Rivian’s Prime Charging | In Depth

hey everybody i'm zach and i'm jesse and you're watching in depth on now you know [Music] in depth is brought to you by ecoware.us where you can find the shirts that zach and i are wearing and for everything that you purchase we carbon offset the production the shipping and the life cycle of every product and for every order we plant a tree and we help cap a well and there's free shipping on everything and we're brought to you by a betterrootplanner.com our favorite ev trip planner with waypoints use our link in the show notes below to get a 30 day free trial to the better route planner premium app and plan your next eve trip with a betterrootplaner.com and we're sponsored by bigbattery.com with the best battery prices in the usa guaranteed if you've got something you need to power from homes to cars rvs to boats and much more bigbattery.com has you covered offering the newest battery tech use the code now you know to save five percent off your purchase today at bigbattery.com this episode is sponsored by skillshare skillshare offers thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people on topics including design photography video editing freelancing and way more i recently took video on a budget prepare your shoot without breaking the bank by christopher rhodes aka yc imaging so why'd you take that well we run a youtube channel and i wanted to learn some new tips on how to shoot better at locations he had some really useful tips on using phone apps at the location to pre-visualize shots and even predict where the sun would be okay so why not just watch a youtube video though well it only took me 38 minutes to watch all 10 classes because you can speed it up it would have taken me 38 minutes just to find a relevant youtube video oh right skillshare has no ads yeah and it was broken into bite-sized lessons so you can stop and practice what you learned exactly and for less than the price of a book on the subject you can take a class and get access to over twenty thousand curated courses all with no ads yeah that's less than ten dollars a month with an annual subscription and the first 1000 people to click the link in the description will get a free trial to skillshare premium so as many of you who follow the channel may know we're going to be getting one of the first rivian r1t pickup trucks currently scheduled for this june and i mean we're really excited to bring you videos and information all about it but one of the biggest aspects of the rivian that i'm interested in is charging will i be able to hop in the r1t and do all the things that i want as effortlessly as i can with my tesla model x because here's the thing the tesla supercharging network to me is what makes tesla awesome do i use it every day no but it's always there when i need it for both fairly short trips like going to pick someone up from the airport or weird days when you go on a day trip or you have to do multiple stops and of course it's there when we go for longer trips like when we went to visit the police chief down in westport connecticut to check out their new model 3 police car or even one of our many cross-country road trips so as the reality of owning the r1t becomes clearer in my mind i begin asking the question will the r1t become our daily driver because i'm really looking forward to having a pickup truck i used to have a dodge van you remember that yeah and i loved the utility i could drive its job sites and pick up everything doors bricks lumber and even though sparky is an suv and we picked up plenty of stuff in it that probably would make most uh model x owners cringe like uh concrete blocks and concrete and even we put christmas trees on the roof and we towed e-bikes in trailers down to savannah georgia but the thing is sparky is not a pickup truck so i'm excited to have that versatility and the rivian r1t is going to be the first electric pickup truck but if the charging doesn't at least approach that of the supercharger network then we're gonna be in a bit of a pickle yeah this is kind of a first world problem i totally get it but can the rivian r1t replace our model x and kind of become our daily driver so the first thing to do is to check out the existing charging infrastructure and we basically have to ignore all of the tesla superchargers and the tesla destination chargers because none of those are going to work on the r1t which is kind of weird for us because for the most part that's all i really pay attention to now you have a leaf so you pay attention more to other networks and i'm going to be going to you for expert advice here on this episode but the rivian according to ceo rj syringe will charge dc using ccs standard and he says that it will be able to charge 140 miles in about 20 minutes now i looked around and i couldn't find any other hard stats for the rivian they didn't seem to say how many kilowatts it can charge so we had to do kind of back of the napkin math and we figured out that 140 miles in 20 minutes well that implies that it can handle about 150 kilowatts now to put that into perspective that's most of the superchargers that came online before around uh 2018 2019 right um it's you know supercharger level it's not uh 250 kilowatts it's around it's going to be probably like 120 or 150 kilowatts right now for ac charging if you want to plug it in at home or at a level 2 charger it can charge at 110 volts or 220 volts at 16 miles per hour this implies probably about a 40 amp maximum level two charge and again this works really well for home charging so basically anytime you need to sleep uh because this will even work at a hotel um you need to recharge in about the same amount of time that most evs will take level two to recharge but i will say at 16 miles an hour if you really emptied the tank that day and the first r1t is going to have 350 miles of range it would take about a full day of charging to get it back up to full so keep that in mind all right so i think the best way to put this in perspective for me is to think about the kinds of trips we do on a fairly