I’m sitting behind the wheel of a recently minted Rivian R1T pick-up truck, about to take a test drive around a track near the company’s 3.3-million square-foot manufacturing plant in Normal, Illinois, 132 miles south-west of Chicago. My left foot is on the brake. My right foot is on the accelerator. Both are floored, but I’m not moving yet.
Lily Macaruso and Laura Ewan, my Rivian guides for this maiden voyage, are asking me to count down from three and take my foot off the brake when I get to one. They are also urging me to brace myself and ask if, by the way, I suffer from motion sickness. Starting to get a little nervous, I wonder what they are talking about.
In a conventional truck — one with a combustion engine — “flooring it” is frowned upon as doing so can flood the engine with gas. But I’m in a Rivian. There is no engine; there’s just a massive battery pack nestled underneath the cabin I’m sitting in. I get to one and release my left foot. The R1T explodes — and I mean explodes — down the pavement. We go from zero to well above 60 miles per hour in what seems like an instant. The G force feels tremendous.