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Electrify America general discussion
- Thread starter Mockingbird
- Start date
Well, Rivian was given a chunk of cash to get them going, so they can stave off bankruptcy until that runs out.
Then the shell and name can be purchased by another company.
Because holidays happen every year. Total solar eclipses, well, those are likely to not happen more than once in that location in the lifespan of the equipment.
Also: If there is a blackout once a year, why does it make economic sense for a regulator to order generators and distributors to upgrade the grid? Answer: because not having electricity is not acceptable in a first world country and it pisses people off.
There are blackouts multiple times per year.
Places like hospitals have generators because the harm of not having electricity is more than the cost of installing/maintaining generators.
On the other hand, the 'harm' of people having to wait to charge is not more than the cost of installing/maintaining more charging equipment.
The same could be said of Tesla multiple times, and that didn't stop me from getting a Tesla.
Although the first one back in 2015 was one of the hardest buying decisions I ever made.
Tesla benefited from traditional automakers ignoring BEVs.
That is not the case with Rivian.
FWIW, my Tesla has never taken more than 1 minute to do the CCS handshake. It's slower than Superchargers, but faster than our CCS-native car.
Tesla resorted to all sorts of "field of dream" stuff to literally create the market. Things like the Supercharger network where people bought Tesla's with faith that the Supercharger network build out wasn't just fluff. Elon also hyped things like FSD well beyond what the capabilities were.
Tesla also created a very different kind of car than other manufactures, and how the vehicles were sold. They did thing like OTA updates to update SW/Firmware which gives the customer the day before Christmas feeling of a highly anticipated update dropping. Plus things like Mobile Service saves the customer from a lot of hassle.
Tesla innovated in a market that was rather stagnant. It created new expectations for customers.
I got my Rivian because I wanted a Tesla like experience with a true 4x4 adventure vehicle. Rivian literally copied from Tesla's playbook, but without that whole full self driving thing.
I don't know if Rivian will be successful long term, but I do know there is a lot of demand. I didn't feel a lot of desire to get a traditional automaker BEV because they lacked a lot of what I was looking for.
If Rivian fails its going to be one of those "you only had yourself to blame" kinds of things. An example of this is when they did the massive price hikes for everyone then within 24 hours or so they reversed that policy for reservation holders. But, it didn't change the market price of the vehicle so all they ended up doing was handing reservation holders massive profits if they flipped their vehicle. If the market says your truck is $100K then its a $100K truck even if you only paid $75K for it. Once your spouse finds out good luck trying to keep it.
There is so much potential in the BEV market especially with Trucks, and SUVs. I personally was a bit tired of EV sedans as I already had two of them.
I'm going to clock it the next time I charge my Rivian at one because I don't feel like its anywhere close to 5min.
I think it's only 5 minutes, if you end up having to switch handles and/or stalls... Otherwise, I think the most I've seen it take is about 2-2.5 minutes.
If I launch a new website and copy from Amazon's playbook, that doesn't make my new website Amazon, nor do I become Jeff Bezos.
If all Rivian is copying from Tesla's playbook, the company is doomed.
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My understanding is the plug-and-charge handshake cars currently take much longer than most others ... Our Hyundai Kona EV takes about 45 seconds from (pre-authorized) plug to charging, and I think my tesla takes about 20 seconds.... but both numbers are from gut feel, not actually timed. The only 5-minute times I've seen quoted were for plug-and-charge vehicles, and were including the payment part of this.
See also my pre-canned belief/rant on how EA should support autocharge[1], with local authorization via (a bloom filter, plus low max charge rate until the CC charge takes) and take the payment authorization part out of the fast-path-toward-charging.
[1] Autocharge is not plug-and-charge. Autocharge is "lookup account via the MAC address of the car". Plug-and-charge is "car presents signed cert telling you what URL to hit to figure out if you'll get paid for charging this car"
Thanks for the data point.
I've only used EA about a half dozen times and each time, it took well over 10 minutes and as much as 30 minutes, just to get it say it was connecting. After that, I don't recall how long the connecting time took.
I was using the CHAdeMo port and I haven't tried for about a year.
Maybe it has changed. If they send me a 'free charge to get you to try our new and improved equipment', I may try again, otherwise, it will have to wait until I'm on a road trip, an EA charger is more convenient than a Supercharger, and I feel like experimenting before I try again.
Of cause Plug & Charge takes a while.
The reason is that the charging network (i.e. Electrify America) has to send the customer's bill to the automaker (i.e. Ford).
The Supercharger doesn't have this problem because Tesla doesn't have to send the bill to itself.
Exelion
Member
I’ve used EA a lot, with the Tesla CHAD, the Setec CCS1, and Tesla CCS1 adaptors. None of those ever took longer than a few minutes to start charging. I can say the credit card swiper is almost always broken, so I don’t use that. But it’s pretty even 50/50 whether I use the phone app or the phone “tap” on the pad. Both seem to work ok, although the app is reliant on cellphone signal I think.
Just make sure you choose one or the other... At walmart a few weeks ago, I was trying to charge there. I initiated from phone app, but it wouldn't connect to my car on the handle I was using... The machine timed out, and went back to the main screen. My phone didn't register the timeout.... I couldn't tap at this point... Nothing happened. I had to exit out of the app, and re-connect, and let it refresh it's state... Then I was able to get it to work.
There aren't blackouts due to inability of the grid to supply enough electricity multiple times per year. There were in Texas in a cold snap, but that doesn't happen every year. If it did, you'd see Texans even more riled up about the state of their grid than they already are.
Watch and see what happens the next time we have a Carrington type solar flare aimed at the Earth. All hell is going to break loose and a lot of people are going to be fired over the lack of preparedness.
Yes it is. Do you want people to adopt EVs? Then they'd better not have to wait 30-60 minutes to charge on Thanksgiving weekend. If they do, they're going to just buy an ICE vehicle instead.
1: RTT for a web request should be O(0.3s), not O(3 minutes).
2: And ... so? Charge the car at 7kW or something stupid low until the check/billing clears. That lets the user know the protocol worked, and the cars are able to talk.
(Implementation: you collect the billing info per the normal flow, but always and immediately pretend success. Then have a background task actually do the check, and on success remove the charge limit. On failure, terminate the session)
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Great suggestions.
Too bad CCS doesn't support V2G. That way, they could start charging at full speed upon plug-in, then start the billing verification process. If it fails, they could suck the electrons back out of the car before releasing the CCS connector.
It is sad how EA (and the others) are more concerned about losing a few cents on charging if the validation fails than making it a good experience for users.
If they were concerned about losing a few cents on charging, they wouldn't give you any partial kWh for free (i.e. always round down to the nearest integer number of kWh).
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