Do you like horror movies? I feel like most new movies that are coming out are almost all horror movies. But here’s the thing: a horror movie doesn’t have to deal with traditional themes to be terrifying, like re-animated corpses or people on all-sanguineous diets or monkey’s paw-related wish-grantery. Sometimes the horror is less imaginative and just, you know, crappier. Like the grim yet ever-present specter of a future where no one can fix and drive a used car.
This horrific idea was driven home for me when I watched a series – I think still ongoing – of videos from bigshot YouTuber (a title which, I just learned today, has nothing to do with other types of tubers, like yams or cassavas) Rich Rebuilds, who just spent $10,000 to buy one of those Rivian-built Amazon delivery vans.
Now, the van Rich bought may not actually have been part of Amazon’s fleet; in fact, I don’t think it was, because it doesn’t have Amazon livery on the outside and the center of the steering wheel reads “RIVIAN” instead of “AMAZON” like the ones delivered to Amazon seem to have. It’s the same type of van that Amazon uses, though, a Rivian Delivery Van, and these are electric delivery vehicles that start at around $80,000 and go up from there. Maybe $100,000 is a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much, once all is said and done. So getting one for $10,000 would absolutely seem like an interesting deal.
Of course, there’s a catch, because this is reality and everything has a catch. The catch here is that the van doesn’t, you know, move. Ordinarily, this is a pretty significant detriment to a van, or, really, almost any motor vehicle, but Rich felt the gamble could be worth it, because, come on, this thing is practically new! How hard could it be?
The van was marked not for sale, but despite that, somehow Rich managed to buy it, becoming possibly the first private – as in non-commercial – owner of a Rivian Delivery Van ever. It’s also worth noting that this van was in this position because it had been Lemon Law’d, which means that it was so broken from the get-go that the manufacturer had to buy it back. And from there, I guess it was sold to the dealer that Rich bought it from?
Anyway, the sellers of the unsellable van seemed to think it needed a whole new battery pack, but Rich didn’t think so. And it seems he was right! The problem is just that the real issue is, in many ways, worse.
These videos are somewhat long, but I think worth watching, if only to really absorb the full schadenfreude of frustration as they try fix after fix to try and get the van moving. It powers up fine; the battery works, all the displays work, the power doors open and close, all the lights work, but there’s one thing that refuses to cooperate, and it’s enough to transform the whole van from a vehicle into a shed: the parking brake.
For whatever reason, the van’s computers think there’s some kind of fault in the parking brake system, and as a result, the van refuses to go into gear and drive. The whole electric parking brake system was inspected and seems fine, but the software refuses to accept that, and effectively bricks the entire van.
By the end of the video, Rich realizes his only recourse is to try and reach out to Rivian, who will very likely refuse to work on this vehicle, because it was marked as not to be sold. And, sure, he knew the risks when plopping down his ten grand, but the bigger issue here is that this should be an alarming warning for us all, especially those of us who like to buy broken used vehicles and then make them work.
That’s something this community does all the time. I know my co-founder and EIC David has done just that multiple times, contributors like our own Stephen Walter Gossin do it with shocking regularity, and even I, with my decidedly sub-par wrenching skills, managed to get a formerly yard-bound and shot-up old Citroën running and driving again.
All of these car-resurrections were able to happen because, at least up until this point, cars were very repairable things. You could take a car that hadn’t run in years and years and get it back on the road, and there’s never been a need to reach out to the company that made the car originally – if they still even exist – for anything.
What this attempted Rivian van repair painfully demonstrates is how that situation seems to be coming to an end. When software becomes the dominant driver of how a car works, then you no longer ever really own a car; the car company is just letting you use it, until such use ceases to provide them any benefit.
If this was a UPS delivery van from 1985 or 1992 or even 2019 that Rich bought, he’d have had it running and driving in no time, ready to be converted into a camper or a mobile opium den or a hauler for a dirigible or whatever. All the systems would have been understandable and repairable. Sure, there would potentially be considerable skill and cost and resources of all kinds involved, but it would be possible.
