“I hit about 2 ½-feet of snow, and it just stopped right there,” Merrill said. “I had seen all the Rivian marketing campaigns with the cars just eating through the snow, so it was kind of like, man, this is disappointing.”
Dislodging cars from snowbanks is nothing new for him, but this situation was very different. After unbuckling himself from the driver’s seat and waiting for other drivers to come and help him out of the snow, Merrill accidentally activated a safety feature that resulted in the SUV getting stuck between the park and drive gears. It had become bricked. Rivian says that the R1S did exactly as it was designed to do in a potential slide-away situation like Merrill’s. Only thing was that the SUV was not sliding away.
“There was an unfortunate cascade of events and edge cases that led to this situation,” said Wassym Bensaid, Rivian’s senior vice president of software development. “But we take this feedback as a gift. It’s great input for us to improve the product.”