I remember picking up the vehicle and bemoaning the lack of hands free text message capabilities in the vehicle’s software, and being told by the rep delivering the vehicle to me in April of 2024 that it would be available that summer. It’s now November of 2025 and it doesn’t even appear to be talked about anymore. Mind you, this is an exceptionally common feature: Tesla has had it for a while and any car supporting Android Auto or Apple CarPlay has it.

Many cars, and especially EVs, are now competing on the axis of software rather than hardware. Sadly though Rivian has chosen to phone this in, and even the meaningful changes have been middling to outright buggy.

The magical disappearing gauge cluster

This problem isn’t just a ridiculous annoyance, it almost fucking killed me.

On more than one occasion, the gauge cluster screen has experienced what I can only describe as some form of digital gangrene. Various pieces would simply vanish, such as the volume controls and mini-nav. I’ve also had the various status icons that indicate the setting of your headlights and wipers disappear as well.

The most dangerous failure by far though is that of the hazard response, which not only continues to beep but blanks out the rest of the screen.

Allow me to explain.

The Rivian R1S is a fairly panicky thing, especially when it comes to drive assist. If you’re leaving a highway, or it isn’t totally confident in its lane detection, it will beep and tell you to take over driving. If it thinks you’re not holding the wheel tight enough, it will beep. If it thinks you’re not holding tight enough and there’s a sharp turn it will beep in a very intense fashion and render a severe message on the screen.

This frantic beep and severe message follows the same form of rendering that the immediate collision detection uses, when it thinks you’re accelerating towards some obstacle and are likely to crash.

When this piece is broken and you’re on the highway using drive assist, you’ll hear the beeping, but the broken warning becomes a blank overlay on the screen, which erased my map of vehicles around me and my speedometer.

Does that beep mean I’m about to crash? Maybe. Does it mean it can’t detect my grip? Possibly. Does it take my eyes off the road while also not telling me what emergency may have caused the fracas? Absolutely yes.

My interests include semis and rumble strips

I do use drive assist when it’s available, which is really only highways, but I’m genuinely confused and terrified by its seemingly insatiable appetite for semis and rumble strips.

Turn on drive assist in either the right or left lane and be prepared for a sudden and deliberate yearning by the vehicle to give you a spine massage. I can’t tell if the lane sensor just sees rumble strips as something different or the car has an odd kink I shouldn’t shame it for, but this happens with startling frequency. A polite chime is followed by an aggressive pull towards uneven ground, and your option is to fight it or let it come to terms with the error of its ways and get back into the proper lane boundaries.

Additionally, the car seems to have boundary issues keeping the relationship professional between itself and adjacent semis both literally and figuratively. The clenching that ensues as I can sense it getting uncomfortably close to the Sysco Foods 18 wheeler in the lane next to me is followed by an increase in heart rate and a clenching of teeth. It’s a harrowing ordeal that has often left my passengers asking me why the hell I’m getting so close to such an intimidating vehicle. Maybe this is what Rivian has in mind with their adventure branding.

Apple Music… sometimes…

The Apple Music app was added over a year ago, and somehow it’s still a buggy and temperamental mess.

The home screen will sometimes render “No media available.” Songs will become decoupled from their play timer. Music will arbitrarily stop playing. Occasionally you’ll have to sign out and in to the app to resolve connectivity issues.

None of this makes sense. Music streaming apps are a solved problem. I could understand having some issues one release or two after the initial launch, but a year later is just pathetic.

No storage device… wait no I found it

Not much else to say here beyond wondering how the vehicle frequently and inconsistently says it can’t detect the additional storage device I have hooked up for the dash cam. Given that the vehicle is “always on” you’d think it wouldn’t struggle with volume mounts, but here we are.

Google Maps-ish

This is one of the few updates of consequence I’ve seen come through, and it’s certainly a welcome improvement over the stock navigation, but it still has some strange problems around searching. I’ve encountered multiple instances where attempting to search for a location was just wildly off and would pull up results on different continents which would be amusing if I wasn’t trying to actually get somewhere.