regular basis we usually go either like down to new york somewhere along that or we go up north to like montreal so could you help me out and figure out if we need to do one of those trips what are we looking at in terms of charging so i think the first thing to look at is the level two charging this uh probably isn't going to get you to the place that you want to go but it is a backup it'll make sure that you don't you know run out of juice you'll be able to hopefully get to one of these so you want a really big wide map full of a lot of different chargers and as you can see in our neck of the woods it's a pretty good safety net oh great well we're done i mean there's plenty of charging the episode over we're we're good we'll know so you guys again again it would take about 10 hours to fully charge the r1t at one of these chargers so unless you're sleeping there it's not the kind of charger that you're going to want to use on your way somewhere in fact this is yeah this is just kind of confusing things for me because to be honest as a tesla driver i don't really stop at level 2 charging anymore yeah i don't want to be all bougie about it but basically we're just used to charging way faster speed so can you show me a map of something that's faster okay so let's look at all the dc chargers as you can see there's a fair number of them it's not the safety net that we were seeing for the level two um but it seems that you can get around to most places all right so let me take a look at this so i mean going down to new york it looks like we're pretty good it looks like along the routes we normally take there's seems to be a lot of chargers a little more sparse through new hampshire and vermont but it looks like probably except for that little middle section of new hampshire we could probably do it well the thing to keep in mind here with this chart is that we're looking at all dc chargers but not all dc chargers are created equal we're looking at 50 kilowatts and up oh wait okay so 50 kilowatts again this isn't something we normally do in a tesla we normally charge at even an urban charger is 72 kilowatts so to recharge at a 50 kilowatt station it would take you about two hours hmm okay so a really long lunch or something right some fun destination that you'd want to go to although most of these chargers are not at those kinds of places okay so then i think we need to dial this down even more i think we need at least i don't know 120 kilowatts or faster can you show me a map of that yes so let's take a look at this and again plugshare is a great resource for this uh yeah you can see that it's not quite the same map that we were looking at before holy cow going north we're in a bit of a problem and there's not much between here and montreal uh right so i mean going going south okay but yeah let's take a look at that so let's say that we want to go from boston to new york and we're going to use our favorite ev trip planner a better route planner uh and you can actually input a rivien oh cool so if you were like i'm not sure about getting a rivian can we get to grandma's house open up a better root planter let's check it out so let's say that we leave boston with 90 so we you know we planned the night before we charged up the night before and i want to get to new york with about 60 i don't want to get there with 10 percent so i put in a destination arrival of 60 that's enough to drive around new york go to lunch do whatever we're gonna do and then leave new york without having to charge in new york because nobody wants to do that okay so here is what our trip would look like so it looks like we're gonna stop at two charging spots to get to new york so both of these are going to be electrify america stations and they're pretty high rated the one thing to keep in mind is that one of them is a four stall station i'm not a big fan of four stalls like we do that on tesla supercharger network sometimes but it's always my last choice because one or two stalls are usually iced because generally if it's four stalls it's in a smaller parking lot and then of course you got cars starting at the other one so it could be that you pull in and you gotta wait and when we see tesla superchargers that have four stalls they're usually way out in the boonies they're not necessarily usually along a major you know artery of the country right so you know that's one thing to keep in mind but we can pretty much get there and get back and even if one of the chargers is broken or iced or whatever there are other chargers around for us to stop at it's nothing to worry about so that's great the arabian is going to be able to get us to new york all right but how about going north to montreal um that's a little trickier uh but you can do it here we'll take a look okay so wait let me see this route here whoa wait a minute i gotta go all the way west through massachusetts and then head north through vermont i don't i've never taken that route to montreal right uh there's no 100 kilowatt plus ccs chargers in new hampshire or vermont that are in any way on our route oh crap all right so how long would it take to get to montreal using this route it would take about nine and a half hours nine and a half hours okay but what about the more direct route there the grey one uh that one's actually going to take you 42 minutes longer because you're gonna have to stop at a 50 kilowatt station um and charge for two hours this is why a better route planner is so great because it like i would have just started right off on the more direct route but that's not the right route right and so it'll add more time and you're going to be looking at a 10-hour trip to montreal okay um we need to put this in perspective for people because i think most people are like well i don't know how long it normally takes to get from boston to montreal so let's give them some other cases here all right let's do the worst case scenario in a tesla let's say it's an older model x so 75 kilowatt hour battery it's a smaller battery and let's even say that it has limited supercharging speeds okay so