The Simplest Way to Sell More Electric Cars in America
Updated at 5:20 p.m. ET on January 21, 2022
The Rivian R1T, the $75,000 debut pickup from America’s new electric-truck maker, is unlike any vehicle I have ever driven.
It is, first, really big: 18 feet long and six feet tall, it weighs three and a half tons, heavier than a white rhinoceros or a tricked-out Ford F-150. But this girth is belied by everything else about it. The R1T has an aesthetic unity missing from every mass-market automobile on the road, Teslas included. Like an iPhone, it feels like a cohesive product designed by a single team: The same colors, angles, and textures appear on its seat cushions, its door interiors, its onscreen interface. It can even be—just look at the yellow flashlight hidden in its passenger-side door—downright charming.
And it doesn’t drive like a 7,000-pound truck—it drives like a hovercraft. As with other luxury electric vehicles, when you press the pedal, the vehicle obliges. Accelerating out of a stoplight in a New Jersey industrial park, I experienced an amount of g-force that you normally have to pay Jeff Bezos to receive. (And in a way, you still do—Amazon owns 20 percent of Rivian.) Later, on a state highway, I looked down to discover that the vehicle was handling 70 mph with silent aplomb.
You can’t understand the Rivian R1T until you test-drive it, in other words. But that is
