Status of Current Charging Curves

[SeaGeo]

Ha, just being facetious that the stars need to be aligned to get optimal charging. I was hoping for a bit better charge curve. I'm debating on if/ when to put down a deposit on a future R1T, If I can get a good trade for my 2-3 year old LE I might be interested in the 2 motor... 600HP is still a beast.

Got it. I was wondering about that.

Yeah, I remember from the Breck event that had accidentally set the regen thermal limit too low. I have a hunch that something similar is occuring here from seeing how inconsistently the curves are dropping off from peak. They've obviously put a bunch of work into the cooling of the truck, and I haven't heard of anyone hitting any thermally induced power limits while towing, so I'm inclined to think it's a self-inflicted software wound or decision that will get fixed. It's just bizarre.

And yeah.... I need to figure out how to delay my R1S reservation about 9 months. lol.

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[Trandall]

Got it. I was wondering about that.

Yeah, I remember from the Breck event that had accidentally set the regen thermal limit too low. I have a hunch that something similar is occuring here from seeing how inconsistently the curves are dropping off from peak. They've obviously put a bunch of work into the cooling of the truck, and I haven't heard of anyone hitting any thermally induced power limits while towing, so I'm inclined to think it's a self-inflicted software wound or decision that will get fixed. It's just bizarre.

And yeah.... I need to figure out how to delay my R1S reservation about 9 months. lol.

Make sense... if you can drain at 1C sustained should be able to charge the same.

 

[OutofSpecKyle]

Will have a full detailed video on this coming. Have lots of charging logs and I think we’ve got it all figured out!

 

[Scoiatael]

The one thing that bothers me about the charging curve, is last year Rivian had all those videos of them testing the Rivian out. You would think during that time they would have identified the 60% dropoff as an issue and fixed it. So that brings up the question were they actually doing testing or was that all marketing videos.

 

[Rivian_Hugh_III]

Thanks for putting that together! I am confident after a few updates the curve will be better. I have no idea why they are being so conservative with it early on, but they must have their reasons.

Any thoughts on the brand/ franchise of charger being part of the problem?

Being new to EV’s I have to ask, is there anything about brand new batteries that would require a “break in” period? Like you may want to take it easy on them until they… wear in?

 

[Forager]

At what point does ABRP input actual charge curves into their mapping algorithm?

ABRP clearly uses a flat (optimistic) charge rate on the alpha R1 vehicles, and I haven’t seen a setting where I can input a custom curve. I want to evaluate how these slower curves impact my daily range for road trips, figuring 8-9
Hours max per day including stops.

 

[SeaGeo]

At what point does ABRP input actual charge curves into their mapping algorithm?

ABRP clearly uses a flat (optimistic) charge rate on the alpha R1 vehicles, and I haven’t seen a setting where I can input a custom curve. I want to evaluate how these slower curves impact my daily range for road trips, figuring 8-9
Hours max per day including stops.

It shouldn't be flat anymore. I think they put a taper in above 50% that slowed the curve down. At one point I think they were assuming it would go above 200kw.

 

[lostpacket]

Ok but has anyone tried charging while Mercury is in retrograde?

Do we even know Kyle's zodiac sign?

It's a good thing I'm here to bring the real science to the conversation.

 

[camaroz1985]

It shouldn't be flat anymore. I think they put a taper in above 50% that slowed the curve down. At one point I think they were assuming it would go above 200kw.

I was wondering about this too. Can we see the curve they use? I would like to see how it compares to what people are actually getting.

 

[Forager]

It shouldn't be flat anymore. I think they put a taper in above 50% that slowed the curve down. At one point I think they were assuming it would go above 200kw.

That would be a good improvement, I’ll play around with it later.

At this point I’m estimating daily range for trips to be around 460 miles or less. That’s basically cycling the battery from 100% in the morning, stopping at 10%, charging to 80%, and stopping for the day at 10%. It’s also 7 hours of driving at 65 mph with a 1 hour charging stop. Anyone with young kids will know there probably needs to be 1-2 more stops, so 450 miles in 8 hours is optimistic. Other variables include proximity to a charger when you are nearing 10% and whether your hotel or campsite has L2 charging available for getting back to 100% overnight.

I’m perhaps getting off topic here. I’m just attempting to quantify how concerned I am about a slower charging rate. For me, probably less so, since my road warrior days are on pause with a young family.

 

[SeaGeo]

That would be a good improvement, I’ll play around with it later.

At this point I’m estimating daily range for trips to be around 460 miles or less. That’s basically cycling the battery from 100% in the morning, stopping at 10%, charging to 80%, and stopping for the day at 10%. It’s also 7 hours of driving at 65 mph with a 1 hour charging stop. Anyone with young kids will know there probably needs to be 1-2 more stops, so 450 miles in 8 hours is optimistic. Other variables include proximity to a charger when you are nearing 10% and whether your hotel or campsite has L2 charging available for getting back to 100% overnight.

I’m perhaps getting off topic here. I’m just attempting to quantify how concerned I am about a slower charging rate. For me, probably less so, since my road warrior days are on pause with a young family.

What I've done is compared the curve I've observed and estimating the time to get from X to Y percent to what ABRP is predicting.

I think the bigger issue you may run into is that it appears a lot of EAs chargers are limiting 400v charging to ~150kw because they aren't providing more than 350A. This definitely varies either by manufacturer or region (which may be because of buildout time), but for example Kyle only found 1 charger between Denver and Phoenix that wasn't limited. And he wasn't able to confirm that the charger would provide more than 350 amps because the battery thermally throttled on him.

 

[Forager]

From reading your opening post, I understood that 10-80% in 60 minutes is what we can reasonably expect based on current curves with the 150kW and 350a limits. Did I misunderstand that? I’ll admit I’m new to EV charging, so I could very likely be missing something.

I appreciate your posts, they are really beneficial to the community.

 

[SeaGeo]

From reading your opening post, I understood that 10-80% in 60 minutes is what we can reasonably expect based on current curves with the 150kW and 350a limits. Did I misunderstand that? I’ll admit I’m new to EV charging, so I could very likely be missing something.

I appreciate your posts, they are really beneficial to the community.

If you don't run into whatever SID ran into (which I think was a cold battery), I think it'll be more like 40 to 45 minutes. We should have a much better idea once Out of Spec publishes their charging curve video. It took them several tests and a road trip, but they think they have figured out what's going on. I suspect you'll save 4 or 5 minutes with a 500a charger. This is dependent on Rivian fixing what seems to be some thermal management issues at the moment , which I think is most likely enabling preconditioning.

I think that if you get the battery warm enough, the curve is reasonably close to the "target" curve I drew up. I'm guessing they're currently limiting it to about 450amps rather than 500 amps, so the peak of that curve will drop a bit on the 500amp chargers initially. On the 350a chargers it'll be limited to <155kw up to about 55%. Above that SOC I think it'll be a stair step that's a little below the smooth taper I imagined, but not a massive amount. probably about 20kw less in many spots.

 

[TXR1S]

Does anyone know if EA can unlock these 350A chargers to 400A? Is that even something to hope for?

 

[SeaGeo]

Does anyone know if EA can unlock these 350A chargers to 400A? Is that even something to hope for?

As far as I've heard they're all specified as 500A chargers. It seems like they are software/firmware limited for some reason. So my initial reaction would be that they should be able to do that. However, Rivian and Mercedes have obviously done a lot of testing on them, so I'm sure they're aware of the issue. Which makes me think EA has found some issue with those ABB chargers that prompted them to put that limit in place.

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