EyeOnRivian
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While searching for any EV-to-EV charging, I came across this recently filed article of TheDrive interviewing RJ.
The elusive CEO confirms auxiliary battery packs, vehicle-to-vehicle charging, and his love for Porsches in our exclusive interview.
A few highlights from the interview/article:
Letās say you get charging infrastructure in places like Joshua Tree or other remote national parks. How do you get further off the edge of the grid?
You're starting to get into the long tail of use cases, but even there we've designed the vehicle so you can have auxiliary battery packs. You can also charge Rivian-to-Rivian, which is a neat thing. You connect the two vehicles and then I could hand you some electrons. That takes us to the limit, and of course you can always find a corner of the world where it won't work, just like you can't find a gas station in Antarctica. You won't be able to find a plug in Antarctica, so there are natural limitations.
Instead of how far, do you want to change the conversation to how fast that people can charge to 80 percent? A lot of the issues stem from āWell, I get electric vehicles, but I can fill up a tank of gas in 2 minutes. This is going to take me 30 minutes to get to an 80 percent charge.ā
There's a lot of misinformation on this, unfortunately. The speed at which you charge has a huge impact on the life of the batteries. Regardless of what they're telling you, everyone is working with very similar sets in chemistry. There are three or four big battery cell providers here in North America, and their technologies have very minor differences. Ultimately you're up against how fast you can shove electrons in, providing you're effective at cooling the cell and providing it with power to shove it in. The limit is chemistry more than charging strategy, charging profiles, and even cooling. We're all boiling the same water so to speak, and we've optimized the hell out of it for cooling, so we can push electrons in really quickly. We've optimized the profiles, and we've optimized how we operate and run the batteries to maintain life.
At launch, we'll be able to put 200 miles of range into the vehicle in 30 minutes. Could we go faster? Yes. Do we start to really degrade the cell? Yes. In the next five years, youāll see a lot of demonstrations where things are charged in 15 minutes, but if you do that 30 times, the battery is shot. Those demos are not realistic or repeatable and we'll start to see those get replaced with real world charging speeds and rates. We see that already, like if you tried to supercharge a Tesla twenty days in a row, the 20th day is slower than the first day because Tesla's naturally protecting the pack.
Is Rivian working on that internally?
We're not developing chemistry, we're working with our cell partner and testing ourselves, but we're using existing chemistry. Itās a little in the weeds for us, but Iām just being honest with you. All of people are claiming to do things that they're truly not. Essentially manufacturers buying cells from the same suppliers. Very few people that are actually doing fundamental work and chemistry on an OEM level, and it makes sense because you aggregate the research to a small set of players that then spend their dollars amongst the manufacturers. That's why everybody is running up against the same ceiling and charging times.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Interesting RJ says you can charge "Rivian-to-Rivian." Did he phrase that specifically on purpose, meaning, is he implying it's NOT possible to charge another-EV-to-Rivian and vice versa?
The elusive CEO confirms auxiliary battery packs, vehicle-to-vehicle charging, and his love for Porsches in our exclusive interview.
A few highlights from the interview/article:
Letās say you get charging infrastructure in places like Joshua Tree or other remote national parks. How do you get further off the edge of the grid?
You're starting to get into the long tail of use cases, but even there we've designed the vehicle so you can have auxiliary battery packs. You can also charge Rivian-to-Rivian, which is a neat thing. You connect the two vehicles and then I could hand you some electrons. That takes us to the limit, and of course you can always find a corner of the world where it won't work, just like you can't find a gas station in Antarctica. You won't be able to find a plug in Antarctica, so there are natural limitations.
Instead of how far, do you want to change the conversation to how fast that people can charge to 80 percent? A lot of the issues stem from āWell, I get electric vehicles, but I can fill up a tank of gas in 2 minutes. This is going to take me 30 minutes to get to an 80 percent charge.ā
There's a lot of misinformation on this, unfortunately. The speed at which you charge has a huge impact on the life of the batteries. Regardless of what they're telling you, everyone is working with very similar sets in chemistry. There are three or four big battery cell providers here in North America, and their technologies have very minor differences. Ultimately you're up against how fast you can shove electrons in, providing you're effective at cooling the cell and providing it with power to shove it in. The limit is chemistry more than charging strategy, charging profiles, and even cooling. We're all boiling the same water so to speak, and we've optimized the hell out of it for cooling, so we can push electrons in really quickly. We've optimized the profiles, and we've optimized how we operate and run the batteries to maintain life.
At launch, we'll be able to put 200 miles of range into the vehicle in 30 minutes. Could we go faster? Yes. Do we start to really degrade the cell? Yes. In the next five years, youāll see a lot of demonstrations where things are charged in 15 minutes, but if you do that 30 times, the battery is shot. Those demos are not realistic or repeatable and we'll start to see those get replaced with real world charging speeds and rates. We see that already, like if you tried to supercharge a Tesla twenty days in a row, the 20th day is slower than the first day because Tesla's naturally protecting the pack.
Is Rivian working on that internally?
We're not developing chemistry, we're working with our cell partner and testing ourselves, but we're using existing chemistry. Itās a little in the weeds for us, but Iām just being honest with you. All of people are claiming to do things that they're truly not. Essentially manufacturers buying cells from the same suppliers. Very few people that are actually doing fundamental work and chemistry on an OEM level, and it makes sense because you aggregate the research to a small set of players that then spend their dollars amongst the manufacturers. That's why everybody is running up against the same ceiling and charging times.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Interesting RJ says you can charge "Rivian-to-Rivian." Did he phrase that specifically on purpose, meaning, is he implying it's NOT possible to charge another-EV-to-Rivian and vice versa?
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