Rivian Gave the R1S Captain's Chairs. The Cheaper R2 Still Gets Everything Else First.

Rivian announced the 2027 R1S and R1T today. I’ve had my Gen 2 R1S since June 29, 2025, so I’m about 13 months in, and I went through the announcement looking for one thing: did they fix any of the stuff I actually complain about?

One of them, yes. And it’s a big one. A few others, no.

Let me say the important part first, because everything below it is easier to read the wrong way. I like this car. It has been the least problematic vehicle I’ve owned in years and I’d buy it again. This isn’t a post about the R1S being bad.

It’s a post about an opportunity. A model year change is when you get to touch the things you can only touch on the line, the seats and the wheel and the sheet metal, and Rivian had a long list to pick from. They picked the captain’s chairs, which is a real fix and a genuinely good one. But it’s one item. Meanwhile the R2 keeps arriving with the things people have been asking the R1 for, and the announcement doesn’t say a word about any of them coming this way.

The captain’s chairs are not enough. That’s the whole argument.

What’s actually new

The lineup gets renamed. Instead of Dual, Tri, and Quad, you now pick between Premium, Performance, and Quad. Rivian says this lines the R1 up with how the R2 is sold, which tracks. Premium is the dual motor at 533 hp, with an optional power upgrade to 665 hp and a Long Range option good for an EPA-estimated 410 miles on the R1S. Performance is the tri motor at 850 hp. Quad stays the halo at 1,025 hp.

Pricing is unchanged from where it landed after the Dual Standard was killed off back in March. R1S starts at $83,990, R1T at $79,990.

The R1T gets a 20” Adventure All-Season wheel and tire, a Goodyear, standard on Premium and a no-cost option on Performance. And Esker Silver replaces LA Silver as the included color on both vehicles.

Interior names got reshuffled too. Performance and Quad get three “Signature” interiors, Premium gets two.

That’s the housekeeping. Here’s the part that matters.

They finally did the captain’s chairs

The R1S is now available with second-row captain’s chairs in a six-seat layout, with a pass-through down the middle. Rivian calls it “our most requested interior feature to date,” which I believe, because I was one of the people requesting it.

I brought this up on delivery day. The bench second row makes getting to the third row a pain. You have to move a seat, and if there’s a car seat installed, that’s a whole production.

That’s mine. One bench across, and the only way back is to fold or slide part of it forward. Rivian’s pitch with the captain’s chairs is exactly that problem: you walk through the middle without touching the second row at all.

Image: Rivian

Each chair gets a fold-away armrest and a cupholder that folds down out of the inside edge of the seat. The seats fold flat and keep full car seat tie-downs. Rivian’s other selling point for the open middle is long stuff. Their example is skis and surfboards sliding through the center with all six seats still full.

Image: Rivian

If you want seven seats, the bench is still there. It stays available on both R1S Premium interiors, and on Black Mountain Signature if you’re going Performance or Quad.

This is a genuine fix and Rivian deserves credit for shipping it. It also changes who the R1S is for. A three-row you can walk through is a different vehicle to a family than one where somebody has to climb over a folded seat every time.

Still heated only in the second row

Here’s the line from Rivian’s own announcement, sitting under a header that says “No Compromises”:

Both seats are heated, fold flat, and retain full car seat tie-downs, so families lose nothing in the switch from the bench configuration.

Heated. Not ventilated.

I want to be clear about why this bugs me. It isn’t that Rivian doesn’t know how to build a ventilated seat. The front seats in my R1S are already heated and ventilated. The hardware exists, the controls exist, the menu in the software already has the button. It’s one row forward.

And the rest of the segment has moved. The Tesla Model Y L launched in the US in July at $61,990 with ventilated second-row captain’s chairs. Not optional, standard, and it’s the first Tesla to do it. The Kia EV9 has had heated and ventilated second-row captain’s chairs on Land AWD and GT-Line.

