Rivian’s electric pickup truck, the R1T, recorded a reliability score of 20 out of 100 in Consumer Reports’ survey, placing it below every gas-powered truck the organization tested. For prospective buyers weighing a switch from a conventional pickup to an electric one, that number carries real weight. It signals that early adopters of the R1T have faced repair and dependability problems at a rate that no traditional competitor matched in the same evaluation period.
Why a 20 out of 100 reliability score changes the R1T calculus
A score that low does not just dent brand perception. It has a direct financial consequence for anyone who owns or plans to buy a Rivian R1T. Trucks that earn poor reliability marks tend to lose resale value faster than their better-rated peers, because used-car buyers and dealers factor in the expected cost of repairs when setting prices. When a vehicle sits at the bottom of every truck tested in a widely followed survey, that discount pressure intensifies.
The broader Consumer Reports survey found that electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids, as a category, still lag gas models in reliability, even as the gap has started to narrow. But the R1T’s position is distinct. Other EVs have improved enough to close some of that distance. The R1T, by contrast, sits far behind not just gas trucks but many other electric vehicles as well. That isolation at the bottom of the truck rankings makes it harder for Rivian to argue the score reflects a temporary, category-wide growing pain.
A reasonable hypothesis follows from the data: if the R1T generates a higher volume of owner complaints per unit sold than legacy gas trucks, its depreciation curve over the next two years will be steeper. Complaint volume is not the only driver of resale value, but it is one of the most visible signals to dealers and auction houses. When federal complaint records and a major consumer survey both point in the same direction, the pricing effect tends to compound.
For current R1T owners, that means thinking beyond day-to-day satisfaction and considering exit timing. If the market begins to price in expectations of higher repair costs, trade-in offers could weaken faster than owners of rival pickups experience. Conversely, if Rivian manages to address the most frequent trouble spots quickly and visibly, it could slow or partially reverse any reliability-driven hit to residual values.
Federal complaint data and the Consumer Reports survey align
Two independent data streams support the reliability concern. The first is the Consumer Reports owner survey itself, which collected responses across recent model years and scored the R1T at 20. The survey compared EVs and plug-in hybrids against gas vehicles, and the R1T’s result was the worst among all trucks in the study, according to the AP’s summary of the findings.
The second stream is the federal government’s own record of owner-submitted safety and quality complaints. The NHTSA complaints database is a public portal where any vehicle owner can file a report about problems they have experienced. For the R1T, those filings span categories including battery faults, drive-unit issues, and build-quality defects. Each complaint is logged individually and can be filtered by make, model, and component, giving researchers and journalists a granular view of where problems cluster.
Neither dataset alone tells the full story. The Consumer Reports survey captures the breadth of owner dissatisfaction across many types of problems, from minor annoyances to serious mechanical failures. The NHTSA portal captures the subset of issues that owners felt strongly enough about to report to a federal agency. When both sources point to elevated trouble rates for the same vehicle, the signal is harder to dismiss as statistical noise or survey bias.
Rivian has not released its own warranty-claim data publicly, and the company’s internal service records are not part of the available evidence. That gap matters. Without Rivian’s own accounting of how many R1T units required repairs, how quickly those repairs were completed, and what components failed most often, outside observers are left to rely on owner-reported data from Consumer Reports and NHTSA. Those sources are credible and widely used, but they cannot capture the full picture of a manufacturer’s quality trajectory the way internal records could.
At the same time, the presence of complaints does not automatically mean a truck is unsafe or unusable. Some issues may be software bugs resolved by over-the-air updates, while others involve hardware replacements that, once completed, may not recur. The open question is how frequently those problems arise and how disruptive they are to daily use compared with rival trucks.
Gaps in the R1T reliability picture buyers should track
Several questions remain open. The Consumer Reports survey score of 20 is a summary statistic. The full truck-by-truck reliability tables, including exact sample sizes for the R1T and each gas competitor, have not been made available in the public reporting reviewed here. Without knowing how many R1T owners responded versus how many Ford F-150 or Chevrolet Silverado owners responded, it is difficult to assess whether the sample was large enough to produce a stable estimate or whether a small respondent pool amplified a few bad experiences.
The NHTSA complaint database is similarly useful but incomplete on its own. Raw complaint counts do not account for how many vehicles are on the road. A truck that has sold tens of thousands of units and generated 200 complaints is in a very different position than one that has sold a few thousand units and generated the same number. Normalizing complaint volume by sales or registration data is necessary to make a fair comparison, and that calculation has not been published in the sources available here.
Another unknown is how much of the R1T’s trouble rate stems from its status as a first-generation product from a young automaker. Early production runs often expose design and manufacturing weaknesses that later model years quietly fix. If Rivian has already implemented running changes to components or assembly processes, future reliability for new buyers could improve even if early owners continue to report problems. Without detailed, model-year-specific breakdowns, however, shoppers cannot easily distinguish between early-build risk and ongoing systemic issues.
Software also complicates the picture. The R1T relies heavily on digital controls and over-the-air updates, which can both cause and cure problems. A glitchy update can temporarily knock out features or trigger warning lights, prompting owners to file complaints. Later patches may resolve those issues without any hardware intervention. Traditional reliability surveys, which often treat each incident as a discrete problem, may not fully capture how quickly software-related defects are addressed or how long they persist.
Depreciation data over the next 12 to 24 months will be the clearest test of whether the reliability score translates into real dollar losses for R1T owners. Used-truck pricing services and auction results will show whether buyers are discounting the R1T more aggressively than comparable gas trucks. If wholesale prices for low-mileage R1Ts fall noticeably faster than those for similarly equipped full-size pickups, that would be a strong indication that reliability perceptions are weighing on the market.
For now, prospective buyers face a trade-off. The R1T offers capabilities and performance that many traditional pickups cannot match, from instant electric torque to unique packaging and off-road features. Against that, the available data point to a truck that, at least in its early years, has struggled more with dependability than its gas counterparts. Until more comprehensive information emerges, shoppers will need to decide how much weight to give a 20 out of 100 reliability score and a thick stack of owner complaints when balancing the appeal of an innovative electric truck against the risks that come with being an early adopter.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
