"The Tesla Cybertruck never got the range-extending battery option the carmaker advertised way back when. But thanks to the ingenuity of a crack team of electric-vehicle nerds, at least one Rivian R1T now sports such an upgrade. The project is a fascinating bit of home-brewed EV hackery and also says a lot about the challenges of designing EV trucks. You can check out how it all came together in the video below."
"The nagging problem here, of course, is that the bed is unusable, seeing as it's packed to the gills with extra Rivian battery modules. So this R1T can barely be called a pickup anymore, as the only thing it's carrying are kilowatt-hours. But the sacrifice happened in service of a larger goal: beating the Cannonball Run record (a cross-country route from Manhattan to Los Angeles) for an electric vehicle."
"They source two extra Rivian packs from crash-tested vehicles, then manage to make a 180-kWh "Mega Pack" that can charge at nearly 300 kWfaster than the Rivian itself at some charging stops. They MacGyver'd a whole cooling system using an ice chest that needs to be refilled at every charging stop. And it actually all works pretty well, feeding energy to the R1T's pack and boosting range dramatically."
A heavily modified 2022 Rivian R1T carries 310 kilowatt-hours of energy storage, providing a theoretical range of 620 miles at about 2 miles per kWh, with lower highway efficiency. The truck bed is filled with extra battery modules, rendering the bed unusable and turning the vehicle into a mobile energy carrier rather than a pickup. The modifications aimed to beat the Cannonball Run electric-vehicle record across the Manhattan-to-Los Angeles route. The team sourced two extra Rivian packs from crash-tested vehicles to build a 180‑kWh "Mega Pack" capable of nearly 300 kW charging. A makeshift ice-chest cooling system supports charging and feeds energy to the R1T pack.
Read at insideevs.com
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