Rivian embraces Tesla's charging standard for EVs

I spend more time pumping gas for my ICE than I do waiting on my EV to charge, by hours a year.

Lets say it takes 5 minutes on average to turn off to the gas station, go to the pump, pay to start the pump, get the handle into the car, actually pump the gas, return the pump handle, close it all up, get in the car, and rejoin traffic. In my testing its often more than 5 minutes from my times, but lets just say 5 to make things easy. I get gas about every other week in my ICE, so 5 minutes every other week, but I do take some vacations so lets round to a 50 week year, half of that is 25, times 5, 125. That's 125 minutes of pumping gas that I do every year. A little over 2 hours. And that's excluding any kind of road trips where I might have done several of those 5 minute stops in a single week.

Guess how much time I had to spend waiting on public DCFC last year? I took a road trip and stopped for maybe 40 minutes total. Outside of that, 0 minutes.

I spend more time waiting to recharge my ICE than I do my EV, by a good bit.

Lets take a look at US averages though instead of just my use case. Average miles driven is what, ~13,500? Average range of a car is ~400mi? That means ~33.75 fill ups a year instead of just 25? 33.75 * 5 = 168.75 minutes, or 2.8 hours a year pumping gas. If someone can charge at home and public chargers where they're already going to be (work/shop/relax places), they might not ever even need to wait on a public charger, so 2.8 hours compared to literally 0 minutes waiting for charging.

MB's system accomplishes the levels of quality defined in the SAE standard. Tesla is taking a different strategy by focusing on quantity of features, although many of them fail to meet the reliability standards of the higher SAE specs.

Tesla is stuck at level 2 because the level of reliability required at level 3 would mean they'd have to remove features to meet it.

The recent moves by Tesla have probably been to force the government to amend regulations that would standardize the CCS Type 1 connector for DC fast charging. These rules were announced in February by the Biden administration for projects funded by the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program.

If Tesla hadn't gotten others on board, the next 5 years would likely see CCS chargers eclipse the Supercharger network many times over with probably 5-7x more CCS chargers as Tesla chargers. As people in this thread have said, the Supercharger network is a big selling point for Teslas. If CCS charging availability were 5-7x greater than Tesla availability, that current advantage would become a liability for Tesla over the long-run.

Given that GM, Ford, and Rivian are all announcing that they're adopting the CCS charger, it seems likely that the government will probably change their regulations around charging standards to the Tesla charger. If the three largest American EV companies are all using NACS in 2025, it makes little sense for them to mandate CCS chargers. With Tesla, Ford, Rivian, and GM all going NACS, it seems likely that more will follow. Hyundai is already thinking about it: https://www.autoblog.com/2023/06/20/hyundai-to-consider-join.... Stellantis (Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge, Fiat) is evaluating it: https://fordauthority.com/2023/06/ford-rival-stellantis-look....

In fact, Tesla had to make its connector non-proprietary or they'd be locked out of everything funded by the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program. The rules allow for non-CCS chargers to be available (as long as there's also a CCS charger) only if they're non-proprietary. If Tesla had kept their connector proprietary, any charger with a Tesla connector would be ineligible for government funding. Now, they can have a Tesla connector as long as they also have a CCS connector. As I've speculated, given that it seems likely most EVs sold in the US will be using NACS from 2025+, it seems likely that the government will even change its rules to favor the NACS connector.

Tesla's shift to calling it the North American Charging Standard and opening it up to competitors is probably more about preventing one of their advantages (Tesla vehicles being compatible with the most charging stations) into a major liability (Tesla vehicles requiring an adapter to use the majority of charging stations in 2025+).

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2023-02-28/pdf/2023-0...

This is true. Though the electric batteries do have the advantage of having already paid the "thermodynamics tax". Some of the energy in gas will go towards heat losses; energy that cannot be converted to movement.

> Only idiots buy black-box based car insurance

Monitored policies are almost always significantly cheaper. That's why people buy them. I won't engage on who the "idiot" is in that analysis except to say that Adam Smith probably has an opinion.

The reason this works is that it forces the consumers to self-partition into those who think they drive safely and those who know they don't. That doesn't correlate perfectly with actual safety, but it's clear that it's a good proxy signal. Insurance companies may be renowned for "slippery policy wordings", but they're even better known for doing good statistics.