Update.
Yesterday, after the truck went into its safe / recovery mode, we decided to keep experimenting with solutions. So we fired the truck up, errors and alarms going off, and took it for a spin.
Within 30 feet of moving, everything but the screen cleared up all at once. It was bizarre.
After driving a few miles we parked the vehicle and let it sit for 15 minutes. Came back to it, opened the door, waited a bit longer than normal (2 minutes?) and sure enough, the screen came back online.
We hopped in the vehicle and drove 1,000 miles from Portland to Southern California right after. We had no errors at all the entire drive down.
So as
@Voader - Oudersopzwier alluded too, there are clearly software tasks running shortly after ignition that can be interrupted if you pull the power. However, for us at least, the owner can recover by just driving the truck around since the software appears to reboot itself over a short distance.
As for the screen, mine fails to initialize if the truck sits overnight (or for long periods). This seems to be some sort of firmware corruption or task interruption during whatever processes that are running during extended shut off. The best thing to do it seems is to drive the truck around, park it, lock it, and come back in 15 minutes to see if the screen returns. I'll ask the dealer to reflash the firmware to see if that helps.
We ran into other small annoyances over the 16 hours of driving:
- AC condenser leaking into the driver footwell
- Missing cabin air filter causing wind to come into the passenger footwell (it was freezing at night)
- CarPlay locking up, requiring a screen reboot (you can do this by holding the MUTE button. Im going to try to this next time my screen doesn't come up.)
- Rattling infotainment screen
- Annoying whine at higher speeds from what appears to be the Cytek under the seats, but unclear if thats the cause
- Heated seats don't really have different levels. The hottest setting ramps up quickly then comes down to a mild heat.
- AC is all over the place. Also getting a ton of wind noise through the vents unless Recirculation is on, but that requires the AC to be running.