Is it possible to fix this Rivian van at all? 99% of the systems in that van seem to be working fine, but I am not even remotely confident that the thing will ever drive again. Maybe if Rivian agrees to help somehow and use their proprietary diagnostic tools to clear the fault, but that’s a huge if. Clever hackers could likely reverse-engineer what the Rivian computers and software are doing and make a replacement nervous system, but the effort to pull that off would be, well, considerable. Like moon-sized considerable.
All of this makes me deeply uneasy. I don’t want to live in a world where otherwise perfectly repairable used cars and trucks and vans are rendered inert, useless monoliths because of some lines of code I’m not allowed to access. If this is a harbinger for the way things are going to be – and I’m afraid it very much is, as we’ve seen many similar things before – then that does not bode well for the used car market or the world of independent auto repair shops or the ability for people to afford and use used cars, for regular life use or for enthusiasts.
Right to repair is important, and the story of this Rivian delivery van should be a big, loud warning to everyone who cares about repairing their own cars. We can’t let this become the norm.
Maybe he’ll fix it, though! There’s still the possibility of a happy ending here, so I’m going to reserve at least a little dollop of hope that in a future video we’ll see Rich driving this thing past Rivian HQ, flipping a glorious bird.
Top graphic images: Rich Rebuilds/YouTube
Not really a big fan of regulations, but the whole issue of repairability of cars today is rooted in the complexity, and I suspect that the whole automotive software environment (AUTOSAR) exacerbates the situation. AUTOSAR is , in my opinion, a good idea that is very poorly implemented.
Perhaps a requirement that the code be held in escrow and that if there is a software related defect that is not fixed in a reasonable time, the code is released to the affected vehicle owners to pass on to aftermarket vendors.
I am currently dealing with this kind of issue with my 2017 Jaguar XE Diesel. The diagnostics for the Engine Controller do not give any indication that it has failed. But there is an emission control system fault that I am guessing is being fetched from an EEPROM at power up.
If I clear the fault at startup, it doesn’t return until the controller is power cycled. So,what I have is really shitty software that is making the car … difficult to drive. If I clear the code every time I start the car, things seem to be OK.
And before someone chimes in with the old “it’s British you know…” the unit is made by Bosch. Doesn’t mean the software isn’t complete shit. I used a Bosch Motion Controller back around 2010, and it was horrible. But I was allowed to write my own code to run on it and we really needed that.
My guess is that they used an EEPROM with a very low bit erase limit, and that has failed. The ECU’s I worked on had a low priority task that did a background test on the EEPROM and verified that the checksum matched and it would fail diagnostics with a proprietary code indicating a checksum mismatch. Did they omit this? If yes, real shit design.
Or maybe JLR just doesn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground and their “diagnostic method” is swap-nostics… keep spending money until the issue goes away? And they want to sell cars for $150,000?
But the real joy is that JLR is circling the drain. I was promised a call from someone there. It is now three days overdue. Maybe when they go bankrupt I can get the source code and build environment documentation?
I think Rich is Intentionally Trolling Rivian in this case bc he IS passionate about Right to Repair and therefore dragging out his videos on purpose.
Fortunately for this vehicle the HV Battery tested to be healthy and I think Rich confirmed the ev motors as well, therefore…
Worst case scenario to getting this van a rocking and functional could result in completely swapping out the software and software hard tied hardware.
I Do agree with another poster Im pretty confident he’ll find a way to fix this macgyver style with some chewing gum, a paperclip and a cheap part picked from another heap for nearly zero dollars.
Or
he’ll find a hacker to get root control and high-larry-ity and highjinks will ensue. Rich is dead ass a low key very smart and funny dude
When I had my soul crushing job in Insurance Total Loss, there was a car sent to the body shop for a minor hit. It was 2023 and the car was a few months old. The body shop fixed all the panels and got it all ready to go. It ran and drove fine but they couldn’t release it because the airbag module chip was on global backorder. The customer ran out of rental, paid $300/week for a rental for 4 months and was desperately calling to sign a waiver to drive the car with no airbags functioning. The insurance FINALLY pulled the plug and had me “total” the car. The customer lost a lot of money and had to buy a new car. The perfectly new car that was fully functional *except* for the airbag chip, yep, went to the junkyard. Probably with a full tank of gas along with its new car smell.
