We heard slightly extra about Rivian’s upcoming plans to open its Rivian Journey Community chargers at a roundtable dialogue with CEO RJ Scaringe this week.
Rivian has been working by itself in-house charging community since 2020, with a spotlight of putting charging websites on the way in which to the kind of lovely pure locations that it has tied a lot of its model to.
For a main instance of this, Rivian opened its first “Charging Outpost” simply exterior Yosemite Nationwide Park in July, renovating an previous fuel station into a really cool ranger cabin-style spot to cease and refuel your automobile – and likewise your self.
Now, it’s able to open its community to different manufacturers, which it introduced final April. The aim was to open by the tip of 2024 – which is quick approaching.
Whereas Rivian stopped in need of asserting a date for this at our roundtable dialogue, it was clear that the announcement is coming “very quickly.”
Scaringe informed us that he was simply reviewing the software program that non-Rivian prospects will use and that “it’s gonna be superior.” So it appears like there’s a plan to supply a separate app expertise for non-Rivian house owners, seemingly by way of the Rivian app (thus ballooning the variety of apps that each EV proprietor must have… we have to do one thing about that).
To this finish, Rivian did buy A Higher Route Planner (ABRP) final June, one of many extra standard cost planning apps for EVs. This has absolutely been a consider Rivian’s app improvement.
Scaringe informed us that RAN has now expanded to a complete of 91 websites and round 700 chargers – which he says is round 4% of the scale of Tesla’s Supercharger community, however that RAN has maintained excessive uptime because it scales. Scaringe mentioned that should you would have requested him 6-7 years in the past, he would have anticipated extra profitable third-party charging firms by now., however that now, out of all of the charging networks on the market, there are “solely two nice networks – and just one nice scaled community,” particularly Tesla Superchargers.
The others, which aren’t owned by an EV producer, simply aren’t nearly as good. RAN and Tesla have ~99% uptime, the place Scaringe mentioned that different networks have sub-70% and even sub-50% uptime (this can be an underestimate – or possibly not – however the level stands that each EV driver can inform you Tesla is the gold commonplace right here).
So Rivian sees it as necessary to electrification to supply one other nice community that may assist give drivers extra decisions, extra availability, and excessive reliability.
However how will that interface with the NACS transition? Rivian was early to hop aboard and announce that it’s going to shift to utilizing NACS and ship adapters to its house owners, although its present autos nonetheless have native CCS ports even post-refresh (the Korean manufacturers would be the first to supply native NACS ports on their autos).
We had been fairly within the timeline of who began the discussions to shift to NACS, and Scaringe informed us that it was just about common throughout the trade that as quickly as Tesla launched its NACS whitepaper calling it an open commonplace, automobile firms began speaking amongst themselves in regards to the potential of lastly harmonizing on a single charging commonplace.
As of now, Rivian continues to be putting in CCS cables, not NACS ones. It sounded prefer it intends to maintain doing this for the foreseeable future, and that “the charging community will catch up” as automobiles transition to NACS. Till then, individuals can use adapters – and “in the long run, the whole lot will go to NACS” because it’s only a higher commonplace, and no matter remaining CCS automobiles exist will simply find yourself utilizing adapters.
This appears slightly unusual to make automobiles that aren’t (natively) supported by yourself charging community, however Scaringe mentioned that that’s the advantage of proudly owning the community – cables will not be too exhausting to swap out. So it might be straightforward to simply change out the cable heads on present chargers with out having to construct new websites or set up new cupboards.
We requested whether or not they’d strive a dual-charging-head technique, with NACS and CCS heads on every cupboard, however it didn’t sound like that was within the plans. The cables will, at the least, be lengthy sufficient to succeed in each side of the car – an necessary consideration given the dearth of standardization of charging port areas on EVs, as networks begin opening as much as a number of manufacturers.
So – we’re trying ahead to listening to extra about Rivian’s efforts to open RAN, which must bear fruit fairly quickly, if the “finish of the 12 months” schedule holds. Keep tuned, as we’re certain there’s extra information to come back quickly.
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