Rivian finally really releases its powered tonneau cover (for real this time) (really)

Rivian has added a powered tonneau cover retrofit to its Gear Shop, allowing certain R1T owners to purchase install of the long-promised feature. The option has been available before, but only for a short period of time, and early versions have seen reliability problems in the past – but Rivian says this version is much better now.

Rivian has had a bit of a history with its Powered Tonneau Cover option, a feature that adds extending slats over the bed of its R1T truck in order to keep gear in the back safe, and can be extended or retracted by the press of a button.

It was originally offered as an option on early vehicles, but it soon became apparent that the feature was not as reliable as it should be, as many owners were having failures. Rivian stopped installing covers, offered fixes/replacements for those affected by reliability problems, and said the feature would come back and be available again in the future.

Owners also said that the original Powered Tonneau Cover was quite noisy to use.

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Since then there’s been a lot of back-and-forth about when the feature would become available again. We were all told in 2023 that it would show up in early 2024… but now here we are in late 2025.

There are third-party options available, but these are manual options that don’t have the benefit of being able to open and close with a touch of a button.

But now, finally, it looks like Rivian is ready to offer a first-party solution for this long-awaited feature.

Rivian quietly added the new Powered Tonneau Cover option to its Gear Shop yesterday costing $3,300 and available as a retrofit for certain R1T vehicles. Better yet, Rivian says the new version is “virtually noise-free,” which was not the case for the original cover.

We say “certain” R1Ts because it’s apparently not available for every vehicle. Per Rivian, “some R1T vehicles built without Tonneau Cover or Manual Tonneau Cover may not be compatible with our upgraded Powered Tonneau Cover due to wire harness limitations. Contact us to check eligibility.”

Rivian has not specified further which vehicles are or are not qualified, but some owners on Rivianforums.com have started chiming in with whether their vehicles qualify, and it might be based on when your truck was built (based on VIN number).

We’ve noticed owners with VIN numbers between ~14k and ~19k have been told their trucks are NOT compatible, but owners with VINs above ~21k and some early owners with VINs of ~13k and under said they were told their trucks ARE compatible. So the pattern looks like vehicles in the mid-late-teens that were built without any kind of tonneau cover may not be compatible, while early and more recent trucks are.

Some owners have even started getting the covers installed already. A few forum members posted their work orders, showing about $2,500 in parts and about 3 hours of labor to install the cover. The $3,300 flat cost for install includes both parts and installation at a Rivian service center.

When added as an option to a new vehicle in Rivian’s configurator, the price is $2,000 on R1T Dual configurations, but comes standard on R1T Tri and Quad.

If you’re looking to get the new Powered Tonneau Cover installed, head over to Rivian’s Gear Shop or call (855) RIVIAN5 to check if your vehicle is eligible and set up an appointment. You can even use your Rivian Rewards to pay for it, if you happen to have any from the use of a Rivian referral code.

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