Rivian Opens Up About Opening Up

If you go to US campgrounds, you can charge an EV on the plentiful NEMA 14-50 receptacle. But if you're truly in the wilderness, then liquid fuel is the only way to go.

@SCE to AUX "But if you’re truly in the wilderness, then liquid fuel is the only way to go." The Mars Rivers all disagree. Mars is fairly remote last I heard.

I live up in the north, so EVs make no sense for us over here. Not for short errand-running (constant warm-ups followed by the car and battery cooling down again, then warm the car and battery up again...) or long trips (huge energy waste because of horrible heating efficiency on battery power).

Lockstops, https://www.foxnews.com/auto/police-bizarre-electric-vehicle-duck-tape courtesy of a friend of mine after reading my consideration of buying a Rivian pickup truck on ttac.

Does wilderness even exist in Europe anymore? BTW do you have garage with 220V outlet? It should help.

@SCE to AUX Solar panels on the roof of electric SUVs/campers would make some sense. It provides a means for these vehicles to charge their batteries while stationary in the ‘wilderness’. Of course, if it’s a rainy or cloudy weekend you are pretty much ‘screwed’ as you Americans would say.

@Inside Looking Out, There is plenty of wilderness left in Europe. But our population density is very high which means you will never be alone. I do not own a garage per se, at least one that is big enough for my 2007 Mercedes GL320 CDI 4Matic or my wife’s 2019 Skoda Octavia vRS Combi 2.0 TDI. Those two vehicles park outside on assigned parking spots in front of my apartment. There is a small underground garage but the parking spaces are only big enough to allow parking for really small cars. That is where I park my beater Renault Twingo, my city car. There is no EV charging capability.

@ThomasSchiffer I am on vacation in Spain and I would never own a car if I lived here. Public transportation is everywhere, there are normal people on it (unlike the US) and taxis are about 3 or 4 times cheaper than in the US. Using public transportation in the US, with extremely rare exceptions, is super inconvenient and you feel like a looser doing it. So everyone is forced to own a car.

@VVK, I totally agree with you. If public transportation were affordable, reliable and could bring me everywhere I wanted to go I would use it more often. That is, however, not the case in Germany. Our national railway service has been privatized and since then it has gone downhill. The agenda is minimal investment, maximum profits at the expense of the train commuters. The trains are in a desolate state. In the summers the airconditioning systems consistently fail, the heating systems don’t work in the winters and the train fares are overpriced and they are never on time. The Inter-City-Express (high speed rail) train is limited to slow speeds because there are few to no high speed rails available for it to travel on. Supposedly they can travel 300 km/h and faster. The few times I have taken an ICE train I never saw it go faster than 120 km/h. In the city, the S-Bahn and U-Bahns are grotesquely overpriced, slow, unreliable and operating at their limits. Taxis are also very expensive in Germany, no matter where you are. In many cases it is actually still cheaper to take your car, despite the high fuel prices which we have here.

@vvk > The few times I have taken an ICE train I never saw it go faster than 120 km/h. Speaking of which, I took the medium-speed Euromed train from Barcelona to Valencia and was very impressed by the 125 mph and how effortless it seemed.