2025 Rivian R1T Quad Max - POV First Driving Impressions

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:00]Today we are driving the top dog Riven R1T. This is the Quad Max. It's a 2025, which means it sees all the architectural changes, less wiring, less weight, and less complexity, which is always a good thing. This R1T makes 1,25 horsepower and 1,198 pound- feet of torque. It's quad motor, so there's 256 horsepower at each wheel.

[00:00:25]It's freaking awesome. This thing is a beast. It's super fast, super capable on and off-road. We have air suspension, which just kind of bumps and clunks around. That's one of my only complaints about this truck is the suspension just feels loud, noisy, and unnecessarily clunky for a $124,000 vehicle. But that's okay. We're going to talk about that more in the driving impressions. For now, let's walk you guys around the interior and exterior of this R1T and talk a little bit about what this has been like to live with this week. First things first, we've got an infotainment screen here with all of our controls. Some of this has been updated and changed. We've got this new rad tuner, some gauges, some controls to open up the front trunk, which we will do right now. Why not? You have a massive panoramic sunroof here with what I assume is electrochromic crystals that can kind of shift and change and reduce the light coming inside. A beautifully laid out interior.

[00:01:21]Lots of space, lots of good packaging, room for your water bottles, your stuff, more stuff, knack charge ports down there, and then just good packaging.

[00:01:32]This being a fully electric architecture, the slate sky and walnut wood interior is absolutely stunning.

[00:01:40]This wood, the open pore wood just feels fantastic. All right, let's walk you around the exterior. We'll show you what that looks like and we'll come back and dive in a little bit deeper with the interior.

[00:01:49]This is painted in storm blue, which is a $3,000 option. Really nice looking color on this R1T. You can tell this is the Quad Max from the subtle blue around the Rivian logo and the blue brake calipers. 20in wheels on a set of 27565 R20 PL Scorpion All-Terrain tires. These are electric, so a little bit more efficient. About 34in sizing here.

[00:02:14]Really big wheel and tire package. Of course, with the air suspension, we get lots and lots of ground clearance, approach angle, departure angle, and on and off-road capability. The suspension in sport mode is super firm and super stiff and super good with body control.

[00:02:27]Off-road, it raises up, jacks up with tons of ground clearance. It gets a little bit stiffer because you reduce that suspension travel with the more air in the air chambers, but it seems to ride okay. We'll do a bit of an off-road test on our route today. We did have one of these off-road in California with the first iteration of the R1T a few years ago that only had 800 horsepower, but we got some pretty good impressions on what the quad motor can do off-road. It's pretty impressive. Let's start in the back with the bed. We've got a button here to lower the tailgate.

[00:02:57]I love how this is just one seamless bed from the back of the cab all the way here. Really useful, really practical.

[00:03:04]You pull this lever and you can raise up some more storage space there. There's a full size spare tire. Very nice. 22-in sizing.

[00:03:13]And then over here to the left, you've got your air compressor connection standard on the quad motor. And you can just set your PSI, plug in, and bada bing, bada boom, air up all four tires, or air down with whatever system you have. To the right, we've got some power, 120 volts, tie down hooks, lights, etc. And there's also an electronically operated bed cover. Very, very nice. Look at that.

[00:03:43]More tie- down points right here.

[00:03:45]Closing the tailgate is a little bit clunky. It's super heavy. And then when you close it, it sounds like this. Not great, but it is what it is.

[00:03:58]The big news with the R1T, of course, has always been the gear tunnel. That's right here. Press this button right there to access it. Super nice to have something like this in a truck where storage space outside of the bed is limited. This is protected from the elements. It's well sealed and it's a good amount of room.

[00:04:18]All right, coming around to the front trunk. Let's show you guys storage space up here. So, it's a fast double button press to get this to open. There it is.

[00:04:27]It's automatic. You've got some more storage space right here. A light, which is very useful.

[00:04:34]And even more storage space under there.

[00:04:36]Cavernous stuff in the front of the Rivian R1T.

