A Famous YouTuber Bought One Of Those EV Amazon Delivery Vans For $10K And Honestly It Terrifies Me About The Future

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