Rivian Recalls 14 R2 SUVs Over Loose Battery Bolts, Its Second Recall in a Month

Rivian is recalling roughly 14 of its new R2 SUVs because fasteners on the vehicle's high-voltage battery pack may not have been tightened to spec, according to TechCrunch. The defect can cause a sudden loss of drive power while the vehicle is moving, a hazard that led Rivian to ground some vehicles entirely rather than wait for a scheduled repair visit.

According to a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration filing cited by TechCrunch, Rivian first caught the problem on September 17 when a manufacturing operator at its Normal, Illinois plant noticed an automated assembly station had under-torqued a battery fastener. The company reprogrammed the station to reject improperly torqued parts and says the recall population is limited to R2s built between May 18 and August 27, 2026, according to AutoGuide, which reviewed the NHTSA documentation.

Rivian told NHTSA it knows of no accidents, injuries, or customer complaints tied to the issue, per TechCrunch's reporting. Owner notification letters are scheduled to go out November 28, 2026, and the specific VINs covered by the recall will become searchable on NHTSA.gov that same date, AutoGuide reported. Owners can already call Rivian at 1-888-748-4261 and reference internal recall number FSAM-1888.

Owners heard about it before the paperwork caught up

The formal recall filing came after weeks of owner reports. RivianTrackr, a blog and social account that closely follows the company, posted on September 28 that several R2 owners with VINs scattered across wildly different ranges, in the 2,800s, 5,400s, 7,400s and 7,500s, said Rivian called them out of nowhere and told them to stop driving immediately. Some vehicles were towed to service centers before owners noticed anything wrong themselves.

Autos.Yahoo, citing those same RivianTrackr reports, noted that many affected owners said they'd seen no warning lights or unusual behavior at all. One owner, quoted by RivianTrackr, said their R2 had about two weeks of trouble-free driving before the stop-drive call came in. Rivian covered the gap with Uber credits and a rental car.

A source on the service side told RivianTrackr that technicians were finding packs that weren't bolted and sealed correctly, including missing bolts and fasteners that were under-tightened, over-tightened, or stripped. In cases where the whole pack needed replacing, turnaround was slow because new packs were going straight to the Normal production line rather than sitting in a parts inventory, and most service centers reportedly had only one technician trained to do the deep inspection work.

Rivian confirmed to RivianTrackr on September 28 that the affected population was 14 vehicles, a number that held when the company filed with NHTSA.

Second recall in a month, but not the same issue

This is Rivian's second R2 recall since the SUV began shipping to customers in June. The first, issued last month, involved a backup camera visibility problem and was fixed remotely with a software update, according to TechCrunch. Digital Trends reported that a separate, larger recall in September covered close to 98,828 R1T, R1S, and R2 vehicles for a software glitch that could briefly block the backup camera, which also corrected itself over the air.

AutoGuide's headline framed the defect as Rivian's "AI" forgetting to tighten bolts. The NHTSA filing describes something different. The documentation points to an automated torque station on the assembly line, standard manufacturing hardware that was miscalibrated and has since been reprogrammed, not an artificial intelligence failure. Calling it an AI mistake overstates what actually happened and obscures a more mundane quality-control lapse on the factory floor.

The backup-camera recalls were software fixes pushed to customers' cars automatically. This one requires a physical shop visit, inspection, and in some cases a full battery pack swap, a meaningfully bigger ask of owners even at a small scale.

Record quarter alongside the recall

Rivian also announced it delivered 19,248 vehicles last quarter, up 45% from the same period a year earlier and the company's best quarter on record, according to Digital Trends. Rivian is still targeting 20,000 to 25,000 R2 deliveries by the end of 2026 and has said it's adding a second production shift to get there.

A fair critic could argue that two R2 recalls within a month, on a brand-new model the company is racing to scale, is exactly the kind of pattern that should worry buyers about rushed assembly lines under production pressure. That's a reasonable concern for any automaker ramping output this fast. But the scale here cuts the other way: 14 vehicles out of a production run numbering in the thousands, with no reported injuries, and a root cause Rivian says it already fixed at the source station on September 17.

The open question is whether that fix holds as Rivian pushes harder toward its year-end delivery target and adds a second shift in Normal. NHTSA's public VIN database updates November 28 will show whether 14 stays the final number, or whether inspectors find more vehicles built in that May-to-August window once owners start bringing their R2s in.