Rivian EV charging station (Source: Rivian)
We heard more about Rivian's upcoming plans to open its Rivian Adventure Network chargers in a roundtable discussion with CEO RJ Scaringe this week.
Rivian has been working on its internal charging network since 2020, focusing on placing charging sites on the way to a good environment that is more tied to its product.
For a prime example of this, Rivian opened its first “Charging Station” just outside Yosemite National Park in July, converting an old gas station into a cool, guard-cabin-like place for you to stop and fill up your car – and yourself.
Now, it is ready to open its network to other brands, which it announced last April. The goal was to open by the end of 2024 – which is fast approaching.
While Rivian stopped short of announcing a date for this in our roundtable chat, it was clear that an announcement is coming “soon.”
Scaringe told us that he was recently reviewing the software for use by non-Rivian customers and that “it's going to be great.” So it sounds like there is a plan to provide a separate app experience for non-Rivian owners, probably through the Rivian app (thereby counting the number of apps every EV owner needs to have… we need to do something about that).
To date, Rivian purchased A Better Route Planner (ABRP) last June, which is one of the most popular charging planning applications for EVs. This has certainly been a factor in Rivian's app development.
Scaringe told us that the RAN has now grown to a total of 91 sites and nearly 700 chargers — which he says is roughly 4% of the size of Tesla's Supercharger network, but that RAN has remained as high as it's scaled. Scaringe said that if you had asked him 6-7 years ago, he would have expected successful third-party charging companies by now., but now, of all the charging networks out there, there are “only two big networks. – and only one major network has scale,” Tesla Superchargers.
Others, not from the EV manufacturer, are not so good. RAN and Tesla have ~99% uptime, where Scaringe said other networks have sub-70% or even sub-50% uptime (this may be an understatement – or maybe not – but the point It stands to reason that every EV driver can tell you Tesla is the gold standard here).
So Rivian sees it as important to electrify to provide another good network that can help give drivers more choice, more availability, and higher reliability.
But how will that convergence change with NACS? Rivian quickly jumped on board and announced that it will switch to using NACS and send adapters to its owners, although its current cars still have native CCS ports even after the update (Korean models will be the first to offer NACS ports in their cars).
We were very interested in the timeline of WHO started discussions to switch to NACS, and Scaringe told us that it was a very good thing across the industry that as soon as Tesla released its NACS white paper calling it an open standard, the car companies started talking to each other about the power to keep agreeing on a single charging standard.
To this day, Rivian still installs CCS cables, not NACS cables. It sounded like it intends to continue doing this for the foreseeable future, and that “the charging network will catch up” as vehicles transition to NACS. Until then, people can use adapters – and “in the long run, everything will go to NACS” as it's just a better standard, and any remaining CCS cars that exist will end up using adapters.
It seems strange to run unsupported (native) cars on your charging network, but Scaringe said that's the benefit of owning the network – cables aren't too hard to swap out. So it would be easy to just replace the cable heads on the existing chargers without building new sites or installing new cabinets.
We asked if they would try a dual charging strategy, with NACS and CCS heads in each cabinet, but it didn't sound like that was in the plans. The cables, at the very least, will be long enough to reach both sides of the vehicle – an important consideration given the lack of standardization of charging port locations on EVs, as networks begin to open up to more brands.
So – we look forward to hearing more about Rivian's efforts to unlock RAN, which should bear fruit soon, if the “end of the year” schedule holds. Stay tuned, as we're sure there's more news to come soon.
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