Brian Wagner, a 2025 Rivian R1T owner, loves his pricey electric truck. It meets all his needs, it looks nice, and the range is impressive. However, he had a scary moment while merging onto a freeway last week, and he took to the Rivian Electric Vehicles Discussion page on Facebook to ask about it.

“I’m not sure if I should be worried or impressed,” he wrote. “I was merging onto the highway and suddenly the center screen went black and most of the info on the driver’s screen disappeared.”

The car didn’t lose power, but it worried him that both screens went black for longer than he’d like.

“I wasn’t sure if it was going to make me pull over or just stay that way until I could stop and do a restart,” he said. “But several minutes later I saw the Rivian logo on the center screen and it all came back.”

Missing driver information could be dangerous

Without being able to accurately tell how fast the vehicle is traveling, read warning messages, or know if something did in fact happen to the battery system, it raised safety concerns.

Especially since, as Wagner noted, the only way to restart those systems is to pull over and restart the vehicle. But, what if he’s in an area he can’t pull over?

Additionally, no one’s certain if any of the ADAS systems would be affected by the reboot, so he could have essentially been driving a several-ton missile at speed around other drivers.

Other owners, though, said it was totally normal

The post attracted almost 40 EV owners, several from Rivian, and others who’ve owned Teslas. One owner said they’ve experienced it “many times.”

“Normal, it happened to me on my R1S and it happened several times on my previous Model Y,” they wrote. Though, another user responded to correct him.

“It’s not normal, it’s a bug, but it does happen. No significant threat to safety, it’s just the infotainment system crashing.”

Another wrote that they hadn’t experienced it, but if they had, it would raise their blood pressure. Another said they’ve had the same thing happen multiple times, even when the screens were replaced.

“They’ve replaced several modules in my truck and perch the cooling system multiple times to rectify my restarts,” they wrote. “There is a known problem with one of the modules.”