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Electrifying the TransAmerica Trail

Charging off-road across America's back yard

By Rivian

October 5^th, 2021

Black Bear Pass is no joke.

Bradley Roschtscha took a deep breath and removed the neon Pit Viper sunglasses that, along with the Stetson cowboy hat he’d also picked up along the way, had become his trademark TransAmerica Trail look.

After many days on the road – or rather, on the off-road – the Rivian service lab supervisor had developed something of a reputation on the trail: for skillful driving, for coming through with plates of crackers and Wisconsin cheddar when the team was approaching hunger grumpiness, and for top-notch puns and dad jokes. But his teammates had just voted him to be the one to drive the treacherous mountain pass, and now it was time to get serious.

The dirt road, originally cut by miners, involves steep climbs, loose rocks and narrow switchbacks cut into a jagged cliffside. In some places, the margin of error is inches, a thousand-foot plummet being the thing on the other side of that margin.

“They were basically placing their lives in my hands,” Bradley said. “I felt honored.”

The R1Ts, nicknamed “Rocky Mountain” and “Haleakalā” after the national parks, were about to be the first electric vehicles to go up and over all 12,840 feet of Black Bear Pass – a first on a trip of firsts.

It was Day 26 of our 43-day trek across the TransAmerica Trail (TAT), a network of mostly dirt, rock and gravel roads designed for vehicles to be able to travel coast-to-coast on minimal pavement, and with maximum adventure. It’s not uncommon to see off-road vehicles, motorcycles, bicycles, even horses on the trail. A majority of travelers spend a few days or a week exploring the TAT’s various stretches and loops. But for two electric trucks to drive the trail Atlantic to Pacific, to do it in one go, and to do the entire thing alongside automotive journalists from MotorTrend? More firsts.

THE SCENIC ROUTE

The TransAmerica Trail was first charted in 1984 by Sam Correro. A pharmacist and off-road enthusiast, he pored over maps and scouted thousands of miles of public backroads on his motorcycle to create a compelling and continuous path through America’s back yard. The result is as varied as the country it crosses, a patchwork of trails and roads – some serene, others thrilling – winding through forests and over steep mountain passes, but also past cow-dotted pastures, cornfields and people waving from their back porches.

Sam Garcia, a technical analyst on the charging team, helped plan the team's route from Atlantic to Pacific. For him, the TransAmerica Trail started as a line on a map and list of small towns across America he hadn’t visited (yet) – Pulaski, Alma, Bartlesville. By the end of the first day of the first leg on the trail through North Carolina, Sam said it became clear it was so much more than a cross-country road trip. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience the country in an entirely different way.

The trip was never meant to be a cruise control-type crossing. The trucks and drivers would roll out early each morning, usually before 8 a.m., and would often spend at least seven or eight hours of full-attention, hands-on driving through just about every type of terrain. Any unexpected detour or encounter along the way – wildfires or wildlife, snow flurries or washouts, even helping fellow trail-goers out of various binds – could add hours to the driving day.

Even given all the long days and wild cards, the trucks didn’t run out of charge once in 43 days. The team used a combination of public L2 and L3 chargers and Rivian Waypoint chargers – stops that will be there for future electric adventurers who want to drive part or all of the TransAmerica Trail.

“The ethos of the Rivian Waypoints Network and the Adventure Network is to go where other charging networks don't. That's a large part of what we want to do with this TransAmerican Trail project, is show that EVs can go anywhere,” Sam said.

The team spent more than 300 hours of driving to navigate the entire trail from Nag’s Head, North Carolina, to Port Orford, Oregon. By comparison, a more traditional, paved road trip between the same two cities might take about 50 hours of driving. Such long, demanding days are why crew members from both Rivian and MotorTrend swapped in and out of the 43-day trip, usually staying on trail for about a week at a time. More than two dozen Rivian employees from across the company — engineers, designers, UI architects, experts in software, charging and propulsion – had the opportunity to participate, with more employees off the trail supporting the effort from afar.

Back in Colorado, Bradley Roschtscha had navigated the truck safely to the top of Black Bear Pass. He and the Rivian coworkers riding with him, Sam Garcia and engineer Emily Bidgood, decided to pull off for a few photos.

Sam stepped to the edge and took in the panoramic view of the Rockies and the town of Telluride far below.

“How am I doing this right now?” he said, smiling. “How is this my life?”

