The Rivian Paradox: High customer satisfaction with low reliability (is product reliability still important?)
- Christopher Jackson
- Sep 8
- 6 min read
Most customers aren’t happy with products that break down a lot.
Product unreliability has been behind a lot of losses, cancellations and bankruptcies. A great example is the Yugo - a small, inexpensive car from the former Yugoslavia that gained notoriety in the 1980s and 1990s. It was about half as expensive as similar cars when it hit the US market. And despite a lot of initial ‘excited’ purchasers, it simply stopped selling when people realized how comically unreliable and unsafe it was.
Now there is Rivian. When Rivian burst onto the electric vehicle (EV) scene, it quickly gained a devoted following. The Rivian R1T truck and R1S SUV were praised for their funky designs and innovative features. Owners and enthusiasts love the company’s approach to off-road lifestyles, reinforced by early partnerships with Amazon and promises of building a nationwide ‘outdoor-centric’ charging network.
Yet, beneath the excitement, Rivian’s vehicles aren’t particularly reliable. A 2025 consumer report rates Rivian at the bottom of 22 major auto makers surveyed when it comes to reliability. Issues range from software glitches and sensor malfunctions through fit-and-finish concerns all the way up to vehicles stalling and shutting down.
So why does the same 2025 consumer report identifying how unreliable a Rivian vehicle is also identify a strong (86 %) customer satisfaction rate?
Know Your Customers
While the Yugo is now seen as a ‘reliability punch-line’ across much of the world, it was actually an enduringly popular vehicle throughout Eastern Europe, with production running through to 2008. Even though the Yugo broke down a lot, it was easy to repair.
With the reverberations of post-World War II communist occupation still wreaking a substantial economic impact, many citizens with little disposable income have become skilled at constantly repairing their equipment and belongings to help make do with what they have. The Yugo’s 1.1 litre engine is very small, so carrying spare parts is quite straightforward. Many people did not have the means to purchase expensive cars, and so the Yugo became not only their best option for vehicle ownership – it was their only option.
Western customers are not so inclined. They tend to pay qualified mechanics for all repairs and maintenance, meaning the Yugo becomes prohibitively expensive.
So it comes down to what customers want. And this applies to Rivian.
The features that make Rivian vehicles unique focus on a ‘sustainable outdoor-centric’ philosophy. There are cross-cabin storage compartments that allow skis and other long objects to be stored easily. It can forward creeks and rivers up to 3 feet deep. Portable rechargeable accessories are embedded in the doors. The front storage space has drain plugs to allow users to store wet fishing and camping gear. And the list goes on.
For example ‘Viviantherivian’ posted this on Reddit:
… it’s the greatest thing that I’ve ever owned. Every moment is great. Night. Day. Road. Track. Mud. And even all the bugs. I’m a tech guy so I understand [software] and [hardware] coming together. Some want an extremely polished, straight forward and streamlined product by a company of 50 years. Rivian takes chances. They are bold. Their design cues are unique and in my wheel house …
So as of right now, Rivian customers have an emotional bond with the product that outweighs the reliability concerns.
Always bet on things that work...
The best-selling cars of all time are (in chronological order) the Ford Model T, the Volkswagen Beetle, and the Toyota Corolla. All three were the leaders in reliability of their day.
While there are different motivations, fashions, and interests of people across the world, affordability is a consistent trait that remains constant. So while the Yugo appealed to a very specific market segment, it came nowhere near its potential for a vehicle of its basic design.
Success is usually seen as ‘binary.’ Something is successful or it isn’t. The Yugo can be seen as successful if its manufacturers are happy with creating cheap cars with minimal profit for a small number of customers over a relatively long time. But by most measures, this yardstick is not adequate.
In a weird parallel, the Rivian vehicles are in a somewhat similar place to the old Yugo. Both appeal to a small but loyal customer base. Both are unreliable. Neither are, nor were, world beaters. But Rivian has the scope to change this.
Early adopters are not mainstream...
One of the most sincere forms of flattery is mimicry. When people see something they like, they try to copy it. There was a time when Tesla vehicles were the only genuine option for ‘run of the mill’ EVs. This is not the case anymore. Rivian’s design features are no longer secret, and if there is a market for them, they will be copied.
So Rivian’s reliance on early adopters will disappear entirely when similarly featured vehicles emerge into the marketplace (which they will). Rivian is almost certainly aware of this and is probably racing to capitalize on its current fan base, but it will be wasting its time (eventually) if they don’t work out how to make its vehicles reliable.
One of the baffling issues with Rivian vehicles is that a quick review of the ways their vehicles fail shows a raft of basic design issues that shouldn’t be issues in the first place. Engineers have a nasty habit of becoming intoxicated with cool new features in their newest babies (designs), meaning they forget some of the basic lessons that experience has taught us over the years.
The build quality issues include panel misalignments, rattles being caused by loose components, inconsistent gaps, door misfits, and emblems falling off bodywork betraying at least part of a culture where quality control was not a thing from the start. And contrary to popular opinion, if you start designing with process quality control in mind, you typically save a significant amount of time and money during production, as you don’t have to continually ‘put out fires’ as they become apparent. The costs of dealing with these basic issues must be crippling at least some of Rivian’s focus on its next generation of vehicles (potentially dooming the company to a continual cycle of reliability problems).
Early adopters forgive the flaws that mainstream buyers do not.
Quality (and reliability) is free
This is based on the famous book ‘Quality is Free’ where manufacturing luminary Philip Crosby argued that making high-quality (and reliable) products is not only free, it actually costs less. The reason being is that if you essentially work out what you need to do to make it right the first time, you stop wasting money fixing problems that shouldn’t have ever needed to be fixed. So you speed up production, stop wasting money on solving problems, and otherwise start to dominate the marketplace.
This pushes against the notion (and excuse) that engineers use to focus exclusively on the ‘fun’ parts of their design at the exclusion of making it reliable from day one. Constantly trying to fix things that don’t work is never fun. Competitors who are rapidly starting to move into Rivian’s niche are less likely to be bound to these paradigms and will almost certainly be able to create comparable vehicles that simply break down less often.
This is when Rivian, as a company, will fail if it allows itself to get there.
Innovation brings people through the door, but reliability keeps them coming back.
Rivian has a head start, and it's clear that they have realized the next step is creating reliable, high-quality vehicles. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Notwithstanding, there are lots of lessons everyone can learn.
The first is that novel design doesn’t preclude quality and reliability. In lieu of a detailed list of examples, let's focus on just one big one – Apple. Their products are uniquely theirs and are amongst the most robust out there. And it is because they think about reliability and quality before they start designing their next model, making sure that their engineers are embedding it in their first designs. These approaches are so ingrained in what Apple does that there is no separate reliability or quality program. It is just ‘what they do.’
The second is that if your product is novel or has uniquely appealing features, it has to be reliable. Without intending to be, the Yugo was uniquely easy to maintain, which made it appealing to a small customer base. So if your product is competing with other similar models and versions, the key differentiator between long-term success and failure will be its quality and reliability.
And third is that anything is possible. Rivian is a wonderful example of a new company shaking up existing perceptions on what a product should be. I would hazard a guess that the ‘intoxication’ of cool new features hampered the reliability of its first vehicles to some degree.
But now is the time for it to change course and keep its competitors perpetually trying to keep up with what it is doing, and not trying to defend an emotional vision of what it said it would be.
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