Electric vehicles have two achilles heels. One, is the cold weather, and two, is towing. And today
we're going to do both of those at the same time - towing 10,000 pounds in the middle of winter.
I have a feeling we're not going to get very far. Feel free to leave your guesses on how far we get
down in the comments. This will be a test for both of us and we'll see who is closest at the
end. Just for reference, this thing does have about 280 miles worth of range in the summer in
prime optimal conditions. Today though, we are sitting right at freezing, and that is
a lot of weight on this trailer. I'm kind of nervous for this one, but let's get started.
[Intro]
Alright, full transparency, I love electric vehicles, and I love my Rivian. And I will
love my electric Humvee when it's finished. But I fully understand that towing is probably
not a strong point for EV's at the moment. And while the truck is probably not going
to look that great today, we still should do it in the name of science.
Woo baby! We're so tall right now dude!
This thing looks amazing.
That's not going anywhere. Just kidding. You might remember my electric Hummer project. Like
I explained in my last video I'm taking it to my buddy's place so we can troubleshoot some wiring.
The trailer, I think, weighs around 3300 pounds, and the Hummer weighs, I think, right around 5500.
I'm not that great at math, but we might be sitting just shy of 10,000. We'll weigh it and
then add some more weight if we need to. However, the Rivian only weighs 7000 pounds which is
considerably less than what we're towing. Towing this much weight is not a game, and it could be
very dangerous. Things get scary when the trailer weighs more than the vehicle that's pulling it.
The trick is that we have to perch the Hummer so that most of the weight is over the axles and
not right here on the hitch. I know that if I have too much of the trailer's weight on this hitch, my
front wheels will start lifting up. But if I have too little weight on the front of this hitch, it
could be lifting my back wheels off of the ground. And with icy roads like today, we don't want to
be doing any of that. If we get any trailer sway, I could very easily lose the Humvee and
the Rivian and that's not something we want to do. Luckily I do have this contraption that was sent
over by Weigh Safe which can visibly display the tongue weight that's being applied to the hitch,
so we can avoid both of the unbalanced scenarios. We should only have about 10-15% of our total
trailer load resting on the ball. And with Weigh Safe we actually know what's going on.
It's milled from a solid block of 6061 aluminum. The ball is 303 stainless steel so it shouldn't
rust. And both pins on the side of the hitch lock so nobody can permanently
borrow it without permission. The accurate load reading comes from a small hydraulic
piston compressing oil inside of the ball and it has a lifetime warranty. The Rivian can tow
11,000 pounds, we're fine on that front. The ball can handle 12 and a half thousand pounds so we're
fine there. And our ultimate goal is to only have 10,000 on the trailer, so we should be safe at
every level. These Weigh Safe hitches are made just right down the road from me here in Utah,
right here in the USA. So if you tow a lot, or if you're towing for the first time,
it's probably a good idea to have one. I'll leave the link down in the description if
you're interested, and huge thanks to Weigh Safe for sending this over.
Now our load is balanced and our trip is safer and I need all the help I can get. Let's go get
this thing weighed. As we start this trip, I have about 7,000 miles on my odometer,
and on average our efficiency is about 2.05 miles per kilowatt hour. So I just reset trip
B and we can check our efficiency as we drive. We currently have 134 miles in tow mode, but that
should start recalculating once it has a good idea of how much weight is behind us. Let's go.
And since this trailer does weigh more than the truck,
the trailer itself has brakes which help us slow down as we go down hills or if we need
to stop. The truck's not doing all of the work. However, the extra weight behind us
is useful when we're slowing down because the electric motors, one on each tire, can absorb
the extra momentum and turn it into electricity for the battery through the regenerative braking.
So right now we're heading to the scales. It says that we are 9 miles away and our current
charge after going down a hill is 146...after going down a hill and some recalculations.
-[Direction Assistant's voice] In a quarter mile turn left onto East Main Street.
-So we will see with 9 miles of actual distance, now our range has gone down
to 136. We'll see what it is when we arrive. Accelerating onto the freeway.
There's so much power in this thing. I can barely even feel the trailer back there. I mean I feel
the tug of the trailer behind me but the power of the electric motor is just, like, easy.
Now let's see what happens with the battery. After driving 9 miles our
new battery range indicator is 201, so we increased our range.
-[Direction Assistant's voice] Your destination is on the left.
-We increased our range by like 70 miles.
93,000 pounds, so we're going to have to go find 700 more pounds to add to the trailer just so I
can get that 10,000...all those zeros in the title. To get an extra thousand pounds added
on the trailer I'm swinging by my buddies over at OSH Cut. If you remember, they're the ones
that laser cut all of the parts that we used inside of this Humvee, like the motor mounts,
the battery boxes, the display board, so it only makes sense that we come back for some scrap
metal to go on the bed to get us over 10,000 pounds. Just shy of 1,000. And with the extra
1,000 pounds of weight we're still balanced. We positioned it right over the axles. Now we
truly have over 10,000 pounds of weight behind the Rivian. Something seriously weird is happening now
though because we have 635 miles of range left. That doesn't make any sense at all.