[00:04:42]There it goes. There it closes.

[00:04:45]On this truck, it's latching, but it doesn't look fully closed on the corners. I assume that's good to go.

[00:04:51]Here's your charge port.

[00:04:54]This is a big 140 kWh battery pack.

[00:04:57]You've got a Knack port. It'll fast charge, but it's going to take a while.

[00:05:01]There it is, locking, making its bird noise.

[00:05:06]Let's unlock this again here. For some reason, it just locked on me. There we go. We're back in action. He's been great this week. It's nice to have an actual key fob with a truck like this instead of just a card. Some more interior accents in the back. Again, the quality continues. Plaid floor mats.

[00:05:23]Love those. Here's what it looks like with car seats in the back. So, lots of room for rearfacing, lots of room for forward facing for a truck in this class. I guess this is kind of splitting the difference between midsize and fulls size truck. It's It's a little bit bigger than a lot of the other midsize trucks out there, which I appreciate.

[00:05:38]There's more room in the back than my Ranger Raptor. You get top tethers behind the headrest, not behind the seat, which is great. Let me show you the other side.

[00:05:51]Yeah, good looking interior. We've got a nice little display for the backseat passengers, heated seats, a little display showing you your music. You can lock and unlock the vehicle, perform a couple other functions. You've got USB ports, and oh, look at this. What's this, Riven? What is this? This is called a vent tab, an event control, and it's done physically instead of through a screen. Hm.

[00:06:16]All right, there's a quick walk around on the R1T. Let's go inside and talk about this interior.

[00:06:25]All right, in we go. Come on. Come Rivian, let's unlock for me. Thank you.

[00:06:35]In access height mode, getting in and out is still a little bit of a chore. I think if you're not accustomed to a tall truck, you would have to get used to getting in and out of this. It's pretty tall, even in its lowered setting. We've got a bunch of different drive modes.

[00:06:49]All you have to do is just press the brake pedal to turn it on. You've got all-purpose, conserve, sport, and snow, as well as a bunch of off-road drive modes. So, all-terrain, rock crawl, soft stand, rally, and drift. Drift. Ah, as well as this rad tuner where you can go in and customize certain drive modes.

[00:07:08]You've got all of these different presets that you can set up and customize to your preference. You can change the torque balance front to rear. Look at that. Wheel slip, stability, damping, roll stiffness. All this is adjustable for crazy off-road shenanigans or racetrack shenanigans. If you want to see some videos of some crazy antics in a new Rivian R1T quad motor, go check out Kyle's video on out ofsp spec motoring where he's sliding this thing around a racetrack. It's freaking awesome. I wish I could be doing that in this this week.

[00:07:41]Just don't have time with the uh with the schedule and travel that I'm doing, but if I could, I would. All right. So, we're going to put this back into let's see, let's go into onroad allpurpose. Very nice. Cool. And the ride height's going to lower there.

[00:07:56]You've got menus for your navigation.

[00:07:58]You've got menus for your music, for your gauges and car control, battery temperatures, all this stuff. That's very cool. Look at that. There's a nice little display. Cameras, really high resolution, easy to see stuff. And then lots of menus and settings. You can have a day mode, a night mode, which is a little bit hard to see in the day, which I guess makes sense. There's access for locks and settings, and at least the infotainment system is really nice and responsive. I'd say this is about almost as close as Tesla in terms of responsiveness, which I appreciate. You can see all the specs on this car. So, ascend slate sky walnut wood interior.

[00:08:39]Super fancy. Well worth the extra $3,000 for that. You could lock and unlock the vehicle. Open and close things here.

[00:08:45]Gear tunnel bed uh bed cover. Lower and raise the vehicle.

[00:08:51]There we go. This is in kneel mode. So, it's its lowest ride height setting. I like that. Very nice.

