And so it happened. The (currently still small, but hopefully growing) group of Santa Barbara Rivian club (SBRC) members met at Handlebar Coffee Roasters on De La Vina Street on Saturday for its inaugural ‘coffee and cars’ meetup. As usual, the coffeeshop was full of Santa Barbarans enjoying the kickoff of the weekend with a macchiato or one of the delicious pastries, but we we lucky to find a lovely spot for our gathering.
After brief introductions, the main topic of our conversation was Rivian and the experiences we have had with our adventure vehicles so far:
- Owned Rivian models by club members: all R1S, launch edition and Adventure
- Delivery dates: everybody took delivery this year (if fact, we all picked up our R1s at the service center in El Segundo)
- Colors: midnight black, limestone
- Interior: we were all raving about the elegance of black mountain & dark ash wood
- Our favorite features: the luxurious look and feel, the built quality, the large 16 inch dashboard & infotainment system, the creative extra like the removable bluetooth speakers, the various charger, the flashlight placed in the side door on the driver’s side, the surround view & bird-eye view cameras, among others
- Our challenges: lack of intuition when locking/unlocking the car, Alexa voice commands, Rivian’s battery “vampire” drain (drastically improved with the latest software update), the “kneel” mode (a great feature) only seems to work on flat surfaces, but not on a slope.
We distributed the SBRC business cards among the members with the goal of increasing awareness for the existance of our club and “recruit” other other Rivian owners and EV enthusiasts to join our community!
We agreed that this first get-together with the goal of exchanges experiences, stories and tips was fund and are looking forward to a next club event when we”ll all hit the road. Will be exciting to see (and document) a line up of Santa Barbara Rivians!