So a $61,990 Tesla and a Kia both cool the second row, and the $83,990 Rivian doesn’t.

I live in Southern California. I have kids in the back. In July, in a car that has been sitting in a parking lot, “heated seats” is not the feature anyone back there is asking about. This is the one that’s going to keep coming up.

Still no liftgate height setting

Nothing in the announcement about it, and I’d be surprised if there were, but I check every time.

Of everything in this post, this is the one that genuinely bothers me, and I want to be clear about why. It isn’t a missing luxury. It’s a car that can hit my house.

My R1S lives in a garage. When I open the liftgate while it’s parked inside, it goes up into the garage door. The only thing I can do is catch it with the button partway up, every single time, and hope I’m quick enough. There’s no way to set a maximum opening height and there’s no memory for it. Miss it once, while carrying something, while distracted, while one of the kids hits the button, and you’re paying for a liftgate or a garage door or both.

Plenty of cars solve this, and none of them treat it as exotic. My Model Y does it, and the Model X I had before it did too. And the way you do it is almost insultingly simple: you raise the liftgate to the height you want, you hold the button until it chimes, and that’s it. The car remembers. There’s no menu, no number to type, no service visit.

That’s what gets me. Everything needed to do this is already in my R1S. The liftgate is powered. It knows exactly where it is in its travel. It already stops when I press the button. All that’s missing is the part where it remembers where I stopped it.

That’s what makes it the worst item here. The ventilated seats need hardware. The Haptic Halo needs a new steering wheel. LiDAR needs a whole compute platform. Those cost real money and take real time, and I understand why they take a while.

This one is software, and that matters more than it sounds, because it means this never needed a model year in the first place.

Rivian ships features over the air constantly. They don’t sit on things and wait for a 2027 announcement. Look at the update history. “Cold Snap” earlier this year added Launch Mode for Dual Motor, improved Kneel Mode, and put an app on the Apple Watch. The update that landed on August 6, a week before the announcement I’m writing about, included memory settings for the climate control.

Memory settings. For the climate. In a car that will not remember how high I want my liftgate to open.

So this isn’t a company that can’t move without a production change. It’s a company that moves all the time and hasn’t moved on this one. At some point “we haven’t gotten to it” turns into “we’ve decided not to,” and after 13 months and I don’t know how many updates, I can’t tell which one I’m looking at anymore.

The R2 keeps getting there first

Here’s the thing I didn’t expect to notice.

Esker Silver isn’t a new Rivian color. It’s the R2’s color, coming down to the R1. Same story with Half Moon Grey, which replaced El Cap Granite on the R1 earlier this year after debuting on the R2 at SXSW. Rivian says the point is to bring the two cars into one color theme, and fine, I get it. But the direction of travel is worth saying out loud: the flagship is being restyled to match the cheaper car.

Once you see it there, you see it everywhere else.

The Haptic Halo. The R2 gets knurled metal dials on both steering wheel spokes, with actuators behind them that push back, and functions that change depending on what you’re doing. Scroll, push, pull, tilt. It’s the single most talked-about thing about sitting in an R2, and it’s a direct answer to years of people asking Rivian for physical controls. My R1S has the small rollers with the toggles. Nothing in today’s announcement changes that.

The autonomy hardware. This is the one that actually matters, and I want to be precise about it, because it’s easy to get wrong.

Right now the R2 and my R1S run the same thing. At Rivian’s Autonomy AI Day they announced RAP1, a custom 5nm chip powering a third-generation autonomy computer, plus LiDAR. But the R2 you can buy today doesn’t have it. The Launch Edition ships on the same Gen 2 stack that’s in today’s R1T and R1S: cameras and radar, no LiDAR, no new silicon. So nobody is ahead of me today.

The difference is what happens next. Gen 3 is coming to the R2, late 2026 into 2027, with a roughly 4x jump in compute. Rivian has said so publicly and put a window on it. There is no equivalent statement anywhere about the R1. And Rivian has confirmed there’s no retrofit, for either car, so this isn’t something you buy your way into later with a service appointment.

