First Towing Test in my R1T

[Meyers Rivian]

Hey everyone, I wanted to share my towing experience with my R1T and it happens to be my first experience too.

On Sashort 52 mile loop to weigh truck and camper and get a feel for how it drives. Was extremely windy and raining. Compared to the Nissan Pathfinder I used to use to pull the camper, this drives so much better. No impact on acceleration and no straining going uphill. I did a few miles on the highway going 65 and again no effort getting up to speed. I did the first half of the loop without my sway bars installed and then installed them for ride home. They weren't installed when I took the weight and thus the imbalance front to back on the truck. I did notice quite a difference without the sway bars especially since it was so windy today so will continue to always use them. I had hoped to not use them anymore since weight distribution is not needed if trailer is under 5K and truck has built in sway control. Not using them would make for easier unhitching when charging if necessary but the drive difference with and without was significant enough to continue to use them.

Some things that occurred and towing remarks:

1) Truck is supposed to go into towing mode automatically once it senses a plugged in trailer. This appeared to happen briefly as the camper lights came on then went off. I'm having a bit of trouble getting the power cord from camper to insert all the way into the R1T. When I got into the truck cab, the options on the towing mode screen were all grayed out and my monitor for the rear camera on the camper wasn't detecting the camera. As soon as I pressed the brake pedal power was supplied to camper and camera turned on. Not sure if this is normal.

2) While driving, a warning would pop up that trailer brake is now available and another warning after that the rear sensors were disabled. This popped up occasionally for a total of 10 or 12 times over the trip. However, none of the towing associated screens ever turned off or disabled before or while these warnings popped up and there never was a loss in the rear view camera. These pop up warnings were quite annoying. Not sure if I just need to clean the trailer cord contacts. Would be nice to know what sensor or power line is used to detect the trailer presence so I know where to dig deeper.

3) Can't set the trailer brake properly because you can't disable regenerative breaking. Normally you should drive around 20mph and coast and then apply the trailer brakes to stop both vehicles but can't do this since you can't coast due to regenerative breaking. I just set it to 5 and never noticed any pushing of the camper on the truck while breaking so it wasn't too low. However I don't want it to be too high because then I will be losing regen as too much breaking is coming from the trailer. Really need a mode to be able to set the trailer braked properly.

4) Before I hooked up the trailer the truck was at 85% battery with range of 248 miles. As soon as it went into tow mode it dropped the estimate to 120 miles which is expected. After about 5 miles of driving and the initial efficiency being around .9 miles/kwh the range estimate started slowly climbing. After a few miles it went all the way back up to 220 miles. It never went back down to matching the efficiency of the current data. Hoping this is just a one time glitch as this can really throw of when you need to charge.

5) Overall efficiency was 1.09 mi/kWh. Only about 10% of driving was highway but it was extremely windy and raining. I'll probably stick with my estimates of 1.0 mi/kWh but will see after we take camper for first real trip in a few weeks at over 200 mile distance. Camper is very lightweight and is why we could tow it with a Nissan Pathfinder (5K towing capacity) but it is very boxy and not aerodynamic at all. Efficiency really is impacted more by aerodynamics than weight. I'll take the 1.0 mi/kWh vs the 10 miles per gallon we were getting towing this with the pathfinder

Hope to hear from other owners what their first towing experience was like. Have a great week ahead everyone.