I’ve been watching Long Way Up on AppleTV lately. Ewan McGregor and a motorcycle buddy of his are riding up from the tip of South America to Los Angeles ... on electric Harleys. Support vehicles are Rivian trucks. HD hadn’t yet perfected their electric bike and this show forced them to double the range. Also, Rivian only had two prototypes ... not even complete. Rivian finished out the two prototypes for them to use. Still a little rough around the edges on the interiors, but overall very nice trucks for what they are.
Yeah, the vid I watched probably three years ago was from a car show, and the prototype was shown by the Rivian guy to some vid blogger with an EV show, and he was shown every nook and cranny. Nice vehicle. The link up there may be the same one I saw.
Ramping production? That’ll be a different story, but as their pickup is first to market (Tesla’s Cybertruck isn’t yet available) and much more conventional looking, AND I think it has better range, they will probably only fail if they can’t quickly deal with production bottlenecks vs demand.
The Rivians in “Long Way Up” had the same problem the Harley electric bikes did. They lost a lot of range and power when operating in very cold temperatures like Tierra Del Fuego at the tip of South America. More than once they ran out of charge in a couple episodes. The good part is that they can be tow charged to about 80% in half an hour if you can find a friendly trucker to pull you around. They also had a brake failure that caused the truck to roll backwards out of control and smash the undercarriage against a big rock.