Hopefully the owner bought the car back and kept driving it on a salvage title.
Throwing away a newish running and driving car because of one module on backorder is about as anti green as you can get.
If only it was that easy. The body shop isn’t allowed to release the car when it’s “unsafe”. With no functioning airbags, they would be liable and at the very minimum would be releasing a vehicle that is not fully repaired. So they wouldn’t release. Plus the salvage price would not have covered her loan, so she’d have to pay thousands of dollars to the lein and still have a car that didn’t “function”.
It’s a total bullshit situation that could have workarounds if the laws and corporations involved were flexible. They aren’t. Yes, her car was a few months old, with less than 5000miles and it went to the scrap heap. All because on chip was on backorder.
It’s one of the many things in which our times can only think short-term.
I have a 20-year-old car (my newest, and there are too many black boxes in it already). The sensor that tracks the position of the steering wheel broke down, and it somehow activated the traction control. The poor idiot of a computer thought the car was on ice or something, and wouldn’t let me go faster than a crawl.
It took me a few days to find a place (the fifth I crawled to!) where they had the right computer to talk to the black box and turn off both ABS and traction control so I could at least drive it.
At the same time, while I have Popular Mechanics issues from the 1950s in my library, there won’t be a surviving issue of The Autopian, as it’s — like everything — completely virtual nowadays. Any article here that interests us now will eventually become a 404 error. Likewise for news, scientific articles, etc.
I have old files — art, texts, whatever — locked in ZIP disks or in floppies, in formats no program can read anymore, and so on. In a hundred years, people will have forgotten all about the political and economical fights that look so important now, and there won’t be a single primary source of information (newspapers, diaries, etc.) for historians to research.
Technology became a race from child-labor-powered mining to the landfill, as almost nothing is fixable anymore; future archeologists will call us “the landfill culture”, and will know they found our layer because of all the microplastics.
I won’t even start about nuclear energy, producing poisonous materials that last for thousands of years and can give cancer to whoever comes close to them… so we can watch cat videos on a huge screen in a climate-controlled house.
Collectively speaking, we’re all idiots.
For centuries our knowledge was amassed in precious libraries… these libraries were curated and maintained so that the knowledge contained in the books could eventually be read.
Nowadays as you say, it’s stored on some magnetic (or magneto-optical in the case of ZIP) storage. Those storage are readable as long as there’s a drive to read them and a software to actually read the files stored on the magnetic surface…
So basically if the content of the files has not been moved from a format to another (both file and mangetic storage) over the year it’s lost.
It’s already showing in the phtography domain where a whole generation of pictures has been lost since digital photography appeared.
I saw the original video on Youtube when it came out and sat through most of it, since I’m a fan of both the Rivian and BrightDrop EV vans. I was a bit confused when Rich went on about $100K/only one in private hands/etc… because hasn’t the ‘generic’ version of the Rivian delivery van that was originally going to be exclusive to Amazon (until Bezos renegged on his purchase commitment) been available for sale to private parties for quite a while? There’s this: https://rivian.com/fleet
If Rich can’t get this running, nobody can. He does this kind of stuff ALL the time and almost always sucessfully. Software-based (‘defined’?) vehicles are repulsive to me, even if everything were open-source by law, which of course it’ll never be. What a world we now live in. 🙁
Private hands = Non-business owner. You can’t just go buy one as an individual. Commercial sales only.
I suspect there will be questionably sourced software used to finally unlock it.
SDV – Software Defined Vehicle is what you’re referring to, and eventually will spawn a significant aftermarket open source conversion business sector, similar to how standalone ECUs are today.
