety concerns.
Holbrook said the EV sat at the certified collision center for four months because Rivian hadn't handed over the necessary software. It was then shipped to Rivian, and it took two more months trying to sort out the problem.
“When the car returned, the body shop found that Rivian didn’t do it [the repair] correctly and damaged the vehicle further,” he added. “At that point, I called Rivian, but they refused to speak to me. My vehicle has been completely mutilated in this process of being disassembled twice and reassembled twice.”
InsideEVs reached out to Rivian, and a company spokesperson said the start-up is relatively new and still learning. Rivian has developed a service harness to solve this problem more easily. The spokesperson also confirmed the vehicle was being returned to Holbrook fully restored---though the owner test-drove it recently and still found some problems.
Rivian said this case was unique, and that the vehicle was determined to be ineligible for a buyback, after it was reviewed by a committee.
Rivian gave InsideEVs an official statement:
"We recognize that an eight-month wait time for a collision repair is too long, and we have been in contact with both the third-party collision center and the customer. More collision centers are needed to repair Rivian vehicles. This year, we have doubled the number of Rivian certified third party collision centers, and continue to grow that number to give customers more options when selecting a body shop for their collision repair needs."
In eight months, Holbrook has driven three different cars. He picked up a rental Jeep Wrangler for the first two months, covered by Nationwide. For the third month, he continued driving the Wrangler but paid for it himself. Then for a couple of months, he drove his son’s 15-year-old Toyota Highlander. Rivian finally handed him a loaner R1T, which doesn’t connect to his phone and has some restricted connectivity features, but works fine otherwise, he said.
Rivian seems to be aware of its wiring harness complications. CFO Claire McDonough indicated earlier this year the company expects some downtime in the summer of 2024 to shift to simpler network architectures and reduce the number of parts, primarily ECUs, by 60% for the R1T and R1S, which would lead to the shortening of the wiring harnesses by 25%.