this is like you go out and you buy a used model x or something like that and you want to drive to montreal it's going to take you eight hours oh wow so an hour faster in a way older car exactly but this is the worst case scenario let's take a look at the best case scenario it would only take you six hours in a model three long range wow i mean that is about what it takes in a gas car i mean maybe you could do it in five but yeah there's no charging in the middle of those two states electrifying america doesn't even plan to put chargers anywhere along that route oh you can take a look at their map here you can see that there are some planned chargers you know down in nashua and manchester uh but there's nothing in the middle of new hampshire and vermont so there's no good route to get us there all right so you can see from this example here that if we were to get the rivian today we would have limited charging options especially going north now to be fair rivian has said that they are going to be building their own adventure network of chargers yeah they said for charging on the road we're building the rivian adventure network a comprehensive nationwide network of fast charging stations capable of adding up to 140 miles of range in 20 minutes and rj has said that rivien will be building dozens of these charging stations each station having six connectors and this should be built in the u.s this year so this is where rivien could do some good because they could fill this gap with their adventure charging network and it makes sense for them to cover new hampshire and vermont because there's tons of great skiing and hiking and adventuring all the things you want to do in your review this is really one of those big question marks that i'm waiting for rivian to answer because it really depends where they put those chargers if they don't put one in the right place in vermont in new hampshire or a few of them then i'm not going to be able to do a bunch of things in the rivien that i could do in a tesla because they need to expand off of electrifying american network and make it work so they need to have some that are on the highway i know that rj scringe has said that they want to put some like at places where you're going to be doing rock climbing or something but i don't want to go an hour off the highway to charge if i'm trying to get to montreal so i think that they're going to need to you know build along major routes and this is where i had an idea um as we know rivien has major investment from amazon in 2019 amazon invested 700 million dollars and then in 2020 amazon was again in for an undisclosed amount but it was a two and a half billion dollar round and i'm guessing amazon wanted to keep their stake so i'm going to conjecture that amazon has a total of about 1.5 billion dollars invested in rivian that makes them a major shareholder so now what else does amazon own uh amazon prime and uh they got the aws stuff uh i don't i don't get what you're saying well you may have forgotten but amazon bought whole foods a while ago that's okay right so yeah there's 500 whole food markets in the united states and let's call up a map of whole foods markets so we can see where they are wow that's pretty good coverage especially in urban areas yeah and let's use this other map here because this map shows that there's usually a lot of of whole foods kind of densely packed into you know more urban areas so it's a little bit misleading it doesn't look like 500 but there are 500 in the us okay so here's my idea rivien slash amazon install chargers at every whole foods market in the u.s now i would install at least six chargers at each location at least three of those should be ccs and the rest may be level two now you cover every store with solar panels and as we reported this week on tesla time news they could buy these from beam solar these are solar powered chargers that require no permits no installation construction like trenches or conduit you just plop them in a parking spot and you get two spaces with 265 miles a day of charging now those are level two chargers you want to have a fast charge dc fast charging um and what speeds were you thinking for that in terms of kilowatts i was thinking at least 50 kilowatts i would love it if they were 150 or more i mean or like ea with 350 kilowatts but since rivien probably can't even take those speeds maybe you don't bother yeah i mean i think anywhere between 50 to 150 kilowatts would be really nice so rivien is banking on owners using the 800 electrify america network chargers and many are located at walmart's now if they had another 500 locations at whole foods markets this would actually fit rivien's customer base better now i'm just being honest here if you're buying a rivien then you're probably wealthier and you're probably gonna fit as a customer better at whole foods rather than walmart now obviously they don't put whole foods in the middles of nowheres that's where the walmarts be so the whole foods coverage is not going to be across you know nation to nation you're going to be able to drive from from whole foods to whole foods to charge your nice riviera right this will really supplement electrify america's network well because electrify america is well placed along highways whereas whole foods cover a different kind of location they're more urban slash suburban many towns that i know that have a walmart in them do not have a whole foods market in them and vice versa and to me this would be really good investment for amazon who i think should actually foot the bill i mean rivian although they've got a lot of investment coming in don't have i don't think the cash flow to install a huge network and so i think this actually fits amazon a lot better it brings in customers to whole foods so imagine this you go to whole foods and you see a row of ev chargers maybe half of which say riven only now why only half why wouldn't it be all of them for rivian only well because i was thinking you know you've got leaf owners and you've got e-tron owners and bolt owners and so you mean why