Then he looked down and saw the part of the pass he’d heard so much about: a series of turns leading straight down the side of the mountain. The team piled back into the trucks, quiet and focused, holding their collective breath as their R1T slowly declined toward the first razor-sharp switchback.

"When Rocky Mountain in front of us started to teeter on two opposite wheels while tackling the first switchback, I had to look away and distract myself," said Emily, a Rivian engineer who was riding in the back seat of Haleakalā. "I completely trusted Bradley's judgement and skill, it was just such a precise set of turns, essentially at the edge of a cliff."

But Bradley and Haleakalā handled it with such skill and ease that after a few turns, all of the air, and the banter, quickly returned to the cab, where it remained for the rest of the ride into town.

It was dinner time when the trucks pulled into Telluride, windows down, occupants jubilant from their landmark day of mountain pass off-roading. There was a jazz festival in town, and the restaurants and sidewalks were crowded with revelers, many of whom smiled and waved at the R1Ts.

“It was really, really cool,” Sam said. “It was the trip of a lifetime, to cross the country in a new way – taking the long way.”

MORE MOUNTAINS TO CLIMB

“Two car lengths, Rocky Mountain,” Matt Trainham said into his radio. “Take it about two miles per hour.”

“Copy that, Matt.”

It was a Monday evening in Moab, Utah. The team was on another day-long detour from the trail, this time to drive the trucks over some of the most famous rock-crawling trails in the world, including the roller coaster that is Hell’s Revenge, a popular and technically rigorous route through the steep, slickrock canyons of the Utah desert.

Matt, a senior manager for Rivian’s Test and Development group, has been crawling these rocks since he was a kid. Part scout, part trail etiquette guide and part off-road driving coach, Matt talked everyone through each twist, turn and climb on the radio, and for particularly difficult obstacles, he hopped out and walked each truck through.

“I grew up riding dirt bikes and in trucks. I like to go out, get lost, have fun and find my way home,” Matt said.

He has two young daughters now, and very much wants them to have the same off-road and wilderness experiences he had and loved growing up. It started to shift his focus.

“When I look back on some of the off-road projects I did before, where the goal was to make something go faster, or to make it quicker or lighter or more powerful, it's cringe-worthy, the lack of concern I had for the downstream aspects of that, whether that was emissions or fuel-efficiency,” Matt said. “How can we keep getting out there, but without ruining the planet? How do we make sure these things are available for our kids and everybody coming after them?”

Then, in 2018, Matt attended the L.A. Auto Show, and watched as a company called Rivian revealed they were building high-performance, but zero emission, electric adventure vehicles.

“I had already kind of come around to, ‘OK, I love the outdoors, and I love off-roading, but as a community, we kind of need to clean up our act,” Matt said. “I was in. I must have spent four hours looking at the Rivians that day.”

Just then, the radio crackled. “Haleakalā, we’ve got room up here.”

“Copy that, top of the hill crew,” Matt replied. “We’re coming up.”

He turned to his passengers and grinned. “Buckle up,” he said, clipping the radio to Haleakalā’s sun visor. It was a nearly silent climb, save the occasional sound of rubber meeting rock as the R1T ascended the 45-degree incline, an angle so steep that for a time there was nothing but blue sky visible through the windshield. Slowly, as the truck rounded the top of the hill, the astronaut-eye view transitioned to bird’s eye, and a sweeping vantage of the Martian, red rock landscape below.

“This is why,” Matt said, gesturing out at the desert. “I want this to keep happening, because there is a magic to it.”

At dusk, the trucks stopped on an overlook, and the team ate sandwiches and sodas, legs dangling over the edge of the plateau as they quietly watched the sun set behind the Colorado River. RJ Scaringe, our founder and CEO, often compares the journey of building Rivian to climbing a mountain, a metaphor much repeated among our ever-growing team.

“From the top of the mountain, you can see the next one easier. It is a great place to decide which mountains to climb next,” Matt said.

EXHAUSTED SMILES

When the trucks were charging at a public stop in Huntington, Oregon, one Wednesday afternoon, Brian Gase looked around them.

“It was a town with no restaurants,” said Brian Gase, a Rivian chief engineer and longtime employee (his badge says No. 4) who had joined the last leg of the trail for a few days. “But there were mountains in the background, and windmills, and an old train track. It was beautiful. And we said, ‘OK, well, we’ve got the stuff to make stir fry’ and pulled out the Camp Kitchen.”

