Rivian Is Preparing a Way For Wilderness EV Charging
The time of the Electric truck is not only coming, but it’s coming in hot. People love pickups, and people love EVS. If you smash the two together, boy, you’ve got a hit! This, of course, is no secret. Tesla has been sprinting toward the Cyber Truck with the quickness. Every EV maker wants a piece of that electric pie, but Rivian looks like it has its fork and plate ready for the first slice.
Rivian is planning ahead for the electric future
Electric cars in cities make plenty of sense. The range is less important, and there are charges all over every major city at this point. What might make someone hesitant to buy an EV made for off-road or more rural applications, like, I don’t know, say, a pickup truck, is that charging in those places might be difficult, even impossible. Well, Rivian is planning to build a network of charging stations in more adventurous locations like Hiking trailheads, rock climbing sites, and campgrounds.
This is not Rivian’s first rodeo
If you look at Rivian’s short track record, it shows that implementing remote charging stations is near to the company’s values. The company is made up of folks who appreciate a big adventure. The first two Rivian R1Ts acted as support vehicles for Charlie Boorman and Ewan McGregor’s film, The Long Way Up. The two bikers rode electric motorcycles from Argentina to LA. As you may imagine, there weren’t many charging stations on many long legs of the journey, so Rivian installed a string of charging stations along their path.
Not only is Rivian planning to install chargers in more remote places, but like Tesla, it plans to make its own charging stations in house. According to Roadshow, the Rivian charging station replenishes 120 miles of range in about 20 mins. That’s pretty dang good.
These electric truck makers are for the people
Rivian will make sure its customers can charge up in the great outdoors and give the R1T and R1S standard CCS charge plugs. Tesla uses proprietary connectors that require drivers to carry around various adapters to use various charging stations other than the Tesla Supercharger. The Rivian trucks will be able to pop between the proprietary charger along with charging stations from Electrify America, EVgo, Chargepoint, and others with ease.
The Rivian Adventure Network sounds awesome!
TechCrunch interviewed the CEO of Rivian, RJ Scaringe, where he said the Rivian Adventure Network should be operational sometime between 2023 and 2024. It may be ambitious, but that seems to be how they get down over there. A good adventure requires a little risk and a lot of ambition.
It is still unclear if other EVs will be able to use the proprietary charging network. Even though the charging connectors may match, Rivian chargers may require built-in software validation to get the power flowing.
Although the plan is ambitious, the R1T and R1S won’t be available until the summer of 2021. Reckon it better get a move on if they want people to take their electric truck camping for the weekend.
