An owner of a Rivian R1S said he walked away without injury from a high-speed crash after striking a streetlight, veering off the road and hitting a tree.
The owner, Dany Caron, set out the crash in his own words in a Rivian owners group on Facebook. “If you’re wondering whether your R1S is sturdy, I just had an accident with mine,” Caron wrote.
“I hit a streetlight on the highway at 100 km/h [62mph], veered off into the woods, and crashed into a tree. The interior of the Rivian is still intact (except for the airbags), and I’m still alive, without a single scratch,” he added before thanking to the EV maker.
The 100 km/h he cited is about 62 mph. The post — shared on X by Chris Hilbert — did not say what caused him to lose control or which model year his R1S was.
The model year matters because Rivian re-engineered the SUV for 2025, and its top US safety award applies only to cars built after that overhaul.
Photographs posted with the account, taken at night at the crash site and later in daylight, showed the silver SUV nose-down in undergrowth with a felled tree across its roof.
A daylight image showed the front end crushed against a concrete barrier, with panels torn and buckled, though the wheels remained attached.
Inside, the windscreen was shattered where a branch had struck it, though the laminated glass held together rather than collapsing into the cabin, and the fixed glass roof was cracked only along its front edge.
The side curtain and front passenger airbags had deployed, and the seats and pillars appeared to have kept their shape, consistent with Caron’s account of an intact cabin.
Top Marks From the IIHS
The 2026 R1S holds the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s (IIHS) Top Safety Pick+ rating, the group’s highest.
The SUV was one of only two large SUVs to earn the 2026 award, alongside the Volvo EX90, and the only one from a US automaker, Rivian said.
The SUV was rated ‘good’, the best of the four possible grades, in all three of the institute’s crashworthiness tests — small-overlap front, updated moderate-overlap front, and updated side.
It was also rated ‘good’ for pedestrian crash prevention and seat-belt reminders. Its headlights were rated acceptable, one step down.
The plus tier requires acceptable-or-better headlights as standard across all trims, a bar the R1S met.
In the frontal tests, the dummy readings showed low injury risk to the head, chest and legs, and in the redesigned side test the intruding barrier stopped well short of the driver’s seat.
Rivian redesigned the R1S for the 2025 model year, strengthening the front body structure and the rear seats to improve protection in frontal crashes, and the award applies only to vehicles built after August 2024 — so an owner driving an earlier first-generation R1S would not be covered by it.
The second-generation SUV also brought a re-engineered platform and simplified electronics, and it took the same top pick in 2023 and 2025.
The institute toughened its 2026 standards, and the change exposed a split within Rivian‘s own range.
The award now demands a good score on an updated moderate-overlap-front test that stresses rear-seat protection: the R1S passed, but the R1T pickup, which shares its platform, managed only acceptable and dropped off the 2026 list, keeping its 2025 rating for the current model year.
Tesla‘s Cybertruck also took the top 2026 award, the only pickup to do so, while its Model 3 and Model Y fell off the list.
Rivian’s Flagship
The R1S is Rivian‘s large three-row SUV, seating up to seven, and, with the R1T pickup, the pricier half of a line-up the company is now stretching downmarket. The SUV offers dual-, tri- and quad-motor drivetrains, up to around 400 miles of range and the off-road hardware that anchors Rivian‘s adventure positioning.
Built at Rivian‘s plant in Normal, Illinois, the R1S was the model that established the brand, and it remains among its most expensive as the company ramps up the cheaper R2 to chase higher volumes.
Rivian began public deliveries of the R2 in June, aiming to hand over 20,000 to 25,000 of the mass-market SUVs this year, more than 1,100 of them in the second quarter, and has reaffirmed guidance of 62,000 to 67,000 total vehicles.
