“We only made it up. Now we gotta get down.” Sean Holman and Frank Markus may work on opposite sides of the business
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00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:02 Ringing.
00:16 Connecting.
00:20 There he is.
00:21 Cool.
00:22 Hey, what's up?
00:24 Hey, wow.
00:25 You guys look pretty high up.
00:26 Yeah, we got the camera here turned around
00:28 so you can see the lovely town of Telluride.
00:30 Yeah, we're probably 10,000.
00:31 10,500 feet or so.
00:33 Something like that.
00:34 Yeah, good for you, Telluride.
00:35 Had it in a rock crawl mode, and so far this leg's
00:38 been really smooth.
00:39 That's awesome.
00:40 Frank, I suck at mud ones.
00:42 Nah!
00:44 That scenery's gorgeous.
00:45 I'm excited to get back out there.
00:47 Wow, I'm very happy you guys made it.
00:51 I was a little worried.
00:52 We only made it up.
00:54 Now we got to get down.
00:55 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:59 [MUSIC PLAYING]
01:02 Yeah, so I've heard that Motor Trend's been
01:13 working on a trip for a while.
01:14 Christian Seba was putting something together,
01:16 and the team reached out to me and said, hey,
01:19 we'd love for you to be a part of it
01:20 to get the 4x4 and off-road perspective.
01:23 And if you're free, we'd love to throw you
01:25 on a leg three, which has you going
01:27 through some really technical terrain.
01:28 I said, that sounds frickin' awesome.
01:30 So I said yes, and here I am.
01:32 [MUSIC PLAYING]
01:35 We started in Bartlesville, Oklahoma,
01:40 home of the Price Tower, the Frank Lloyd Wright's
01:43 only skyscraper.
01:44 So I had a nice look at that before I met up
01:46 with the rest of the team.
01:48 And we have ended at LaSalle, Utah.
01:51 So we were the group that went over the Continental Divide.
01:55 I had no aversion to camping.
01:56 That was one of the things.
01:57 Johnny didn't want to camp, so he was originally
01:59 assigned to leg three and was kind of grousing about it.
02:02 So when the lift and shift happened,
02:03 I'm like, oh, I'll take the camping one.
02:06 And it really-- it was a vital part
02:08 of telling the story of the Rivian
02:10 as an adventure off-road vehicle.
02:12 My break away from the modern world
02:14 is to get out in the back country
02:16 and remember how it was 150 years ago before all this stuff
02:20 and immerse myself in some old structure, some old cave,
02:24 some petroglyph, some sort of historical area,
02:26 and remind myself to slow down a little bit.
02:28 To me, that's how I recharge my batteries, if you will.
02:31 Pun intended.
02:34 Frank and I kind of work on different sides of the business.
02:37 He's a technical guy for Motor Trend, big EV background,
02:40 former engineer.
02:41 I'm more of a content and creative guy
02:43 that has a lot of experience in trucking off-road.
02:46 And we both come at this from different directions.
02:51 In so many ways, we were yin and yang.
02:55 He was all about, let's just power through all these things.
02:58 And I was all about, let's see how much we can conserve
03:01 and how far-- how much gas we can have in the tank
03:04 when we arrive at the recharging stations
03:06 and that sort of thing.
03:08 Yeah, so I'm not a battery homer by any means.
03:11 I'm not-- I'd like to think I'm an early adopter.
03:13 But battery technology has been sort of a slow burn for me.
03:18 I wasn't sure if I would really like the technology.
03:20 I knew that there were some benefits-- 100% torque
03:23 at 0 RPM, things like that.
03:25 But all the things I've driven to this point
03:27 didn't have what it takes to do really
03:29 technical off-road driving.
03:31 There hasn't been a vehicle to date from a manufacturer that
03:34 really fills in this gap.
03:36 I think Frank is looking at it from the standpoint
03:39 of the tech and how things work and what
03:43 they put into the vehicle.
03:44 And for me personally, it's about
03:46 how do I relate the traditional 4x4
03:48 to a battery electric vehicle?
