Charging in the US is terrible. it will be better Thanks some big new investment, but it’s still extremely common to show up at a charging site to find the only available charger broken. The Tesla Supercharger network is currently the best in the industry, which helps explain why every automaker decided to switch to NACS, but even then, implementation is still slow. Rivian’s solution? Simply collect data on all chargers across the country and categorize them so drivers have a better idea of where broken chargers are.
The brink report that the latest software update Rivian recently released uses data collected from customers’ cars to direct owners toward chargers that actually work and away from chargers that it believes have broken. And while this is a relatively simple idea considering how connected modern electric vehicles are, it’s also one of those things that’s so obvious, it’s hard to understand why it hasn’t caught on yet. entire industry.
“Our North Star is charging and electric vehicle trip planning should work well. You shouldn’t think about that,” Rivian’s head of software, Wassym Bensaid, told brink. He then added: “Actually, it’s surprising how many chargers are rated F. It was one of those ‘a ha’ moments when we looked at the data.”
And while you might not like the idea of an automaker knowing too much about your charging experience, at least Rivian is using the data it collects to make customers’ lives easier. a little bit:
Every time one of our vehicles interacts with the charger, we have some data uploaded to the cloud, and that gives us a very precise understanding of the state of the session the vehicle is having. So we get data not only related to the number of successful sessions but also related to how many trials? How is the payment? What is the interaction speed? What was the overall peak performance you achieved in a session? What is hypothermic behavior?
To make the latest software update useful, Rivian is said to have been collecting customer charging data for more than a year. There’s only so much Rivian on the road, and it doesn’t have access to the EV charging experience of other automakers, so it won’t be a perfect system, especially from the start, but at least Most of all, they are trying. They are also adding a customer feedback option that allows owners to report bad chargers and highlight the best performing chargers.
“Charging will work,” Bensaid told the Verge. “And the more satisfied customers we get, the more we eliminate the worry of fees as a barrier to adoption.”
