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In 2019, a few years before the startup Rivian finally launched its first two electric vehicles on the market, they surprised us with a promotional video that went very viral. In it, we could see a Rivian R1T in the middle of a field performing a 360-degree spin on the spot, which is known in English as a ‘Tank Turn’.
In the video, the American brand boasted about the fantastic technology installed in their vehicles. At the same time, they demonstrated that such a maneuver was possible thanks to the use of an independent motor per wheel. However, the R1T and R1S are already on sale. Neither of them has such a feature. What happened?
No spinning on your own axis
On paper, being out in the field and pulling off a maneuver like the Formula 1 cars at Sainte Dévote is insanely cool. It’s not the reason you would buy a Rivian, but it is certainly an argument in favor of investing so much money in a luxury electric vehicle.
Well, this week we discovered that, following the success of the promotional video, the company’s CEO, RJ Scaringe, reconsidered this feature. As he mentioned in an Instagram post, he decided to cancel this feature after calculating the environmental damage that their SUVs and pickups could cause on any terrain by practicing this maneuver.
And he is not wrong. The Rivian R1T weighs 3.2 tons. It is right on the limit of being able to be driven with a standard driver’s license —in Europe they have already prepared a bit of a workaround to patch the regulations so that these vehicles are legal despite exceeding the weight limit—. With such a mass pivoting on its own axis, the electric pickup would become a veritable excavator. Just a few users practicing these turns would be more than enough to destroy trails and cause quite severe damage in rural areas.
Therefore, the ‘Tank Turn’ goes completely against Rivian’s environmentalist positioning. Had they not suppressed it, the brand would have a serious public relations problem today. Hence, we couldn’t think of a more acerted decision, even if it goes against the communication the brand had used to promote itself.
In any case, the hype for Rivian is still there. While the Tesla Cybertruck still shows no signs of life, RJ Scaringe’s company is going full steam ahead. Reservations keep selling out and the build qualities of these vehicles do not seem to be bad at all.