03:49 And how can I equate things like lockers and differentials
03:54 and low range crawling gear sets that an electric vehicle
03:57 doesn't need to do the same terrain?
03:59 And basically, distill that down to the enthusiast
04:03 or an off-roader in a way that they
04:04 can understand the differences, but also what's the same.
04:06 [MUSIC PLAYING]
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04:20 Got a little goat parade going on here.
04:24 Quite a lot of dirt on the windshield as well.
04:27 Hey, I'll just use the road, too.
04:29 Hey, we got a lot of goats.
04:34 I kid you not.
04:36 Cutest thing I've seen all day.
04:37 [MUSIC PLAYING]
04:41 I kid you not.
04:42 There's a lot of goats up here.
04:43 Sometimes getting out there, you see nature.
04:45 You see things you weren't able to see.
04:47 On this trip, it was really fascinating
04:48 because of how quiet it was.
04:50 We saw bighorn sheep.
04:51 We saw deer.
04:52 We saw antelope.
04:53 We saw birds.
04:55 We saw groundhogs and prairie dogs and squirrels.
04:59 And it's almost like they hear the crush of the gravel
05:02 under the tires.
05:03 And that crush of gravel sounds like hoofs of another animal.
05:05 They don't care.
05:06 So when you have an internal combustion engine,
05:08 that's the noise that they fear.
05:09 So we ended up just driving, even at speed,
05:12 right up on these guys.
05:13 And they didn't seem to care, which
05:14 got us really close to nature.
05:15 And I think that's another part of it,
05:17 is getting out of the city and reminding yourself,
05:19 kind of slow it down.
05:20 Enjoy the simple life a little bit.
05:22 The part that's been not surprising, but really
05:26 kind of heartwarming in a way, is
05:27 getting to see the reactions from people as we've been out.
05:31 I mean, I've only been here a couple of days.
05:34 Getting to see the people's smiles,
05:36 the folks that actually know the brand already,
05:39 in a grassroots kind of way.
05:41 Folks that know it's something different,
05:44 and they're curious about it.
05:45 When they hear that it's a new American EV truck brand,
05:50 they're actually super stoked.
05:51 They have tons of questions.
05:53 Really, really cool to get to see those reactions in person.
05:56 [MUSIC PLAYING]
05:58 Hey.
05:58 Hi.
05:59 Hey.
05:59 [MUSIC PLAYING]
06:01 See that?
06:02 See how excited people are?
06:03 Right there behind you?
06:04 This is one of those things where
06:05 when you have a new vehicle like this,
06:08 you basically get to see the joy in people's eyes.
06:11 And everywhere we go, they just light up when they see the R1T.
06:14 It's pretty cool.
06:15 [MUSIC PLAYING]
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06:43 Right.
06:44 Here we are.
06:45 Day five.
06:46 Grumpy old man.
06:48 I think today was the fifth.
06:49 Tomorrow's the sixth.
06:50 Are you sure?
06:51 I think.
06:51 But--
06:52 Is it the nighttime?
06:52 That's what I wrote down, anyway.
06:54 I don't even know what day it is.
06:56 Oh my gosh.
06:57 Tomorrow is the day we tackle Black Bear Pass.
07:00 And that's going to be one of the most epic parts
07:03 of this entire adventure.
07:04 I think Frank and I are super lucky,
07:06 and we feel super blessed that we were chosen to be the pair
07:09 that get to do the best part of the trail.
07:11 There's a lot of other cool stuff going on.
07:12 But man, when you get to tackle Black Bear in a vehicle that's
07:14 never done it before, that nobody's ever seen before,
07:17 that's not even on sale yet, as part of your cross-country
07:20 first battery electric vehicle to go coast to coast off road,
07:24 that's a pretty awesome honor.
07:26 With that said, tomorrow's going to be awesome.
07:28 Let's go to bed.
07:29 Peace out.
07:30 Well, here we are at Black Bear Pass, 12,840 feet.
07:38 So for those of you who don't know, Black Bear is one
07:41 of the most epic drives, period, in all of North America.
07:44 And very, very challenging.