exclude them i see but maybe just the fast chargers are for rivian or something like that i mean because you wouldn't want to arrive in your rivien and have you know a bunch of bolts or something in your way and you're like why are all these people here yeah maybe they should be separated to a different part of the parking lot keep the rivien separate from the leafs i don't know i don't know right and this could actually be rivien's way and actually amazon's way of keeping up with the tesla network yeah and i'd like to discuss what a charging location actually is we're really used to gas stations right where it's a relatively small footprint and that is because you can refill a gas car in about five minutes so this car is constantly coming and going there's usually a convenience store attached to most gas stations and so people are you know hopping in there to pick up some convenience store items why is there always a convenience store there why don't they just sell gas well it's because they can't make any money on gas the average gas station has a profit margin of get this only 1.7 of profit margin on the gas yeah when you buy a gallon of gas well you haven't bought one lately but when someone does they're only paying about 10 to 15 cents per gallon of profit and so you couldn't stay open if that was it you have to make money somewhere else so you build a convenience store so let's take a look at the chart of profit margins in the convenience store so when you're selling things like candy snacks milk and health and beauty care you're getting profits of 30 40 50 plus percent so gas stations totally don't work without the convenience store why are we expecting charging stations to be able to function without something else that makes money well to be honest this is why i'm not investing much of my hard earned money in all these specs that are coming online for chargepoint and evgo because i don't really believe that they're going to make money on their own just like i don't believe most gas stations make much money on their own because there's not going to be much margin on electricity and most of the time the chargers are just like could we please put in a charger somewhere who would let us put in a charger and you know some you know nice you know museum or something like oh you could put in a charger here but no one's going to go to that museum of you know whaling or something like that that people want you know i want convenience i want a pharmacy i want a convenience store i want a whole foods yeah i mean with ev charging let's be honest and i know this won't be popular with many ev owners out there but for the next few years at least it takes longer than it does at a gas station we don't have the futuristic solid state battery yet which you can charge in five minutes it's not here and it's probably not going to be here for five ten years so you're gonna need more chargers and you're gonna need bigger lot of land so having a whole foods market means that ev drivers will shop and they will shop in many cases for longer than they would have otherwise according to wall street journal retailers that get shoppers to linger in their stores see sales of 20 to 40 percent more and stats that i've found show that the average shopper spends about 50 per visit both at walmart and whole foods isn't that funny i mean i've i've seen people pay 300 at whole foods but i guess the average average you know yeah okay i see it's you know 50 is going to be the average but i mean if if shoppers are lingering that means that they're going to spend an extra 10 20 more exactly and that longer shopping visit that generates the 20 to 40 more makes up for the charging in fact i'd offer it for free if i was whole foods during certain hours to get customers in during slow periods because you can imagine that when you first open the store and no one's there at seven o'clock in the morning if you said hey you know if you come between seven and nine uh you know it's free charging you might bring in customers during that period where you really want them where they're not gumming up the store because at 5 p.m when everyone's off work you know the place is packed right and i mean this could be flexible and flowable and you know could just use computers to say like you know how many people are currently in the store offer charging in three minutes you know they could take care of all of that exactly and i mean whole foods market had 15 billion dollars in revenue in 2020 so imagine if shoppers stayed longer and spent more money it's just more money for whole foods which is owned again by amazon and so this builds a brand loyalty and a stickiness so if you've got your choice of places to go to for your shopping but one of them offers ev charging you're going to go there and even for non-rivian owners this adds a um a cachet and it adds a good look for whole foods because it's like look we have special eevee charging and here they are and here are the rivians and it's also great advertising for rivien because now front and center outside of every whole foods is a bunch of pretty nice riviens parked there and everyone goes ooh off only i could be the one to own that then i could have the good parking spaces and you know when you get to the checkout and you get five cents off every bag that you bring in yourself you could get maybe something off because you drove there an electric car yeah i mean it could link to your amazon account that could be how you're paying for the electricity and not just the rivian trucks let's talk about how this helps amazon delivery as we all know amazon ordered a hundred thousand electric delivery vans from rivian in fact we saw the first few being delivered in la last week and as this pandemic is shown people like grocery deliveries at the beginning of the pandemic a third of u.s households had had their groceries delivered within a month and that means that all of these households have someone who has on their phone oh you know what i don't feel like going to the grocery store let's just order it online it'll arrive and