A Rivian Road Trip Stop at the Shop

Some businesses have a polished showroom with carefully angled lighting and enough polished concrete to make you nervous about dropping a socket wrench. We have a century-old factory building, a freight elevator with a temper, and whatever project currently happens to be spread across the worktable.

Last week, a couple passing through on a road trip reached out asking if they could stop by to look at one of our tonneau covers in person. We do not technically have a showroom, but we genuinely like talking to people about this stuff, so we picked a time and invited them up to the shop. That is usually how these things go around here. Someone comes to look at one product and ends up getting the full Akron industrial archaeology tour in the process.

The Questions We Like Hearing

While we were walking through the workshop, we showed them a few projects in progress and some Tunnel Trays we were preparing to ship out. That immediately shifted the conversation. One of the best parts about talking to customers in person is hearing the exact questions we asked ourselves while designing the product in the first place.

“How much space does it actually take up?”

“Do you lose a lot of room in the gear tunnel?”

“What does it feel like loaded up?”

Those are the good questions. Those are the questions that lead to nine prototype revisions and someone crouching next to the gear tunnel with a tape measure wondering how Rivian managed to make a storage compartment simultaneously huge and somehow still awkward.

The low-profile design of the Tunnel Tray came directly from those conversations and concerns. We wanted it to sit as low as possible while still clearing the gear tunnel doors and maintaining smooth operation from both sides. Storage space disappears fast when you travel with real gear instead of hypothetical camping props from a catalog photoshoot.

So we started showing them the details. The locking bar. The dual-slide setup. The L-Track system. A few small design choices that people may never notice unless they were the kind of person willing to spend part of a road trip discussing aluminum tolerances in an old factory building.Which, to be fair, immediately made them our kind of people.

Eventually You End Up in the Parking Lot

There were still a few practical questions about how the tray would work with the specific gear they were traveling with, so we headed downstairs to look at Bill’s truck. This is usually where product conversations become much more useful. You can explain dimensions all day long, but eventually somebody grabs an actual suitcase and starts sliding things around to see what fits. That tells you more in three minutes than most marketing copy ever could.

He started loading in luggage, travel gear, and a few larger items they were bringing home from a college commencement trip. We tested a couple different configurations, checked clearances, slid the tray in and out from both sides, and generally treated the parking lot like a very improvised field-testing lab. Honestly, it worked exactly the way we hoped it would when we started designing the tray in the first place.

The Difference Between Specs and Reality

One thing we have learned building products for the Rivian community is that people are usually not asking theoretical questions. They are trying to picture their actual daily life. They want to know whether the thing works with backpacks, recovery gear, groceries, camera cases, camping equipment, hockey bags, charging cables, folding chairs, or whatever else currently lives in the truck. Most people are not trying to optimize cargo space for a magazine photoshoot. They are trying to make sure their gear still fits after a long weekend on the road.

That was exactly what made this conversation fun.

Once the suitcase came out and started moving around the tray, the whole discussion changed from measurements and specifications into practical problem solving. We tried different layouts, checked what could stack cleanly, and looked at how easily things could still slide out from either side. Somewhere in the middle of all that, we also ended up talking about Rivian features they did not even realize the truck had yet, which tends to happen anytime a few R1T owners stand near an open gear tunnel for too long.
The tray itself more or less disappeared into the process, which is honestly the goal. Good gear should stop demanding attention once you start using it. We spent a long time trying to keep the Tunnel Tray low profile because we did not want owners sacrificing a huge amount of vertical storage space just to gain accessibility. The whole point was making the gear tunnel easier to use without turning it into a shallow drawer that only holds extension cords and disappointment.

After a few minutes of moving things around, opening and closing the tray, and generally stress testing the setup with real luggage from a real road trip, the decision was pretty much made. What started as a quick stop to look at a tonneau cover had somehow evolved into a full Tunnel Tray install in the parking lot.

One Parking Lot Install Later

At one point, I ran back upstairs to grab extra cardboard padding for some larger items they were transporting home from a college commencement. Our workshop happens to live on the fifth floor of the building, which means every trip downstairs feels at least mildly committed to the cause.

By the time I came back down, Bill already had both the Tunnel Tray and the tonneau cover installed. That part makes us laugh. It perfectly captures how things tend to happen around here. Nobody really schedules a full parking lot installation session. It just sort of develops naturally once enough curious people and aluminum parts occupy the same physical space.

Those visits are honestly one of the best parts of doing this work. The forums, emails, and messages are incredibly valuable, but there is something different about watching somebody interact with the products in person. You get to see the little hesitations, the practical concerns, and the things people immediately test first. Those moments shape future revisions just as much as any CAD file or prototype session does.

It is also a nice reminder that this whole thing still feels very small in the best possible way. People stop by while traveling. We talk trucks, storage setups, manufacturing problems, and strange gear tunnel experiments inside an old Akron factory building that was probably never intended for any of this. Somewhere between the freight elevator, the workbenches, and the stacks of outgoing shipments, a temporary showroom appears for an afternoon and then disappears again.

The only thing that would have made the day better would have been our dream workshop. Someday, maybe, we will have the kind of space where you can drive the truck directly inside instead of conducting field tests beside the curb with passing traffic and questionable weather forecasts hovering nearby.

Until then, the parking lot seems to be working just fine.