I’ve occasionally had to find the location in the Google Maps app on my phone and share it with the car to get things to work. It’s not the end of the world to have to do this, but again, this is nearly a six figure vehicle.

Soft reboots at 70mph

Thankfully I’ve only see this happen three times (which is still a lot given what’s happening) but there have been instances where something in the vehicle’s operating system was going haywire, resulting in a soft reboot while driving.

What do I mean when I say soft reboot? I mean every screen going blank at the same time, including the gauge cluster, and seeing the Rivian logo render while I wait a few seconds for the controls to render again, all while cruising down the freeway. Even if nothing came of it, there’s a very real panic when you experience this, simply because you really don’t feel any confidence as to whether the car is just going to stop driving abruptly as a consequence or not.

Want to see my impression of a rocket?

For reasons I don’t understand, sometimes the car will turn on its vents to a level that you really wouldn’t think they’re capable of reaching. On two occasions I’ve had the vents stuck in a “full blast” configuration after using the defogger that sounded like Cape Canaveral. It will also occasionally do this when I first open it, which I can only assume is some kind of proximity based catch up mechanism if the cabin temperature has lowered or raised considerably since leaving.

I shall reenact the car scene in Titanic

Speaking of the defogger: it’s nearly useless. This is, in its own way, an achievement: I don’t think I’ve ever owned a car that did such a simple thing so poorly. I truly don’t even know how it’s possible given that I can see the vents and feel the air, but after 15 straight minutes of driving with a windshield that was 25% fogged and side windows that were 75% fogged I can confirm the phenomenon.

At least the hardware is good

What really aggravates me about this car is that the hardware is so so good.

For the boat of a vehicle this car is, it’s surprisingly nimble and turns very well. I feel very little body roll even at a normal ride height while also not feeling many bumps. The acceleration is great if not sometimes frightening when you can break all four loose for a second flooring it when you’re already going 40mph.

The fit and finish all seem top notch: the materials used really look and feel great on every surface and don’t seem to develop creaks or dash rattles. The physical controls (where they exist) are all fantastic for moving seats around both for comfort and for cargo.

The doors close with a satisfying thud and keep out wind and road noise quite well.

I will say though that the charging pad is a pretty dopey design. If you’re unfamiliar: it’s a big rubber mat with a slight texture but your phone will just slide around on it constantly and break its charging cycle unless you hold it in place the entire time.

An unjustifiable price for unjustifiable issues

Despite my complaints, I still like this car a lot, but at the price tag that comes with it I certainly don’t see myself owning one and at this point I question if I’ll lease another one either. I’m currently driving a quad motor and the new price is a staggering $122k which is not an amount of money I’d consider for any car never mind one with so many serious flaws.

It’s a shame really because from a hardware standpoint the car is exceptional, and you’d think with the mutable nature of software that more would have been accomplished by now to address the embarrassing problems the car has, but it seems to not be a priority.

I’m hoping maybe they’ll figure things out over the next six months and change my mind, but at the present time, I’m not hopeful.

This is the conundrum of the absolute masterpiece that is Expedition 33.

I want everyone to play this game. I want everyone to experience the art, level design, music, storytelling and journey. I want people to explore every nook and cranny of canon the story gives access to because not all of it is mandatory to complete the game. What makes the story so great and so compelling needs to be experienced firsthand to really appreciate and internalize its message, which leads to any encouragement you share manifesting with the same bug eyed intensity a conspiracy theorist exhibits when they encourage you explore the same rabbit hole they’ve crawled into.

Still, I want to try to express enough that perhaps I encourage at least one other person in the world to try it. Or maybe somehow one of the developers or actors sees this and is heartened by yet another appreciation post.

At its core, Expedition 33 is a story about grief on both a macro and micro scale. Grief is something we all experience for many different reasons and in many different ways. Grief is an abstraction for emotions and factors too varied to enumerate that is usually rooted in some form of loss but not necessarily death. It’s a useful encapsulation of a complex state that allows us to communicate how we’re feeling to others in a more complete and visceral way than words can muster on their own.

