A warning to Rivian R2 buyers from a longtime R1T owner has drawn more than 400 comments in 48 hours, over the EV maker’s service as it continues ramping production and deliveries of the first R2 trim.
The post on the 136,000-member r/Rivian community was published Thursday by an owner who has driven a 2022 R1T for three years. “Service is still awful, and getting worse,” the owner wrote.
The post directly challenged founder and chief executive RJ Scaringe’s public claims of progress, warning buyers that “RJ is out on social cooking up BS on service improvements.”
Owner’s complaints converge on the same service and customer organization whose dismantling EV exclusively linked to the run of R2 quality faults — with commenters in the thread drawing the connection to the cuts unprompted.
Uber became a Rivian shareholder in March, taking an initial $300 million stake as part of an up-to-$1.25 billion commitment tied to a planned fleet of 50,000 autonomous R2 robotaxis on its platform.
The Sterling Case
The owner described waiting more than four weeks for an appointment at Rivian‘s service center in Sterling, Virginia, only to be told at drop-off that technicians could not look at the truck for another week.
No loaner vehicle was available, and the center offered Uber ride credits instead — an option the owner called unworkable with two child car seats.
Staff floated a possible loaner by the following Tuesday, but only if the truck sat in the lot for five days first.
“My repair is a 4 hour job,” the owner wrote in the comments, arguing the center could have lined up a one-to-two-day window rather than a week-long hold he could not bridge by ride-share with two children.
In a later update, the owner said the complaint was not aimed at the Sterling staff but at corporate cost-cutting that reduced transportation options owners had received for the previous three years.
“That is a downgrade to the minimal service I expect,” he wrote, adding that as a 2022 owner he accepts long waits and vehicles sitting in the lot as normal.
The owner said in the comments he was sending a demand letter to [email protected], would secure his own rental car, and would pursue the cost in small claims court.
By his own math, the Uber credits will cost Rivian more than the roughly $40-a-day airport rental he says he is prepared to accept.
The Policy Change
Rivian stopped providing third-party rental cars through Enterprise when no loaner is available, leaving ride-share credits as the default fallback.
“They ended the Enterprise rentals a few months ago,” one R1S owner wrote.
“They are being cheap,” the original poster responded, describing the ride-share substitution as a safety hazard for owners who cannot fit child seats into an Uber.
A separate thread on Rivian Forums documented the shift in late March, with owners posting service-center messages stating that no alternative transportation would be provided unless a vehicle stayed in the shop for more than 48 hours, and describing $300 Uber credits that expired before repairs finished.
Several owners in the Reddit thread said the credits fail entirely for families, rural owners outside ride-share coverage, or anyone living hours from a service center.
The policy also appears to be applied unevenly, with owners in Malvern, Pennsylvania, Franklin, Tennessee, and Gaithersburg, Maryland reporting that their centers still arrange Enterprise rentals.
“That’s absolutely unacceptable,” the original poster wrote when a fellow owner described receiving a rental that same week, noting that his own center sits next to Washington Dulles International Airport, where rental cars are easy to access.
Rather than scrapping the credits, he proposed offering Uber as an incentive for faster service while placing families for whom ride-share fails into a separate line — writing that he is fine waiting, and that his objection is to what he called Rivian’s tough-luck position.
One R1S owner recounted being told by a service intake employee in Chicago that the ride-credit substitution was for the survival of the company.
The Staffing Cuts
The service complaints land on a network that has been cut repeatedly in the past ten months, a sequence EV has documented in detail.
Rivian’s October 2025 restructuring eliminated more than 600 jobs and dismantled the vehicle operations organization responsible for pre-delivery inspections and delivery standards, a person familiar with the matter told EV.
Two separate sources linked the breakdown directly to the run of five R2 quality issues in the first 47 days of customer deliveries.
Nine days after R2 deliveries began, the company laid off more than 300 workers from the same service and customer organization, saying at the time it had “restructured a handful of teams” to profitably scale the business.
Headcount overall has grown to 17,000, but the additions have been concentrated in engineering, manufacturing and the Volkswagen software joint venture, while customer-facing teams have thinned across successive rounds.
“They cut all those service center managers back in June,” a Reddit user wrote of the degraded experience.
Another owner noted that mobile service can relieve pressure on the centers, but that “Rivian just laid off a bunch of mobile service” — an account echoed by an R1T owner who said mobile technicians no longer seem to be available in his area.
The R2 Stakes
Leaning on the second-shift timing: Rivian is targeting 20,000 to 25,000 R2 deliveries this year within a full-year range of 65,000 to 70,000 vehicles, a plan that leans on the fourth quarter, when a second shift at Normal is due to add material volume.
R2 buyers have already absorbed delivery delays attributed to transportation issues, a VIN-matching stall that left inventory building at the Normal plant, and a sharply slowing VIN-assignment pace through early August.
Reservation holders in the thread said the service accounts were changing their purchase decisions.
“I am considering giving up my reservation,” one wrote, saying the R2 would be his only car.
“I will most likely cancel my Rivian order over this,” another commenter wrote, comparing the policy unfavorably to Tesla.
Others said Rivian‘s approach compared poorly with loaner programs at Lexus, Audi, Volvo and BMW dealers at similar or lower price points.
The Other Side
The picture is not uniform, and several owners pushed back.
A Bay Area R1 owner of four years wrote that local service “has improved immensely,” describing a 12-volt battery replacement completed by mobile service within two days of booking — a failure pattern EV has covered separately on first-generation vehicles.
Owners in Chicago, San Diego, eastern Pennsylvania and Atlanta reported timely appointments and available loaners, suggesting the experience varies sharply by location and capacity.
Rivian has said over the past months that it has been scaling its sales, service and charging infrastructure across the country ahead of the R2 rollout, and the company has not publicly addressed the loaner and rental policy described in the thread.
