Rivian Figured Out How To Make Charging Suck Less

Charging in the U.S. sucks. It’s getting better thanks to some massive new investments, but it’s still incredibly common to show up at a charge site and find the only available charger is broken. The Tesla Supercharger network is currently the best in the business, which helps explain why every automaker decided to switch to NACS, but even then, the rollout has been slow. Rivian’s solution? Simply gather data on all the chargers around the country and grade them so drivers have a better idea of where the broken ones are.

The Verge reports that the latest software update Rivian recently released uses data gathered from customer cars to point owners toward chargers that actually work and avoids chargers that it thinks are broken. And while it’s 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 isn’t already commonplace across the entire industry.

“Our North Star is charging and trip planning in EVs should just work. You should not think about it,” Wassym Bensaid, Rivian’s head of software, told the Verge. He later added, “Surprisingly, actually, there’s multiple chargers rated F. That was one of the ‘a ha’ moments as we went through the data.”