Rivian is replacing a customer’s R2 with a new vehicle after finding further problems with its air-conditioning compressor, and its engineers will keep the vehicle to study it, the owner said, five weeks after he reported that the part had been placed on a containment hold.
The R2 owner, Jose Castillo, disclosed the swap in an article and a post on X on Sunday.
“My R2 is getting swapped for a new one,” Castillo wrote. “Rivian found continued issues with my AC compressor that weren’t normal, and engineering wants to use my car to learn more,” he added.
He said the vehicle, an R2 Performance Launch Edition, was at a service center and that he had not yet been given a replacement.
The EV maker, founded and led by RJ Scaringe, has not commented publicly on the case as of press time.
An Unrelated Visit
The compressor was not the reason for the service appointment.
“I had brought it in for a scheduled suspension noise and not related to HVAC,” Castillo wrote in a reply on X.
Asked how the fault was identified, he answered that it was “diagnostics from the sounds of it.”
In his article he described the case as “apparently a unique situation.”
“If my car helps the engineering team learn something, I’m more than happy to hand it over,” he wrote.
Castillo took delivery at Rivian’s plant in Normal, Illinois, and he has since passed 5,000 miles in it.
The August Failure
The same component failed in the vehicle’s first month.
Castillo reported on August 22 that the R2 had begun blowing warm air in South Florida, in what he later described as 98-degree heat.
“AC compressor did in fact have a mechanical failure,” he wrote two days later, after a service visit.
He said Rivian had ordered a new compressor and lent him an R1S in the meantime.
The repair did not go as planned.
“The first replacement got flagged too, the part is on a containment hold,” Castillo wrote on August 28, adding that the car was “fixed under warranty, zero cost” and returned to him within the week.
A containment hold is a quality measure in which a manufacturer or supplier sets aside a batch of parts suspected of a fault. Castillo suggested at the time that his was not the only car involved.
“I expect other R2 owners may be affected,” he wrote on August 27. “I’m not sure how many, but I find it unlikely that the issue is limited to one vehicle,” he added.
He was more specific on the Rivian Forums site two days later.
“This was the first R2 with HVAC issues and so Rivian really had to figure out what was going on and then identified that there are others with this issue due to a bad part,” he wrote.
Rivian has not said how many R2s were built with compressors from the batch placed on hold, or whether it contacted their owners.
No Records
Public records do not show a broader compressor problem.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) listed three owner complaints for the R2 as of Sunday, none of them about air conditioning.
Two readers commenting on his August article described R2s delivered without working air conditioning, and one of them later said the service center had traced it to a different part.
An Early-Build R2
The R2 is Rivian’s first mass-market model and the centre of its growth plan.
Deliveries to external customers began on June 9, and the Performance version with the Launch Package starts at $57,990.
The launch has brought a series of quality problems, with EV counting five separate issues in the first 47 days of deliveries, according to public comments by owners.
In September, Rivian told some R2 owners to stop driving pending checks on a high-voltage fastener, and later said only 14 vehicles were affected.
That recall is unrelated to the compressor.
Production has risen quickly, with the highest vehicle identification number reported by owners passing 13,000 in late September and 13,700 as of Sunday.