[00:08:59]And that's about as low as Actually, that's even lower than it was when we did the walkound. So, kneel mode is slammed. That looks pretty cool. Nice if you're getting in and out of the vehicle, loading kids up, etc. Okay. Is there anything else we need to talk about with the R1T? I think that pretty much covers the basics.

[00:09:20]Everything is in the screen, including your silly screen vent controls where with your airflow direction. I think that's just the worst idea in automotive design ever. Rivia just took it from Tesla. It's not necessary. I just want to reach in there and just turn them myself. Uh not go through the menus, which is just a ridiculous thing. But anyway, whatever. I can't see that actually being cost cutting where everything else in this screen is cost cutting for this Rivian. That's just poor design. I wish they would just scrap it and give us little vent tabs, but still whatever. Not a big deal. Not the end of the world. The climate control works great. You've got heated steering wheel controls, heated mirrors, uh heated seats. There you go. You can control all that. It's pretty easy.

[00:10:00]Maybe a couple button presses here and there. Ultimately, this infotainment is distracting to use, but when you get accustomed to it, it's not as bad. You just find yourself taking your eyes off the road quite a bit. The cruise control and the hands-free driving is very similar to Tesla. Instead of pushing down, you just pull back on the stock.

[00:10:19]It works great. Let's go test it. Let's go drive this R1T Quad Max.

[00:10:29]Really nice visibility all around.

[00:10:32]You're going to hear lots of creaking and squeaking driving around in this thing today. Some of that are my car seats, so forgive that if you will.

[00:10:43]Uh, let's see here. What drive mode are we in? Let's go into just allpurpose.

[00:10:49]Our ride height is going to be standard.

[00:10:51]Our ride feel is going to be soft. Regen standard. Stability is on. Very nice.

[00:10:57]All right, listen to this when we hit a pothole.

[00:11:01]Yeah, it's just loud. Loud. NVH.

[00:11:09]So much of this truck looks and feels fantastic for the six figure asking price. The ride quality and the noise and vibration from the suspension feels like it's broken. Honestly, it doesn't feel indicative of any price point. The ride quality itself is fine, except unless if you're going off-road and you're set to max ride height, it gets a little bit stiff just because there's so much pressure in the air suspension chambers. So, the ride quality is okay. I think what the suspension does and its breath of capability and range of capability on and off-road is amazing, but the feeling of quality just isn't there, and it should be by this point. Rivian has had ages to dial in the suspension, the NVH here, and I think that's the one improvement they really should have made to the second generation R1T and R1S product to kind of bring it up to the level that the price point demands.

[00:12:13]Going over bumps, going over potholes, the suspension just sounds terrible. It it is maybe the only thing that would be a dealbreaker and keep me from buying this truck.

[00:12:25]There are some interior rattles. They're not terrible though, but the suspension is just so loud.

[00:12:34]Granted, this is a horrible road. But if you're going off-road in your Rivian R12, you're going to have to just listen to that all day long.

[00:12:45]It's fine. It's not broken. It's the nature of the beast. It's part of the design of the air suspension and the complexity here.

[00:12:56]But Rivian's a big company. They figured out how to build a truck really, really well so far. I wish they could just figure out how to make the suspension quiet down a little bit.

[00:13:10]All right, let's go into sport mode and show you what the suspension can do around a corner because it's nothing short of amazing. Here's full power.

[00:13:22]Insane. Insane.

[00:13:25]All right, turning in again. Remember, we are on all terrain tires today.

[00:13:31]A little bit of safe under steer.

[00:13:35]Completely flat.

[00:13:41]Again, no rad modes engaged. Turn signal camera.

[00:13:49]It is so fast.

[00:13:54]Instant throttle response in sport mode.

[00:13:58]Little bit of wind and road noise at speed on the highway.

[00:14:07]Love the driving position. Love the visibility. Seats are super comfortable.

[00:14:13]And of course, everything with your driving position is adjustable. So you can change your steering wheel height and telescoping all through these buttons in the screen just like Tesla.

[00:14:31]It's one pedal drive. You get a few different regen modes, high, normal, soft. They all seem to work pretty well.

