A Rivian customer waited 3 years for his dream car. It died within days.

• Rivian's customer service disappointed one early adopter during a time of need.

• Rivian has been struggling with a touch-and-go relationship with its early boosters.

• "I'm just not the right person to be an early adopter," the Rivian owner said.

When Chase Merrill took his first ride in his new Rivian R1S, it was his favorite car that he had ever driven.

Merrill, 24, put down a deposit on an R1S three years ago at the urging of family members who also own Rivians. He was unsure about making the switch from his 2015 Ford Edge to a fully electric SUV, especially since he lives in a relatively remote area in the Adirondack Mountains, New York.

But once he got behind the wheel of the $85,626 car on March 10, those worries melted away.

"I was in a honeymoon phase," Merrill said in an interview with Insider. "It's an incredible car, and it handles unlike anything I've ever driven" — but the honeymoon didn't last long.

Two days later, Merrill drove his R1S to his family's shared property in the mountains. He wanted to put his rugged electric SUV to the test, so he drove it on the unplowed, snow-covered road into the property.

At first, the R1S sliced through the snow. Then, a large snowdrift stymied the car, he said.

"I hit about 2 ½-feet of snow and it just stopped right there," Merrill told Insider. "I had seen all the Rivian marketing campaigns with the cars just eating through the snow so it was kind of like, man this is disappointing."

Merrill said that he's dislodged cars from snowbanks before, and enlisted another vehicle to help pull him out. While he was sitting in the driver's seat, unbuckled, rocking the R1S out of the snowbank, he said that he accidentally triggered a safety feature that got the car stuck between the park and drive gears.

His Rivian was bricked, rendering it completely useless.

The brand-new Rivian ultimately had to be loaded onto a flatbed and driven to a service center in Chelsea, Massachusetts, hundreds of miles away. The towing fee was $2,100.

The ordeal now has Merrill considering trading the R1S for a Toyota Tacoma or a similar gas-powered pickup truck, he said.

In an interview with Insider, Rivian executives said that the car did exactly what it was programmed to do in a dangerous slide-away situation — but in this case, it wasn't sliding away.

"There was an unfortunate cascade of events and edge cases that led to this situation," Wassym Bensaid, Rivian's senior vice president of software development, told Insider. "But we take this feedback as a gift. It's great input for us to improve the product."

Bensaid said that he and his team are brainstorming responses to this specific incident, such as adding better service shortcuts to the Rivian mobile app to report problems like Merrill's and sharing FAQs for drivers whose cars get stuck.

Rivian risks alienating early adopters

Merrill isn't the first early Rivian fan to start souring on the company. Rivian has had trouble keeping some of its order holders happy as it navigates the early days of full production for its three electric vehicles.