It might not be my smartest idea but let's see how fast we can accelerate. Alright,
we are getting onto the freeway from a full stop. We're doing 0-60. Three, two, one go.
I peeled out back there, there was gravel. Alright, 30...oh snap...40, 50, 60.
-[Zack's friend] 12 seconds.
-[Zack] 12 seconds! 0-60 with 10,000 pounds. That's crazy. We're not doing that again.
Looks like our range is recalculating, dropping from 600 down to who knows what.
Super weird though. What the heck! I mean we are doing the regen but there should never be 600
miles of range in this thing. So it looks like we've gone about 52 miles. We have 95 miles of
range left. Kind of interesting that our trailer is empty back there, no Humvee on that animation.
Our efficiency graph is still as useless as ever. One cool thing though if you'll see as we're
driving along the freeway, as I accelerate, that blue bar rises, and if I let off the accelerator
we start putting power back into the battery. So I don't have to use the brakes when I'm slowing
down and we're actually putting juice back into the battery adding range, which is kind of nice.
So we've
officially gone
78 miles and the truck says we have 40 miles left, which probably means about 30 miles if
we were to drive until completely empty, but even with the gas vehicle you wouldn't do that.
So based off of that, I estimate we would be able to go about 110 miles which is about one third of
our original range that we had at the beginning of the day if we weren't towing a trailer. So
10,000 pounds on the back of the Rivian R1T cuts your range by about two thirds.
I gotta give OSH Cut their metal back since it is pretty valuable stuff,
and then I probably have to find a charger or I'm not going to make it up to Salt Lake. And charging
with a trailer is probably a whole different can of worms, but let's find out together.
So looking for a charger here on the Rivian console, the ones with two lightning bolts are
slightly faster than the single lightning bolts. But the super fast ones have three lightning bolts
like this guy here and it's 26 miles away. We should be able to make it since we have 634 miles
left. Yeah, something's not quite right there but let's see what happens. We should be just fine.
I guess Rivian and their whole network of vehicles isn't really used to calculating
this much weight in this temperature going this far. Because yeah, the estimates and
the calculations of how much range I have left are all over the place, between 200 and 300. Right now
it says I have 100 miles left, but I know I'm down to like 20. So it should be interesting.
Finally made it to a charger. We have 11 miles of range left and here we are at Camping World and
every single one of these charging stalls is taken up by non-EV vehicles. There are a few open ones,
I would have to disconnect my trailer. Normally I charge at home and this is probably why. So
I skipped that charger and went down the road to find another charger. Luckily it was a pull
through, and it's also the slowest charger in the world and my truck is still broken.
We've been here for about, I don't know, 15-20 minutes now. And I pulled in on zero miles left.
It's charged zero miles but it says it's added 600, which is kind of embarrassing. It has never
done this before, and this was supposed to show what EV's were capable of but this Rivian's being
super weird. Either way, it says it'll be done charging in about 24 hours, so I'm going to be
here a while. There is a faster charger up the road but I would not have been able to make it.
This burrito is really good though.
So I've been here for about 45 minutes now and we've added 10 miles of range. There is a 50
kilowatt charger about 4 miles up the road, so I think I'm going to take off the trailer
and try that one out. Alright, I found a new fast charger. Also not trailer friendly down
this alleyway here, but you know it's a fast charger because of the way the plug
looks. The bottom two ports do straight DC power going right into the battery.
And the best thing is this one is free and it is actually working. Charging at
a rate of 107 miles an hour, and I should only have to stay here for about 30 or 40
minutes to get enough range to finish. This charger's a 50 kilowatt charger and I think
the Rivian can charge at 200 kilowatts. We obviously haven't seen any of those
chargers around here. They're probably still building out the network. Tesla,
on the other hand, has a worldwide network that is always functioning it seems like.
Alright, it's dark now. I've added 100 miles of range with that fast charger and switched
back to tow mode and we have 478 miles of range left which we know is a lie,
and extremely unhelpful. When range is so important that metric needs to be
extremely accurate, but we're almost to Jeremey's which will end this adventure.
And now we finally have the answer. In below freezing weather the Rivian R1T can tow
10,000 pounds for 100 miles before becoming completely empty. And honestly that's pretty
impressive. I could have avoided the unfortunate charging situation there
at the end if I planned it a bit better. But at the same time it was telling me I had 600
miles left. What the heck is that about? But it is a very outlier situation and I'm surprised
we even got a hundred miles out of the deal in the first place. Plus, we only used about $13
worth of electricity. So while electric trucks might not be best for long haulers just yet,
for me, I still kind of like it. If you have any questions, leave them down in the comments. Come
hang out with me on Instagram, and thanks a ton for watching. I'll see you around.