Rivian has updated its online gear shop and deleted the entries for the R1T-specific Camp Kitchen and Tunnel Shuttle accessories that were previously listed as “not available yet.”
Both were designed to fit inside the R1T’s unique gear tunnel that acts like a sort of lockable trunk between the cargo bed and passenger compartment. It runs across the whole width of the all-electric pickup and is a great place to store long items like skis or tent poles that wouldn’t fit in the front trunk and leaving them out in the open bed would be less than ideal.
Rivian showcased the Camp Kitchen that fit inside the gear tunnel back in 2019 and it was a pretty cool package that included a 30-piece kitchen set and three main modules – cooktop, sink, and water – that were mounted on a so-called Tunnel Shuttle base that could slide in and out of the gear tunnel.
The Camp Kitchen was slated to cost $5,000, while the Tunnel Shuttle was priced a bit more reasonably at $1,500. The kitchen accessory was put on hold in October 2022, when Rivian told reservation holders that it’s temporarily pausing production so that it can be redesigned, but that never happened and now it’s nowhere to be seen on the carmaker’s online shop.
In a statement released by Rivian for Electrek, a company spokesperson said the following:
“As we continue the work of delivering vehicles to our customers as quickly as possible, we’ve made the decision to halt production of the current versions of the built-in Camp Kitchen and Gear Tunnel Shuttle. We’re exploring updated designs and will offer adventure-ready cooking solutions for our vehicles in the future.”
In other words, the American EV manufacturer is considering redesigned versions of both accessories, but now it’s focusing on delivering as many vehicles as possible, as quickly as possible to reservation holders, which makes sense considering Rivian wants to make double the number of vehicles in 2023, after barely missing the 25,000-unit target last year.
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