Oops, Wrong Color Bumper Cancels an R2 Owner’s Pickup

A reservation holder posting as u/andymoog on r/RivianR2 received a call at 8am today, six hours before his pickup was scheduled, telling him it was off. His original date was July 8th, and it slipped once already for shipping delays, no big deal, that kind of thing has been normal for a while now. Today was the makeup date. The vehicle showed delivered to the service center earlier in the week; everything looked fine on paper, right up until somebody actually walked around it.

The bumper did not match the rest of the vehicle. Rivian told him it came out in El Cap Granite, the darker grey used on R1, instead of Half Moon Grey. El Cap is not even a color you can order on an R2.

They gave him three ways to handle it. Take delivery today and let service swap the bumper down the road, except service killed that option itself and canceled the appointment anyway. Wait about three weeks for the right part to show up. Or unmatch the VIN completely and get rematched to a different build, two to four weeks, “prioritized,” whatever that ends up meaning in practice.

All three of those mean more waiting on top of the wait he already had. And a bumper is a pretty small thing to lose a delivery day over, except it is not really about the bumper. It is about a vehicle rolling all the way to a customer handoff with a body panel that was never supposed to be there, and nobody catching it until the morning of pickup. VINs are already climbing into the 4100s, with plenty of people still stuck waiting.

Rivian catching it before the customer drove off in it is the right outcome, obviously. But it is worth asking how we got this far before someone at the service center noticed.

author avatar
Jose Castillo Founder and Editor
Jose Castillo is the founder of RivianTrackr and has owned and driven Rivians since early in the brand's consumer history. He currently drives an R1S and an R2 in Florida and uses Universal Hands-Free every day. As a credentialed Rivian journalist, he has covered the R2 First Drive in Park City and SXSW firsthand and has spoken directly with Rivian's software and autonomy leadership.
Add RivianTrackr as a preferred source on Google

Share this story

6 Comments

  1. It’s almost like a trading card error pack – is it worth more like that? Jokes aside it’s concerning it left the factory like that.. but it is good the service center saw it. Scaling to so many new R2’s all at once is really an extremely difficult job!

  2. It raises the far far more concerning issue as to if they can mismatch something so obvious as the color of one of the largest components of the exterior, what may be mismatched inside? A connector, wire gauge, screw/bolt, seatbelt harness, etc.

    Hope Rivian sees this as a wake up call to act a bit more professionally

  3. The strangest thing here is that El Cap isn’t even an option for any currently available R2 variant….so how did an R2 bumper even get produced in that color?

  4. hMM the pic of the delivery center. The customer was the one who found out? Hmm doesn’t delivery center people know what to look for? Guess that don’t have no color samples on what the vehicle is being delivered. Then the final assembly people at the plant, and the truck driver would of maybe saw a difference. But the assembly personnel didn’t even care, grab a part/ bolt/ screw it in, next vehicle, just get it out the door to make the count look good… Not good for all… now the pile up at the plant, start working 24 hours rivian personnel to fix the glitch and replace parts. wow.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *