Yeah, I'm not a fan of the stickers and transponder passes, either. But it's a pretty old plan from back in the 90s.
ABRP is an easy candidate for Tesla’s App Store. I’d pay for an ad-free version of that. That plus a CCS adaptor (WTF Tesla!) would eliminate a lot of the few remaining issues with road tripping.
I hope you are not sitting on the edge of your seat waiting for Rivian to deploy widespread water refills and waste disposal. They will probably do it at a few popular national parks for media attention and call it good. They have their hands full just trying to get to volume production at a price that will maintain demand and be sustainable. Adding waste disposal sites (beyond just a handful of token sites) will not be easy.
They still say they're on the path to 11,000 level 2 spots and 3500 DC quick charging spots in the next two years.
The thing you experience with 70kW is typical of Supercharger V2 chargers. If there is another car in the adjacent stall you get half the juice. Sucks, but thems the breaks.Also ran into a weird SC in Indio, with a problem. That island was only delivering 70k or a bit less. I moved to another spot and got the normal 140-some for that location.
I usually don’t have it try and loop back. I’ve gotten to where I just plug in the next Supercharger as my destination. That way it does the pre-conditioning at the correct time. If you try to just drive past one, it‘ll be preconditioning your battery for twice as long. That costs you a bit of range.There was no other car connected to that island. It's been there for at least a year, but looks much older than that. No idea what it's all about.
Also the in-car nav is extremely conservative on charge, annoyingly stupid too. When I skipped a stop it recommended, it kept telling me to loop back. LOL, so stupid. Even when I was closer to the next charger.
We can hope. I would love it if Rivian could follow through on their announcements but that map has a very familiar disclaimer, similar to the one Rivian had on the price and timing of Rivian reservations:
Ummm....Those are primarily Electrify America and other for-profit charge networks built by third parties, not manufacturer's own charge stations. And I didn't see any water filling/waste dumping stations! I was specifically speaking to Rivian's announced infrastructure, not the mish-mash of Electrify America stations brought to us by dieselgate and other poorly executed third-party chargers that are often non-working and poorly placed. I've tried using them and gave up, it ain't pretty! I've never even seen a water filling station or waste collection station offered by Rivian (but it's not like I visit National Parks a lot since Covid hit).
They exist and mostly work and outnumber Tesla stations. And no, they're not primarily any one network. And that's fine. I don't need a national network to buy gas, and definitely have never needed a national network to get electricity before.
"Soon, you will have the ability to buy a buggy whip at every drug store, while those newfangled 'gasoline' stations are still inconvenient!"
