How Fast Is a Rivian R1T?

Top speed is a funny topic. People love to ask about it out of curiosity or for bragging rights, but at the end of the day there are very few times and places where it matters. In America, if you're not on a racetrack with a long straightaway, you'll never legally get anywhere near your vehicle's top speed. But people still want to know. When you have an electric truck as quick as our 2022 Rivian R1T, people really want to know how fast it'll go, so we tested it.

Questions about a Rivian's top speed have swirled for a while. Early in the truck's production, someone reported an official top speed of 125 mph, and that number is still flying around the internet. Rivian later clarified that the actual top speed is 110 mph, but curious folks decided to test that official proclamation. Relying on the speedometer, a few folks saw an indicated number slightly over 115 mph, prompting Rivian to include an update to the speedometer programming in an over-the-air (OTA) software update to make it more accurate.

With all that confusion, we decided the only way to be absolutely sure was to test our Rivian R1T's top speed ourselves. We took our R1T out to a private test track with a 7-mile-long high-speed oval track where we could run flat-out as long as we wanted (or until its battery pack died). To verify the accuracy of the speedometer, we hooked up our GPS-based Vbox telemetry unit that checks the truck's precise position 20 times per second from which it calculates instantaneous speed extremely accurately.

Rolling out onto the oval, we accelerated hard toward the truck's top speed. One of the R1T's biggest party tricks is how quickly it gets up to speed, and we found it continued to pull hard up to and beyond 100 mph. At 110 mph, though, the electronic speed limiter began to kick in and our acceleration dropped off sharply. Getting the last few mph took another second or two, but eventually the truck hit a wall and just stopped accelerating altogether. The speedometer and the Vbox readout agreed: The top speed of our Rivian R1T is … 112 mph.

Why not 110 mph? We've reached out to Rivian for comment and it hasn't gotten back to us. Rivian specifically notes on its website, "Actual vehicle capability will depend on selected options and trim. Acceleration timing estimates depend on tire selection and battery pack."

Regardless, the speedometer is highly accurate. At top speed, the truck's speedometer and the GPS agreed with both reading 112 mph exactly. At lower speeds, we found the speedometer always read within 1 mph of the GPS. Rivian tells us the speedometer is intended to overestimate the truck's speed slightly, so you're actually traveling a little slower than the speedo says (to stay out of legal trouble); but we found it was more often reading 1 mph slow at lower speeds.

During our test, we discovered the R1T was incredibly stable at top speed. We also felt like it had the power to keep accelerating had it not been for the limiter, so why is it there? The answer is tires. The R1T's Pirelli Scorpion All Terrain Plus tires are rated to 130 mph. In fact, all the tires Rivian offers for the R1T are limited to 130 mph. Any faster than that, and the tires would be in danger of "rapid unscheduled disassembly," to crib a SpaceX euphemism. When it comes to tires, we'd call it a blowout, and it's the last thing you want at high speed.

Why not make the top speed the same as the tire's maximum speed rating? Safety, we assume. Rivian has likely built in a margin so owners will never stress their tires to the absolute limit (at least, not when it comes to top speed). After all, this truck weighs about 7,200 pounds. That's a lot of pressure on those tires, especially at high speeds. Better safe than sorry.

There's also the matter of efficiency. The faster you go, the harder the vehicle has to work to push the air out of the way. Doesn't matter if your vehicle is powered by gas, diesel, or electricity, it takes more fuel to go fast than to go slow. During our five minutes at top speed, we traveled 9.6 miles at 112 mph. In that distance, our predicted range dropped from 173 miles to 152 miles, a loss of 21 miles. We were losing range at more than double the rate we were covering distance. In fact, our battery dropped by 10 percent during those 9.6 miles, which in ideal conditions would be good for as much as 33 miles of range based on the truck's 328-mile EPA-estimated range.

With 835 hp and 908 lb-ft, our R1T certainly has the power to go faster, but where would it run out of steam? Assuming you could find tires rated for both higher speeds and the R1T's 7,200-pound curb weight (unlikely), we're sure it could go quite a bit faster before the aerodynamic drag became too great to overcome. How fast? Rivian hasn't said, and the company hasn't published detailed specs for its motors and transmissions that would allow us to calculate a theoretical top speed.

A note on terminology: Quick and fast mean two different things when it comes to vehicles. Quick refers to acceleration; fast refers to top speed. A lot of people use those terms interchangeably, but they have specific meanings. When we say the R1T accelerates to 60 mph in 3.1 seconds, we're talking about how quick it is. When we say the R1T goes 112 mph, we're talking about how fast it is.