A meditation on Rivian's quad-motor machines and exciting EVs
Rivian's new Quads aren't perfect, but they're plenty impressive
Good morning, dear readers. I am again on the home front, but only just. I spent somewhere just short of 20 hours yesterday winding my way back from the U.K., where lately I was exploring the 2025 Goodwood Festival of Speed. I won't ramble too much about my time there just yet, as I have a few stories yet to submit on what I saw there, and they likely won't see the light of your browsers until sometime next week. So, more on that to come.
Until then, some thoughts on Rivian’s latest, most high-performance machines yet, and why I wish more folks would get more excited about the promises yet to come.
Rivian Quads and the false equivalence of noise and excitement
There are a lot of people out there who call EVs boring, and honestly, after spending a few days watching various machines sling themselves up the hill at Goodwood, I can see why. On first blush, after watching a vintage Grand Prix machine roar and smoke its way past, some lucky soul onboard squinting through a pair of goggles and sawing at a steering wheel with a diameter measured in astronomical units, the electric machines that whispered on by afterwards did seem a bit underwhelming.
But I think it's important to ask oneself why we celebrate that Grand Prix machine. Is it because it made a lot of noise, or because it was the most advanced machine for speed on the planet at its time? It is, of course, the latter. The sound and the fury were purely side effects.
At this year's Goodwood, while I was absolutely thrilled to see Damon Hill and David Coulthard and various other of my favorite drivers screaming up the hill in F1 machines of various vintages, I found myself quite annoyed at the sound of most modern hypercars made by various companies tripping over each other to deliver a "pure" driving experience in some multi-million-dollar, ornately sculpted, wildly overpowered machine.
Yes, they screamed or wailed or otherwise made some evocative sound that echoed through the grandstands, but it all felt very contrived considering the new records set the day before the event by the Rimac Nevera R. That thing made nary a sound when it tore up the hill, yet it was unquestionably the fastest road-legal machine there, having announced a bevy of acceleration, braking, and speed records besting everything else on the planet.
That made all those ornate new hypercars seem like peacocks strutting around, making a godawful racket just for the sake of attention. I don't know about you, but I don't find peacocks particularly exciting.
Many of these machines claim that the intent is driver engagement. I appreciate that, but any car reviewer worth their salt will tell you that a well-tuned Miata offers a far more pure, more engaging driving experience than your average hypercar, yet I didn't see anyone celebrating the MX5 at Goodwood.
It's a question of maximum performance vs. maximum fanfare, which brings me back to Rivian's latest. The company's new four-motor machines have over 1,000 horsepower and can accelerate far more quickly than any machine of that size really needs to. That's not what impressed me. What impressed me was the control of those individual motors, enabling the summit of challenging terrain with little fuss.
No worries about locking differentials, no worries about choosing the right gear, just point and shoot. With the central touchscreen displaying which of the four motors was making what power, it was fascinating to see the R1S I was working up a sheer rock surface power up each individual wheel as it had grip. It was even more impressive as I let the recuperative braking handle my descent down a steep, gravel slope. The SUV just cruised straight down at a controlled speed, adjusting the regen at each wheel dynamically to make that so.
And of course they did all that silently, which just made the experience of getting out and through nature all the more enjoyable.
EVs with one motor per wheel are still a rare phenomenon, and while Rimac is clearly top shelf in the performance division there, I'm excited that Rivian brings it to the road in a (relatively) attainable way. BMW has also indicated it has some exciting stuff to come in this area, and after my earlier time behind a prototype iX3 with just two motors, I can't wait to feel something with four.
But what about that excitement? Can EVs deliver that? There's clearly room for improvement, but Hyundai in particular is doing some great things there, putting a strong focus on making EVs as fun as they are fast. The company unveiled the Ioniq 6 N at Goodwood this week, and I do have some impressions to come on that, but I'm sorry to say you'll have to wait until next week for those. (You can, though, get a sneak peek of the sound in this video.)
Until then, check out my impressions of Rivian's new Quad-motor machines over at Ars Technica. They're not perfect, and they're way more than anyone needs from a performance standpoint, but then performance is rarely about need in the automotive sense.
Rivian's new Quad-Motor R1T and R1S beat the competition in any conditions - Ars Technica
Thanks as always for reading. Be well, and do good.