Trying to run modern vehicles, with all their safety systems on a dyno is not easy if the vehicle in question doesn’t have a dedicated dyno mode. This is required in order to be able to run the vehicle without its suite of safety systems on, since they would not allow its wheel to spin in a room, facing what is very obviously a solid wall.
The Rivian R1T doesn’t have a dyno mode, so when Aaron O’Neal tried to see how much power it actually makes using a rolling road, the vehicle was not at all happy. It did allow power to be applied initially, but you can clearly see in the video that it constantly cuts power and pegs the vehicle back.
Aaron doesn’t say what warnings popped up on the screens, but he does say that it was the vehicle’s collision control system that could not be turned completely off that hampered the test. It didn’t cut power completely or constantly – it just intervened every few seconds, it seems, but even so, the vehicle still managed to put down good numbers given the situation 526 and 563 horsepower.
The quad-motor Rivian R1T Launch Edition is supposed to have 835 horsepower and 908 pound-feet combined, giving it a claimed zero to sixty time of 3.3 seconds, making it ridiculously quick for what is essentially still a big, heavy electric pickup that also happens to be great off-road. We will probably not get to see a proper Rivian dyno run until the company releases an update that permits it or the vehicle gets a special, dedicated dyno mode.
Rivian will soon also begin production of the less extreme dual-motor model (with in-house-designed motors), expected to have around 600 horsepower and still be able to sprint to 60 mph in the low-4-second range. Some of the people who ordered the quad-motor initially will probably now opt for the dual-motor after Rivian upped the price by around 20 percent, making the quad motor considerably more expensive than first announced.