[00:14:43]Steering feels decent. There's a little bit more communication than a lot of other electric vehicles or even a lot of other trucks, mind you.

[00:14:56]Considering the power here, it's easy to drive, easy to place, easy to live with.

[00:15:05]When you're navigating somewhere, all of your navigation instructions pop up here to the side. I love the organization of everything, especially in this front gauge cluster. It'll show you all of your settings for driving assistance, hands-free driving, adaptive cruise control, what vehicles are around you.

[00:15:24]So, right now, it's showing me that this BMW in front of us is an SUV, but that's okay. It's kind of far away.

[00:15:32]You can skip 5 mph increments by swiping up and down on your little control right here. That's good. Cancel everything by pulling the stock forward.

[00:15:48]I get it. You know, Rivian is his new company. It's a major feat to build a competitive electric vehicle in this timeline right now that we're in.

[00:15:59]But there are a few things with quality control that I just I could see them needing to improve upon. The hood jiggles around a lot. The suspension makes way too much noise. If they addressed these things, I think they'd have a really impressive product on their hands. And again, we've got more lane closures up here, so we can't pass this truck yet.

[00:16:21]At the end of the day, if you're owning this truck, it's probably going to annoy you at first, and then you're just going to get used to it. It's not a deal breaker. It's not a huge deal.

[00:16:32]It just kind of lowers the perceived quality of the overall driving experience.

[00:16:38]And that's a bit of a shame considering how fantastic everything else is about this truck. The packaging is second to none really. No one has really pushed the limits and explore the boundaries of what's capable with electric vehicle truck packaging like Rivian has here.

[00:16:58]There we go. Get around that situation super fast.

[00:17:05]All right, we're going to go and visit our little bumpy road test route. It's dirt, there's a bit of mud, and there's lots of bumps. And we're going to listen to the suspension in an off-road mode.

[00:17:18]So far, we've been in sport, and actually the ride quality of sport mode is pretty decent on the street. seems to figure out everything quite well.

[00:17:29]Feel like once you're moving, once you're got some speed under you, the suspension quiets down quite a bit. It's those low speed impacts, those low speed bumps that are just so noisy. But again, ride quality is still quite good. It's well composed. It's well damped and isolated.

[00:17:44]You can just kind of bulldoze over speed bumps in this thing and it's just fine.

[00:17:48]It doesn't really care.

[00:17:53]I love the wine from the electric motors under full throttle. Just insane.

[00:18:06]Universal handsfree on. Stay attentive.

[00:18:13]seems to work pretty well.

[00:18:21]We're going to go right here and re-engage. We've got a work zone.

[00:18:26]See how it handles this.

[00:18:29]One complaint that I do have with the cruise control, the hands-free, the adaptive system, is that it never really resumes to the speed that you've previously set it to before you canled it. So, it's always resuming to the speed that you're at currently.

[00:18:44]And of course, you can just quickly change that, but it would be nice for it to remember where you were before.

[00:18:55]Doing a great job here on Hines. 40 mph road negotiating the lines. Well, haven't really seen much traffic on today's drive, so it's not showing you what's going on around us. I think the extra NVH here is forgivable in the truck. I mean, this is a truck. It's got off-road all-terrain tires. It's got tons of capability. It's a bit more utilitary. And even though, you know, don't let this luxurious and and uber fine looking interior fool you. It's still a truck and you can do truck things with it.

[00:19:26]And this, the NVH, I think, is a bit more forgivable. in the R1S as a luxury SUV, maybe a Land Rover competitor, it's a little bit less forgivable, but it still suffers from the same NVH complaints.

[00:19:41]All right, let's take over the wheel here now that we've got pedestrians.

[00:19:44]There you go. You saw the pedestrian on the screen.

[00:19:49]I've always thought in the back of my mind, this could potentially be a replacement for the Ranger Raptor someday. It kind of does all the things.

[00:19:56]It's super capable off-road. It's very practical.