That’s the part today’s announcement should have addressed and didn’t. Not “give me LiDAR now.” Just tell me whether the flagship is on the roadmap at all.

The charge port. The R1 charge port is on the front driver’s side. The R2 moved it to the rear driver’s side for production, which is the same corner Tesla uses. Rivian originally showed the R2 with the port at the rear right and then moved it, so this was a deliberate call, not an accident of packaging.

I’ll be honest that this one bothers me less every month. Tesla is rolling out V4 stalls with longer cables specifically for cars whose port isn’t in the Tesla spot, and they’ve said those will become the majority of the network. Out here on the West Coast new sites keep showing up, and enough of them are the newer hardware that the front port is turning back into what it used to be, which is a thing you think about for two seconds while you pull in. So put this one on the list, but put it at the bottom. I’m including it because it’s another case of the R2 getting the more considered version, not because it ruins anybody’s road trip.

They aligned everything except the hardware

Here’s what makes this more than me listing things I want.

Rivian isn’t shy about the fact that they’re bringing the two cars together. They say it three separate times in this one announcement. The new trim structure “aligns R1 closer to R2’s trim structure, so there’s consistency across the Rivian lineup.” The interiors were renamed “to match R2.” And Esker Silver “brings R1 and R2 into a unified color theme.”

That’s the stated goal. Make the R1 more like the R2.

So look at what actually made the trip. Trim names. Interior names. Paint. Every one of those is a badge, a spec sheet line, or a bucket of pigment. Now look at what didn’t. The steering wheel people keep asking for. The charge port in the corner that matches the charging network most of us actually use. The autonomy hardware.

They aligned everything that costs nothing and nothing that costs something.

I’ll be fair about the biggest one. RAP1 and the third-gen computer were only announced in December 2025 and are still in validation. They aren’t in the R2 yet either. A 2027 R1 going on sale today was never realistically going to have LiDAR, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

But that excuse doesn’t cover the Haptic Halo, which exists today, in a car you can sit in. It doesn’t cover the charge port. And it doesn’t cover the silence. Rivian has told R2 buyers roughly when Gen 3 arrives. They have not said anything to R1 buyers, and this was the announcement to say it in. Not a roadmap, not a “coming to R1,” not even an acknowledgment that a 2027 flagship is going out the door on the hardware generation Rivian spent an entire event telling us they’re moving past.

A model year change is the moment you get to do the hardware. Rivian used theirs to rename the trims. The software they could have shipped any Tuesday.

So where does that leave me

Right where I started. I’m keeping it. The R1S has been the most boring car I own, and I mean that as a compliment. It works. I get in it, it goes, nothing happens. After the R1T, that’s worth more than any of the things on this list.

So none of this is me shopping for an exit. It’s me watching a company that ships improvements constantly, and got a model year change on top of that, reach for exactly one item off a long list. The captain’s chairs are real and I’m glad they exist. They also cost Rivian a genuine amount of engineering, which is what makes it strange that the one nobody has to retool anything to deliver still isn’t here. If you can redesign a second row, you can let my liftgate remember where I stopped it.

And the R2 stuff is the part I’d actually think hard about if I were buying today rather than sitting in one I already own. A color coming down from the cheaper car is nothing. Buying a $83,990 vehicle onto a hardware generation with no retrofit and no stated future, in the same year the company told everyone what the next generation looks like, is not nothing.

So if you’re cross-shopping, two pieces of homework. Go sit in a Model Y L and an EV9 before you sign anything, because they cool the second row and this doesn’t. And ask your guide directly what happens to R1 autonomy hardware, because there’s no retrofit and right now there’s no answer either. Neither of those is me being down on the R1S. It’s me telling you what I’d want to know.

I’m putting together a full look at 13 months of ownership, all of it, the good and the stuff nobody warns you about. This is a few items off a longer list.