Brave new world my ass. 😉 But I’m old and grumpy, so others might feel differently about SDV.
I’m not old old but definitely hate software based computing in cars. The only screens I want in a vehicle are the hvac display, and my phone.
I’m a huge fan of right to repair, but I also suspect that where there is a will there is a way. How many vehicle OS systems have been cracked and opened to the modding community over the years.. countless!
I suspect that as software engineered platforms continue to advance, so will the community that figures out to get into them and make modifications.
that is why “right to repair” laws should be put in place. automakers are trying to use the “digital millennium copyright act” to try and get people who crack vehicle OS arrested for PIRACY by police officers. we shouldn’t NEED a law that allows us to fix our own stuff but corporations are bastards.
Curious as to when these legit make it to the open market. It has to happen! Rivian is cranking them out and has a freaking ginormous parking lot full of these white ones outside the factory. I’m sure they’d like to sell them all! Watching closely on that front.
While proprietary software and diagnostics isn’t new, the ability for that software to prevent usability of the car is. In the past, if you wanted to drive with your parking brake engaged, have at it. In a pinch the car would still move. Disabling a car from moving under its own power with software because of a fault code is the threat. I was thinking about this just this morning- a few months ago my EV refused to accept charge because of a detected battery fault. Meaning once I used up whatever charge was left in the traction battery my car was bricked. It took two trips to the dealer for a battery/BMS recalibration to restore functionality. Things that I nor likely any Indy could do. The problem here is I’m pretty confident I could limp an ICE car home in a pinch. This car? I’d be stuck wherever it decides to throw a fault.
I did this with my old car. Seven miles. The serpentine belt broke, meaning no alternator and no cooling. Luckily, my repair shop was mostly downhill, and I could coast with the engine off and clutch-start when needed.
Not sure how AAA is going to stay in business with its fixed-price tow service for bricking and flat-no-spare cars.
Fixed price towing will just get ‘market condition adjustments’ that 3x the price.
I can fix most any mechanical and most basic wiring issues, the minute it becomes electronic unless there is a big melted hole in something I am lost-
As these hit the secondary market more I wonder if some hacker group will come up with homebrew ECU firmware or something, because the potential of these vans to have a second life is just so big
Fisker owners did just that, but I’m not sure how repeatable their success is going to be.
I suspect Amazon will actively prevent these ever hitting the secondary market, if not already written into agreements with Rivian for supplying them. Much like uHaul’s custom designed equipment when it’s deemed to be “end of life” it’s deliberately destroyed/scrapped.
This van sounds like it slipped through the cracks as it ended up getting lemon law’ed, so presumably Rivian had to buy it back, but then how it ended up at what looked like a BHPH lot is anyone’s guess. The “Not For Sale” label in the window might have originally been due that it was not supposed to go to auction/wholesale due to some Amazon agreement, but evidently someone got tired of waiting or there was no procedure in place exactly what they were supposed to do with it, somehow it sneaked out the back one night and whoops it’s gone lookit that.
While the van itself doesn’t have the Amazon branding on the front, at one point in the video he shows the key fob at it has the Amazon logo on that, and he also found the front end had clearly been hastily ripped apart and put back together- could have been crash damage, or someone ripping out the amazon branded front grille piece.
I’m pretty sure that I remembered reading that Amazon’s exclusive access to the Rivian van was limited to maybe two or three years, after which Rivian was free to sell its vans to anyone it pleases. I daydream of building a Rivian camper for my hash weekends.
Note to Jason- by ‘hash’ I mean running and drinking shenanigans, not dreamy Turkish tar shenanigans. Although the two are hardly mutually exclusive…
Even if all of the computers are locked down, someone will go to the lengths of bringing a new motor controller, a new battery controller, etc. etc.
It’s the equivalent of completely rewiring an ICE car with a new ECU, you’re going to have to work out the specs of the motor, and how best to run them etc.but that’s much more achievable than reverse-engineering a locked down computer.
It’s already happening in newer ICE vehicles, if the market is there a business will eventually pop up.