The forms of grief Expedition 33 captures are sometimes subtle and sometimes obvious and tend to provoke a lot of philosophical turmoil and debate in the process. They really manage to walk a tightrope of the human condition, sparking numerous threads about certain story themes and character arcs that both have no objective answer and hit people differently depending on their life experience.

Additionally, the voice acting in this game is of the very highest caliber, and includes some household names in the form of Charlie Cox and Andy Serkis. Simply put: the game is devoid of weak links in the delivery of its dialogue.

Expedition 33 is an experience that can bring even the most stoic gamer to tears, causing you to reflect on your own past with different perspective than you had before. It strongly confronts the idea that our own journeys with grief can be compounded by how we feel others around us process the same grief. It’s entirely possible to disagree or take issue with how someone else handles grief: friends, family, even coworkers aren’t immune to this circumstance. The dual mandate of navigating your own while empathizing with another’s is put on full display in this game, and it will wreck you in beautiful ways.

As if this game couldn’t do enough right, the art direction and music are both something to behold. The world is beautiful, haunting, and unlike anything I’ve seen. The music is wonderfully complex and deep, and uses classical instruments, rock instruments, and vocals to weave through the surreal setting of the game in magical ways.

Without spoiling too much, the end of the game presents you with a choice that culminates everything you’ve learned about the world, the characters, and the story. What cuts deep about this choice is that at its core its one we’ve all likely been faced with at some point in our lives. The consequences of that choice are frequently debated on various discussions of the game, but in ways where you witness strangers connecting with one another on a deeper level than usual.

The game already has a movie deal penned, and quite frankly I’m pretty worried about it because it’s an awful lot of ground to cover. In my mind’s eye this would be something perfectly suited for a 6-8 episode Apple TV or HBO Max series. Games never map one to one with their screen adaptations in terms of time commitment, but I don’t think enough of the story could be realized in under six hours to give it the credit it deserves.

All of that said, the fact that it does seem screen bound keeps me motivated to not reveal more of the story to anyone I know who doesn’t play video games.

I truly believe, no matter who you are or what you’ve experienced in life, you should play this game from start to finish because you’ll walk away from it a changed person, and I can’t think of too many video games that have had that profound of an effect on me. When I say changed, I don’t mean making some kind of drastic switch to anything in your life mind you; I mean thinking differently about your own past, relationships, and how you live with what you carry.

“For those who come after.”

I’ve been told by many close to me that they enjoy my writing. They usually find it interesting and entertaining. I’ve also been told that as a software engineer I shouldn’t be very capable of that. I don’t know exactly how to receive a compliment that’s also suggesting I should be impaired at something.

I do write. A lot. For no one really. I’ve tried my hand at a couple of books and a couple of television shows. They’re ongoing projects spanning years now and I’m not sure any of them will ever evolve to the point of anything resembling a product to be consumed by the rest of the world, but there’s always that flicker of “maybe.” For the foreseeable future they’ll just be a very lonely hobby.

My ambition to write short self-contained posts here was inspired by someone new I met recently. I won’t divulge much about this person, as I’ve no doubt they’re oblivious to their role in all this, and I’ll reserve the right to be the one who perhaps chooses to share this with them someday, or perhaps not. To be completely hypocritical, the medium by which they drove this inspiration was their own publicly posted writing but I’m choosing to not show my hand. Their writing is smart, insightful, and quite frankly beautiful, but some of it is also deeply personal and my reading it may inflict awkwardness, despite it being public.

The name of this site came to me during a car ride home of no significance whatsoever. The combination of the two words made me chuckle and I ran with it. To my delight, AI search results of the term were comically dismissive:

“Intrepid apathy” is not a recognized clinical term but a contradictory pairing of words.

Intrepid means fearless and adventurous, while apathy is a lack of motivation, interest, and emotion. Therefore, “intrepid apathy” would describe a state of being both courageous and indifferent at the same time, which is inherently contradictory. It could be used figuratively to describe a state where one is willing to face challenges but without any internal drive or passion to do so.

Who knew I could describe myself so well on whim.

I hope you come back and I hope I’m able to entertain you.