It’s now officially official: electric utes, known as pickups in the US, do not ruin the weekend, even if the weekend involves driving up a slippery, rocky hill on a glorified goat track, as Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe did with his family this Sunday (LA time).
The Rivian R1T ute and its SUV stablemate, the R1S, are both highly anticipated electric vehicles: with a top battery option of 180kWh, range of up to 640km, the ability to wade through 1 metre of water, pull 5 tonnes, plus generous approach and departure angles, they tick a lot of off-road boxes.
“It’s a Sunday morning, about an hour outside of LA,” says Scaringe in a video he shared on Twitter.
“We’ve got mud, we’ve got snow, we’ve got rocks.”
It’s not hard to see how well suited these vehicles could be to Australian adventures – and Rivian has said it considers Australia a key market, although local pricing is as yet an unknown (US pricing starts at $US$67,500).
Rivian opened up the US order page for both its electric offerings in November, starting with delivery of the “First Edition” of each in June.
Sunday testing 🙂 pic.twitter.com/L5W3E7nui2
— RJ Scaringe (@RJScaringe) January 31, 2021
Bridie Schmidt is associate editor for The Driven, sister site of Renew Economy. She has been writing about electric vehicles since 2018, and has a keen interest in the role that zero-emissions transport has to play in sustainability. She has participated in podcasts such as Download This Show with Marc Fennell and Shirtloads of Science with Karl Kruszelnicki and is co-organiser of the Northern Rivers Electric Vehicle Forum. Bridie also owns a Tesla Model Y and has it available for hire on evee.com.au.