- A Rivian owner has recorded a video of their R1T apparently cutting through a carrot.
- The test follows videos showing a Tesla Cybertruck pinching and hurting a person’s finger.
- On the first attempt, the pinch protection system allegedly worked, but not in the second and third.
Tesla is a divisive brand, and that means that it gets a lot of attention online every time it does something like, say, allow one of its vehicles to slice a carrot with its auto closing frunk. However, it isn’t the only American EV manufacturer that may struggle to protect its owners’ fingers.
Last week, we saw a Cybertruck owner get his finger stuck in between the frunk lid and frame of the vehicle, but today it’s Rivian that’s in the hot seat. Its all-electric pickup, the R1T, may also do too little to protect users’ appendages, as a recent round of carrot testing appears to show.
Read: Man Puts His Finger Where He Shouldn’t To Test Tesla’s Cybertruck Update
In a short video posted to the r/Rivian Subreddit, an owner shows the R1T’s frunk lid slicing through a carrot. What is perhaps most alarming about the video is that the truck doesn’t cut through the vegetable cleanly, instead stopping when it initially meets resistance, and then continuing to force its way down until it breaks the tip of the carrot off.
The way the R1T’s frunk lid appears to be working hard break the veggie seems to suggest that something is wrong with its pinch protection feature, and has owners concerned for their fingers, and the digits of their loved ones.
The test is a little confusing, since an earlier video performing the same test showed that the R1T’s auto-closing frunk safely stopped closing when it met resistance. Indeed, the Redditor who posted this video said that on their first attempt, the pinch protection worked, “but on the second one and the third it did not. The video is from the third.”
Commenters posit that this might mean that the R1T’s is designed to clamp down harder the more times it is asked to close its frunk. That could be because the engineers assume that an owner attempting to close the lid multiple times wants it to close over a bag (or other item) which just a little too big to fit in the storage compartment — though that remains conjecture, at this point.
We have reached out to Rivian for more information on this video, but the automaker has yet to respond. In the meantime, it seems prudent to advise people to keep their fingers clear of all vehicles’ closing doors (and lids), regardless of which manufacturer produced it.