then we'll make dinner it's very easy for people and it's going to become very popular now since these groceries will be delivered more and more by electric vehicles it only makes sense that you'd want charging right at the stores now we're not saying that you're gonna have big amazon delivery vans parked right in front of the store that's probably gonna happen in the back but if you need to be digging a trench to bring in a bunch of power to charge those delivery vans uh you may as well in that same conduit that you have to run anyway and the most of the cost comes from digging the trench to put the conduit in you may as well run a thing to charge the fast chargers for the rivians but my problem here is that the whole foods don't solve all the long distance electrifying america gaps yeah i mean i agree i think that rivian should focus on the highway gap locations for their adventure network first but the whole foods market chargers do increase adoption where most of these owners are going to live that's true i mean if you were to take a cross-section of potential rivian owners and people who live near a whole foods i think that that venn diagram is going to look like a circle because it's it's gonna almost perfectly overlay and i would argue that amazon should pay for what i'm gonna call the prime spots and those could be you know right out in front of the whole foods yep and then rivian could call their network the whole adventure network like like whole foods okay all right all right for me the whole food market charger idea does two important things for these new rivian owners so picture this kind of adventure that many of these owners will take in their shiny new riviens they're going to the mountains to go skiing or they're going to the lake house to go fishing with the family they get on their app on their better route planner app and they see that a charging station is available at a familiar whole foods market great family you can hop into the market and go shopping while we wait for the rivian to charge you stop to get a charge you buy some groceries it's a win-win for amazon and rivian amazon can now expand their customer base as rivien expands their customers and i think whole foods market makes a lot of sense because what other chain would do the trick here first of all whole foods is owned by amazon they have 500 locations that's the perfect number they have the perfect brand integration they have the perfect fit with rivian customers and they're also perfect for urban dwellers if you live in an apartment in a city and you can't really install a charger at your building there's going to be a whole foods most likely in your city that you can go charge at but no one who owns a rivien is going to live in an apartment you could though now is what i'm saying like this is something that i think up until now doesn't really fit the urban sensibility owning a pickup truck is like well that's a big gas-guzzling vehicle yeah and there's actually plenty of people who own pickup trucks and live in cities um you know they might have jobs out in the country or whatever but living in a city doesn't preclude them from owning a pickup truck and what i'm saying is a lot of people don't own a pickup truck because they get really bad gas mileage and you may just might not want to put gas into a vehicle at all which means you're forced to choose a tesla or a leaf right now when rivien opens up this new option it's a pickup truck but it's electric and so that might fit you perfectly except oh i can't install charging and again this is where this charging option makes total sense and i would argue that there are lots of tesla owners that can't charge at home who rely on urban charging that's why tesla did it in the first place to charge their vehicles you only need to stop about once a week because you have a nice big battery so just like a gas tank you're not going to the gas station every day to to pump up um you're most likely going once a week and what do you need to do once a week go shopping it makes perfect sense and in fact i think that this is a way for rivien to kind of leapfrog tesla getting a better uh charging infrastructure there's a lot of uh both urban and you know long-distance tesla superchargers that aren't in the most ideal you know locations i think that electrify america being at a walmart you know while we say you know well rivian and porsche owners aren't going to want to stop at a walmart walmart has all the things that you need while you might be out on the road if you need a snack you there's food if you need to go the bathroom they have bathrooms and if you need anything else they pretty much have it for the everyday charging for the every week charging this makes total sense uh whether you live in the city or even in the suburbs i've been kind of surprised over the years that there haven't been more tesla superchargers opened up at whole foods markets i think it's probably because of jeff bezos and elon not really seeing eye to eye on much stuff i mean look at blue origin and spacex so this is something that either tesla should just make a real hard move on and try and get into or rivian should take advantage of this opportunity because it really is an opportunity in my mind ev owners really do fit the whole food customer base really well but we'd like to hear what you have to say so i mean leave your comments down below maybe you've got a way better idea or maybe you've got some holes you can point out in our argument we'd love to read about them thank you so much for watching now you know

Channel: Now You Know

Views: 93,191

Keywords: elon musk, model y, model 3, tesla time news, now you know, zac, jesse, news, update, model s, model x, NYK, EV, electric cars, supercharger, autopilot, full self driving, electrek, TSLA, Tesla, rivian, Rivian Tank Turn, rivian amazon, amazon, rivian delivery truck, whole foods, wholefoods, WFM, Rivian Delivery Wholefoods, Rivian R1T, Rivian charging network

Id: gGXEt7lkZCc

Length: 26min 41sec (1601 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 19 2021