Rivian’s R1T electric bakkie
Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon / Bloomberg
Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon / Bloomberg
If – or, probably, when – all the business books about Rivian Automotive Inc. starts falling, at least one should get the title: Do all the difficult things at once. The young company is currently trying to complete a factory and three different vehicles while planning a trip to a Wall Street stock exchange. Apparently RJ Scaringe, CEO still a little too much sleep, because two weeks ago Rivian announced a plan to build its own charging network, à la Tesla.
The decision, which has been scaring Scaringe for years, consists of at least 3,500 fast chargers at 600 locations and at least 10,000 “charging points” that charge more slowly at campsites, motels, hiking trails and the like – all installed by 2024. expensive capital project: according to one study could cost the hardware alone in building a fast charging station up to $ 320,000, to say nothing of maintenance and other soft costs. In short, Rivian’s own strategy is a silent accusation of US infrastructure: which at the moment is apparently not enough.
Tesla opted for the same kind of own network, but that was nine years ago. The charging card, which is not from Tesla, has since become denser, but pins are still thin outside urban centers, and the center of the country is covered with electron deserts.
Tesla currently has 9,723 fast charging cords in the US, according to the latest version from the Department of Energy. The other networks together have only 7589 outlets for public charges, and they are much less widely distributed. The Tesla Club is covered in Millinocket, Me., Athens, Ala., And Casper, Wyo. —All places where Ford’s saturated new Mustang Mach-E is struggling to run free. While this is a challenge for Ford, it’s a bigger hurdle for Rivian’s ‘Electric Adventure Vehicles’, which apparently goes to more wild places than the Santa Monica farmers market.
Plug power
Source: US Department of Energy
There is good reason for the anemic charge card. The microeconomics for a public charging network is quite cruel. Profits will not appear without much EV traffic; EVs do not appear without many chargers. But at the micro-micro level, there is another variable in the comparison: chargers sell cars. Elon Musk saw this clearly a decade ago. When Rivian plants a charger in an electron desert like North Dakota, the revenue flows in return through a thicker pipe than for a charging empire that sells only the electricity.
A look at the Rivian card colors his sales ambitions. There are a number of chargers planned for Alaska, Hawaii and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Even Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia will see stations. “We can be really creative about locations,” Scaringe said TechCrunch in December, “so it enables us to get to places that are very specific and unique to Rivian.”
Rivian loading map
Source: Rivian
What’s more, Rivian plans to hand over the keys to 100,000 delivery vans to Amazon.com in the coming decade, including 10,000 by the end of next year. The retail giant no doubt wants to use (and load) the equipment widely. Meanwhile, non-Rivian vehicles can use the company’s slower charging tools, another potential revenue stream. “Demand is a nice problem to have,” says Ryan Fisher, an analyst at BloombergNEF, and there is value in closing primary charging points before EVs invade remote locations in the country, he adds.
The current car industry has not been so adventurous yet, but it has another variable in the equation: gas-powered revenue. These cars can still sell vehicles in places like North Dakota, where the loading equipment is sparse. As such, the industry has largely decided to assess its own charging networks and essentially merge a patchwork of interoperability agreements with third-party networks. Ford Motor Co., for example, joined Electrify America in 2017, the charging network that Volkswagen founded as part of the settlement of its Dieselgate exhaust fraud scandal. (Public charging networks have become even more important to Ford owners this week stopped selling his $ 799 home charger because some do not work properly.)
Lastly, Rivian needs to think carefully about the long term – specifically the large, squishy calculus of brand value. The company produced the capital behind its name for 12 years, and almost every step was deliberate – from the production of seven-minute snowboarding films to an Aspen gondola for an impromptu interview. It also rents ‘guides’ that will be personally designated to engage with individual buyers.
Now, at the point of placing products in the wild, it would certainly be easier and cheaper to outsource loading work to some third-party plug in a motel parking lot, but that would be out of step with the company’s approach so far. Charging will be a big part of the Rivian’s UX, probably as important as the lights, the acceleration and the handy ‘Camp kitchen’ that slides out from under the bakkie. For Scaringe and the company, the reward – the potential savings to skip their own network – does not seem to be worth the risk.