[00:19:59]It's very nice. It's electric. It's not as expensive to run.

[00:20:04]I could see myself going out and spending $40 to $60,000 for a used Rivian R1T. And that being a pretty nice daily driver.

[00:20:14]It's fun. It has tons of capability. On paper, I think it's a really good choice. With the shaky hood and some of the rattles and noises here, I have a little bit more trouble stomaching six figures for something like this.

[00:20:28]Ultimately, it depends on how you're going to be using your R1T. If you want more range, if you want more power, you can just keep spending more and more and more. You could probably get away for a lot less than this with a perfectly fine truck. We drove the two motor R1S off-road a couple years ago, and it did fine off-road. It struggled a little bit. Had a little bit of wheel slip here and there. It wasn't as seamless and amazingly impressive off-road as the quad motor was, but it still got us up the hills. It wasn't an issue. No drama, tons of ground clearance from the air suspension, etc. Do you want the level of insanity brought by this quad motor?

[00:21:08]Then if you do, you're not going to be able to get anything else crazier for the money. Let's turn into here.

[00:21:15]Ooh, they might have graded this road.

[00:21:18]Looks like we've got some repairs going on here. Look at that. All right, let's go into off-road.

[00:21:28]We're just going to stay in all terrain mode. Very nice. Some deep mud holes there.

[00:21:47]All right. So, this is a smooth road.

[00:21:50]Now, just listen to some of the noises here.

[00:22:16]Ride quality excellent. Steering light.

[00:22:29]There's almost so much noise from the suspension that it all kind of blends into the background.

[00:22:42]height and high ride quality is still great.

[00:23:04]Lots of creek in there. Little bit of mud getting kicked up underneath the truck.

[00:23:12]It's still small and narrow enough to fit through tighter trail. That's nice.

[00:23:24]And the turning radius is decent, too.

[00:23:27]But I think ride quality itself is very acceptable off-road. This this feels great. I would be very comfortable taking this through a trail all day long. It's only when you get into max height, highest, when you lose suspension travel and it becomes pretty bouncy.

[00:23:46]Yeah, no thanks. But high is fine. All right, we're going to skip this mud pit because I don't know what's at the bottom.

[00:23:56]Really nice cameras here.

[00:24:11]Yeah, it just eats it up. Those 34in tires help a lot, too.

[00:24:17]with how much Rivian has gotten right with this truck. I think it's it's forgivable to let them go on some of the things they've gotten wrong. It's just that by now I feel like they should have addressed this stuff, especially at the price point.

[00:24:33]All right. Well, this is the most maintenance that I've seen on this road in maybe four years.

[00:24:43]Here's what we look like in high mode. So, yeah, a little bit more ground clearance there. That's looking pretty good.

[00:25:23]It is a good looking truck.

[00:25:26]Love that this is plastic, not painted.

[00:26:05]All right, guys. I mean, those are pretty much going to sum up my thoughts on the R1T. Fantastic truck. It's just a rattle fest in here. That's the only complaint that I have. If Rivian was able to fix some of the NVH, this would be, I think, the most compelling utilitarian electric vehicle on the market. It just bests everything dynamically. It's so good onroad. It's so good off-road. It's so capable everywhere it goes.

[00:26:32]It just makes so much noise and feels so clunky and cheap going about it.

[00:26:40]Beating a dead horse at this point.

[00:26:41]That's my That's my big complaint. My my big I think the the big thing keeping me from really recommending this R1T for the money is it just doesn't feel like a $100,000 plus vehicle.

[00:26:55]I see I look around and I see $100,000 plus vehicle in the interior quality, but as soon as you start driving it, it just makes me question everything else. So, all right, that's where we're going to leave off for now. We'll try to get another video in on this at some point this week. I don't know if I'll have time to take this off-road. I will give it my best shot. Watch out.

[00:27:21]But for now, that's going to be a wrap.

[00:27:23]Thanks so much for watching. We'll see you guys in the next video.