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Comment by bdcravens | Hacker News Reader

TIL Rivian has a charging network

Rivian's R&D center is in Palo Alto, but their charger map doesn't show a public charger anywhere near there. They have zero chargers of their own in Silicon Valley.

There's a standards group at SAE working on making US charger payment compatibility work.[1] BP Pulse, General Motors, Ford, ChargePoint, Electrify America, Tesla, Toyota, and Rivian are on board.

It's good to see more higher-powered chargers. When and if solid state batteries with 9 minute charge times ship in volume, they'll need big chargers. QuantumState and ProLogium announced "breakthroughs" again this week. They do that a lot.

Samples of solid state batteries do exist. It's quantity production that's hard. Ehang, the flying car company, demonstrated a 48 minute flight using prototype solid state batteries recently.[2]

As I've said before, I think the future is one for one replacement of gasoline pumps with fast chargers. Once charge times drop below 10 minutes, a charging station doesn't have to look like a parking lot.

[1] https://www.sae.org/news/2024/12/sae-itc-plug-and-charge-fra...

[2] https://www.ehang.com/article/

> Rivian's R&D center is in Palo Alto, but their charger map doesn't show a public charger anywhere near there. They have zero chargers of their own in Silicon Valley.

Similarly, Tesla chargers in the New York area were the first to receive Magic Docks because their Energy manufacturing facility is there including the engineering aspects of it.

> Rivian's R&D center is in Palo Alto, but their charger map doesn't show a public charger anywhere near there. They have zero chargers of their own in Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley has one of the highest density of EV chargers in the world, why would Rivian need to build more?

Their goal appears to be covering areas poorly served to expand the places EV owners can go. This seems much more valuable than adding another plug to an already well served urban area.

Yeah, and they have chargers in outdoorsy places where others don't. Great news for other EV owners who like to get into the great outdoors (national parks, etc.)

Rivian's brand identity was trying to push the off-road/nature usage of their trucks/SUVs, so that focus made a lot of sense. They announced a big partnership with the Parks Department to have chargers at major National Parks. I hope that partnership will continue even as the network opens up to more users, because that was an interesting focus for a charger network.

~90 locations?

Yeah I've just never seen one, and don't have a Rivian, so it never came across the media I consume. I'm in the Houston area, and they only have 3 in Texas, none of which are near me. Only one is on a freeway that I may likely encounter.

They're more common further west, especially around national parks and other outdoorsy areas

I've got a Rivian and have only used their chargers on a road trip to Whistler from the Bay Area. One was in Shasta behind a little hotel—you'd not see it if you weren't looking for it. The other was at a Homewood Suites lot somewhere in Southern Oregon. Unsurprisingly, these were back-to-back stops. So, I think they were specifically put there to help bridge a gap between Northern CA and Southern OR.

If you were going to use it, your car's navigation would probably route you there, and you wouldn't need to look for it. FWIW.

Agreed. That comment was just a response to the parent who commented that they hadn't seen RAN chargers often.

Of note, right by the Shasta station was a large Supercharger bank, so the planning for this was probably done before the Rivian deal to use Tesla chargers and the free adapter program Rivian implemented. They may have kept that one anyway, considering the Shasta Area is probably underserved and fits Rivian's target market for their stations ("adventure" areas)

The key is that they are mostly in remote areas, not the cities.

They must not have one, because they’re ALWAYS taking up two stalls at the Tesla supercharger ones.

Take this to daddy Elon - this has absolutely nothing to do with Rivian.

Rivian placed their charging port on the front left corner, while Teslas have ports on the rear left corner. So to charge a Rivian at a Tesla Supercharger, you have to park in the adjacent spot and plug in.[1]

More Supercharging stations are adding "trailer compatible" spots, so this should become less of an issue over time. I would also bet that EV manufacturers will standardize on a port location similar to how gas vehicles have. (Early gas vehicles often put the fill hole in places like the dash or under the seat.)

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Rivian/comments/1f0wt4v/okay_is_the...

Rivian designed their vehicles long before Tesla offered them access to superchargers.

Globally, Tesla chargers have been available to most EVs for many years. America moving to a standard shouldn't have shocked anyone.

The chargers shouldn't have been made so short as to only ever accept 2-3 models of cars with identical charger placements. But they were designed to only work with a few Tesla models, so they weren't designed with flexibility in mind. Even Cybertrucks towing have a big issue with the vast majority of existing deployed chargers.

Lots of ICE vehicles have their gas inlets in a number of different spots. Some even have them behind the rear license plate! And yet people don't seem to have an issue getting gas in their cars.

IMO having the vast majority of chargers at the head like that was a bad decision. Putting them on the side of the spots makes a ton of sense and really opens up a lot of flexibility.

> I would also bet that EV manufacturers will standardize on a port location similar to how gas vehicles have

No need. Just make the cables longer and the problem is solved. Even Tesla has put longer cables on their V4 chargers.

Here's a long cable on some EnBW Alpitronic chargers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LK2shbCwDYM

Longer cables have significant disadvantages. They cost more. They're less efficient, meaning they charge slower and/or require more cooling. They contain more metal, making them more appealing to thieves. They get tangled and damaged more easily. That's why Tesla made their cables so short and standardized on a charging port location.

I'm sure future charging stations will have some long cables for vehicles with odd port locations or trailers, but I don't know if every charger at a station will have a long cable. Considering the disadvantages of long cables, it makes a lot of sense for manufacturers to use one location for the charging port. That allows owners to use as many chargers as possible. And it would mean that anyone driving an EV wouldn't have to remember where the port is on their specific vehicle.

> I don't know if every charger at a station will have a long cable.

Every charger will have longer cables. Longer cables have been deployed on chargers from many manufacturers for years. It's not novel.

Tesla is generally behind the curve with charger development. Kempower and Alpitronic make the best chargers.

Both of those companies have much higher costs per charger than Tesla. Kempower doesn't make their prices public, but the cheapest I could find was $50,000 for a 1 port 50kW charger. A dual port 200kW charger was almost $200,000. Alptronic's chargers are $50,000 for a 1 port 75kW charger and $90,000 for a 2 port charger with 300kW total output. Those numbers are just for the hardware. That doesn't include costs for installation, land, or grid connection. My best estimate of Tesla costs is around $41,000 per plug, and that includes all of those extra expenses.[1]

Sadly, the graveyard of failed companies is full of ones that made amazing products. Kempower's revenue has been going down over the past year, and they've burned through half of their cash reserves in the past few quarters. They've decreased headcount to reduce costs. I hope they pull out of this dive, as more competition is great for consumers. But it really is the case that fancier chargers are significantly more expensive. So much so that it's hard to make them profitable.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42344230

The cables are going from a cabinet many meters away from the dispenser to the dispenser. They could go another 3-4 feet and suddenly support a lot more vehicles.

Or Tesla could have placed the dispensers to the sides of even some of the spaces and alleviated the issue.

But Tesla envisioned only the few Tesla models to ever charge at Tesla chargers, so they designed them with tight tolerances.

from my understanding this is addressed with the new v4 supercharger stations that are coming online now. its not just a rivian problem its the same with Ford EVs as well.

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