“I don’t really cook, but pretty soon I was cutting up onions and cubing tofu and everyone was pitching in. Road trips have come to mean you’re not stopping unless you have to, and you want to get there as quickly as you can,” Brian said. “We found ourselves in no hurry and enjoying the fact that we were out there together. Meal prep felt more like family time – even doing the dishes afterward. It was such a different experience than hitting a drive-thru.”

Back at the Rivian factory in Normal, Illinois, the team was days away from rolling the first customer ready R1Ts off the line. On the other side of the country, two pre-production trucks had traveled nearly all of the way across the continent off-road. Brian, who has been along for pretty much the whole, wild ride (not of the trail, but of Rivian itself) found himself enjoying the moment rather than fretting.

“On past trips, the years we were in development, I’d be asking how the vehicles were doing. But the trucks are great. They're capable. I just enjoyed the ride and spending time with the team," Brian said. “I’ve never seen so many smiles on so many exhausted people before.”

SPLASHDOWN

“I found a waterfall,” said a voice on the radio. “Turn around. I swear you’ll thank me.”

The passengers in Rocky Mountain looked at each other. It was the final day on the TransAmerica Trail, and though the trucks were driving through some magnificent scenery, everyone’s mind was on one thing: the finish line.

“Like horses to the barn,” Lilly Macaruso, a Rivian special projects engineer, later joked.

When you’re crossing the continent in electric vehicles, it’s important to have a plan. But sometimes it’s just as important to be willing to deviate from that plan. Rocky Mountain turned around on the trail and backtracked to find Haleakalā.

The second truck had pulled off trail to take a few photos and stumbled onto a scene straight out of “Fern Gully,” a place where the river moved over a rock plateau and became a large waterfall that ended in a crystal-clear pool. It was all framed by a forest of massive, lush trees, with fallen trunks nearly the size of the trucks themselves crisscrossing the banks.

“It was delightful, one of those things you would have no idea exists until you get right up to it,” Lilly said. “Instantly, everyone was exploring, walking into the cave behind the waterfall and over fallen trees so big we looked like ants. It was a good reminder that you don’t find great adventure by planning the whole thing out. You also find it by being open to it.”

They could have stayed all day – it was a favorite moment of the entire trip for many of the travelers – but after about an hour, Lilly looked at the time. If they wanted to reach the end of the leg while in daylight, they’d better make tracks.

“It felt like trying to call kids back in from recess,” said Elyse McArthur, a Rivian field service engineer. “These grown people were skipping and climbing around. Finally, we were like, ‘OK, come on, come on, we’ve got to go.”

The Pacific was calling.

The last few days on trail were the first time Lilly and Elyse had ever met in person, but they quickly found they are built from the same parts. Elyse has driven (and fixed) vehicles on every continent of the world, including Antarctica, and used to moonlight as a stunt driver and off-road driving instructor.

Once, as a pre-med student, Lilly sought a job at the auto shop across the street from her college apartment to head off student loan debt, and when the owner told her he didn’t need a receptionist, she said, “Look, I may not know how to change oil or anything yet, but I can do anything a man can do,” and he hired her on the spot. A year later she was rebuilding engines. She changed her major and went on to earn a degree in automotive and racing mechanics.

“At Rivian, we’re all so different, but there’s a part of us that is the same – variations of the same passion,” Elyse said. “Add to that spending up to 14 hours a day in a vehicle together, sharing snacks and meals and stories and ridiculous habits and weird nighttime routines, and you learn a lot about people.”

Back on the road after the waterfall, the energy in the trucks became electric as they drove up the last bluff. Everyone knew the Pacific Ocean, and the end of a 43-day marathon, was just on the other side. The team piled out of the trucks and onto the beach.

“I wanted to jump in the water because the ocean was so immense, all those crashing waves, and the project we had just finished was so big, and you could feel it all there,” Elyse said.

“We took every person’s contribution with us. We didn’t do it alone, and we knew that. The years that went into making these trucks what they are. And on the trip, if something happened or we had questions, there would always be someone on the other side of the phone, in California or Normal,” Lilly said. “It’s not magic that we made this happen, it was a lot of really, really hard work and people dedicated to make sure we don’t fail at anything we could have prevented.”

Elyse nodded her agreement. “But also, it was magic.”

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