When a Bad Review Isn’t Enough
Most frustrated car owners write a scathing review, fire off an angry email, or vent in an online forum somewhere. Jake Burns went considerably further. He spray-painted slogans including “DON’T BUY JUNK” and “RIVIAN IS JUNK” across the body of his own Rivian R1T, then parked the truck directly across from the company’s Denver showroom for maximum visibility. He followed that up by building a dedicated website, rivianisjunk.com, laying out his entire ownership experience in detail.
The stunt exploded across Reddit, and the timing landed particularly badly for Rivian, arriving just days before the company’s new R2 model was due to reach customers. One owner’s personal grievance turned into a public spectacle for an EV startup that hardly needed the added attention at that moment.
What Actually Pushed Him There
Burns, who posts online under the names Jake Burns and philociraptor, says the display was the product of an accumulated list of frustrations with his truck. He’s posted footage that appears to support at least some of his claims, seeming to show the steering wheel shaking at low speeds, unusual noises under acceleration, and driver-assist features behaving unpredictably, none of which reflects well on a vehicle in the R1T’s price bracket. His most serious allegation centers on what he describes as an unresolved steering defect that he says Rivian has failed to properly address.
Not Every Owner Sees It the Same Way
To be fair, plenty of Rivian owners weighed in on the same Reddit thread defending the brand, with several reporting tens of thousands of largely trouble-free miles of ownership. Others recognized a pattern similar to Burns’s experience, though. One user posting as Huskerzfan said his own truck spent a significant stretch in the shop, with more than 3% of its total mileage accumulated on trips to service centers, and 12.5% of his lease term spent driving loaner vehicles instead of the truck he was actually paying for.
The Timing Rivian Really Didn’t Need
Even treating Burns as an outlier case, his protest arrives at an uncomfortable moment for the company. The R1T already carries a reputation as one of the less reliable EVs currently on the market, holding a Consumer Reports Predicted Reliability Score of just 18 out of 100, exactly the kind of statistic a growing automaker dreads seeing attached to a viral story. Burns has framed his campaign bluntly, arguing that the public deserves visibility into what happens when a company is given repeated opportunities to address quality problems and still falls short.
Whether Burns comes across as a legitimately wronged customer or someone who took his frustration further than necessary probably depends on the reader. But a larger question does linger as Rivian works through its next chapter with the R2 launch: when some of a brand’s earliest and most enthusiastic believers are the ones spray-painting its product in protest, that’s worth the company’s genuine attention, regardless of how any individual reader judges Burns’s methods.