07:47 So the fact that we're up here with the R1Ts,
07:50 and we're going to complete it, is
07:51 going to show just how capable these guys are off road.
07:54 And I, for one, am looking forward to it.
07:56 So again, 12,840 feet.
07:58 How many switchbacks?
07:59 A lot.
08:00 117.
08:01 That many.
08:02 [MUSIC PLAYING]
08:05 My highlight was just yesterday, actually.
08:17 We were at Black Bear Pass, which
08:20 is at about 12,000 elevation.
08:23 And we actually went down it all the way into Telluride.
08:27 That was probably the most exciting, amazing, terrifying,
08:32 awesome thing that I've experienced in an R1T,
08:37 and off-roading.
08:39 Black Bear Pass is not the most difficult trail in the world,
08:43 but it is one of the most demanding,
08:44 in terms of skill level, and driver concentration,
08:47 and understanding vehicle dynamics, and things like that.
08:50 I thought this R1T acquitted itself quite well.
08:53 It rode really well.
08:54 It had enough articulation, even with wheels in the air.
08:56 The motors would turn at the same speeds,
08:58 sort of simulating a locker.
09:00 Throttle tip-in was really good.
09:02 The cool thing about it is, instead of a crawler gear,
09:04 you have regenerative braking.
09:05 You put that on maximum, and it'll hold you on a downhill.
09:09 And because you're going all downhill on the trail,
09:12 we actually gained tens of miles by the end
09:14 of the trail in our battery range.
09:16 So it was kind of cool to see that we were creating energy
09:19 going down.
09:20 You really want to be able to move an off-roader inch
09:24 by inch, not foot by foot, or half tire rotation
09:28 by half tire rotation.
09:30 You really want to be able to just walk over things
09:33 as nice and easy as possible.
09:35 And you go into this thinking, oh, there's only one.
09:39 There's no gearing.
09:40 There's no low range.
09:42 There's no levers to pull or buttons to push, hardly.
09:46 But you come off of Black Bear Pass, or Cinnamon Pass,
09:49 and California Path, the ones that I drove over,
09:53 and you start to think, maybe this
09:55 is the natural off-roading.
09:58 This is the way they should be.
09:59 And all of these gearings and low ranges and buttons
10:04 and so forth are elaborate Band-Aids for a powertrain
10:08 that isn't designed to go inch by inch.
10:10 You have to gear it way down to make it do that,
10:13 whereas an electric machine that makes peak torque at zero RPM
10:17 is ready to do that right off the bat.
10:26 There's been thousands of people over the last 10 years
10:30 and the last several years, actually,
10:32 that have really gone into getting the vehicle to where
10:35 it is right now, to the point where we're almost
10:38 ready to share it out with the rest of the world.
10:42 And I think if they were out here,
10:43 their smiles would be as big as ours.
10:45 It's been interesting for me is I
10:53 came into this trip with an open mind,
10:55 because I'm definitely curious about the technology.
10:57 And I want to be able to talk intelligently about it.
10:59 And I was blown away.
11:01 It doesn't feel like a science project.
11:03 It's a complete vehicle that feels
11:05 like it could have come from any manufacturer.
11:07 In fact, some of the weirdness that
11:08 exists in other EVs and the starkness of the interiors
11:11 and things like that, the Rivian feels warmth
11:13 and has a soul to it.
11:15 It's not this cold machine that doesn't want human interaction.
11:19 What they're making is a vehicle that people can willingly
11:22 embrace and be proud of and go, you know what?
11:24 This is me.
11:24 I can take it to the next level.
11:26 It's not for everybody.
11:27 And I get that.
11:28 It's something that's going to be a slow burn
11:30 as different generations come online.
11:32 But if you're an early adopter and you're
11:34 ready to take the plunge, I think
11:35 you can be really surprised with just how good it is.
11:38 Got some janky old snacks in here.
11:51 Let's see.
11:52 Ah, a Clif Bar, a super dusty Dust Ruffle.
11:57 Oh, these nacho cheese Doritos look good.
12:02 I bet they're not broken hardly at all.
12:04 What's your pleasure, Sean?