Charging outposts are the latest and greatest way to fill your EV

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration

For Brian Stewart, the typical trip to charge his electric vehicle brings him to the back of a gas station. He waits out the clock by stretching his legs, catching up on emails or running into the convenience store to grab a snack. 

But this time, on the way to a balmy August hike, Stewart found his way to EV manufacturer Rivian’s new “Charging Outpost,” located in Groveland, California—about 25 miles outside Yosemite National Park. As the car sat at one of the five fast chargers on site, he worked on his laptop on a couch inside the space, which has local coffee on tap, a build-your-own trail mix station, free Wi-Fi and air conditioning. 

I met Stewart during a visit to the Outpost in August while on the way to a hike of my own in the park. The charging ports and upscale indoor rest stop opened in July after being converted from an abandoned gas station—a physical representation of the “evolution of transportation,” said Paul Frey, the vice president of propulsion, charging and adventure products at Rivian. 

“We want to be able to meet our customers wherever they find adventure,” he told me over Zoom, explaining the motivation behind creating the site. “Yosemite is a really iconic park, and well aligned with, you know, where our customer base is. And so being able to enable people to get into the park is super important for us.”

The site is also part of Rivian’s efforts to build out its charging network. Since the company was founded in 2009, it has added more than 529 fast chargers across 31 states in the country, with a focus on locations frequented by lovers of the outdoors. But concerns remain for EV owners traveling long distances as small electric-vehicle companies like Rivian face stumbling blocks on their mission to increase customer access to reliable charging ports. 

Road Trip Range: Stewart says he will not go back to driving a car with a fossil-fuel powered combustion engine now that he owns an EV, but the one downside of his Rivian vehicle is “a little bit of range anxiety on road trips.” 

This is a common concern for EV owners across the board, regardless of their manufacturer. A 2023 survey found that 59 percent of EV owners experienced some level of range anxiety, though their stress reduced after more than five years of ownership. 

The U.S. is working to scale up its domestic EV market, but in many states, there is not yet enough reliable charging infrastructure to meet demand. In some cases, consumers’ fears of their car dying on an average trip may be unfounded. In a recent study, researchers analyzed driving data for 333 gasoline vehicles over one year in the Atlanta area, and applied it to a model to assess the extent to which different EVs could fulfill the same needs, which my colleague Dan Gearino wrote about last year. They found that a small EV could have met the needs of more than a third of these drivers without the need to go out of their way for a charging port.

However, long road trips are a different ball game. EV owners say finding fast chargers—which typically fill up an EV battery in less than an hour—can be difficult on trips through rural areas and often takes them off route, adding hours to get to their destination. This can be especially cumbersome near large national parks like Yosemite, Stewart says. 

“If you go through this route through Yosemite, there’s chargers to get east. If you go up through Kirkwood, you pretty much have to go all the way to South Lake and then come back down,” he said. “So you’re driving kind of out of your way to get to the fast charge destinations.”

There are currently 227 charging stations within national parks across the U.S., according to the National Park Service website. But the majority are level 1 or level 2 ports, meaning that it can take more than 10 hours to completely energize a battery. Rivian is trying to help change that. 

“Our charging network is really focused on a few elements. One is these iconic sites. Others are more on routes to iconic sites,” Frey said. He added that the company recently established several new charging ports on the Blue Ridge Parkway, a 469-mile road through the central and southern Appalachian Mountains in the Eastern U.S., and is targeting “charging deserts” people pass by en route to other locations. 

The company also recently installed 58 level 2 chargers in the Yosemite Valley.

Aiming for a National Network: In August, the Biden administration announced $521 million in grants to expand electric vehicle charging and deploy more than 9,200 ports across the country. Car manufacturers are also rolling out larger EV batteries to give customers a longer range on the road.  

EV company Tesla has far and away the most access to battery top-up sites of any company, with more than 50,000 superchargers around the world. Last year, CEO Elon Musk agreed to open the company’s vast network to EVs from other manufacturers, including Rivian. 

However, a year out from the initiative’s launch, many customers have not yet received the adapters required to start tapping into the Tesla network, including a number of members on Rivian discussion Facebook groups—and Stewart, at the point we spoke in August. 

“I’m really looking forward to getting my Tesla adapter,” Stewart said. “It probably would have been smart for Rivian to not tell all their vehicle owners that they could get the adapter until they were closer to being able to provide it.” 

At the end of August, Tesla announced that its factory in Buffalo, New York, was ramping up production of the adapters to 8,000 a week. To help meet demand, Rivian has a contract with its own manufacturer to help supply adapters directly to customers, but Frey acknowledges that rollout has faced obstacles. 

“There have been some supply constraints, and so we’re working through those,” Frey said. “But our marketing and … customer success teams are working overtime to make that happen.” 

Rivian also recently launched a program to help address another long-standing issue for EV owners: broken chargers. By analyzing more than 1 million EV charging station consumer reviews, researchers found that charging stations in the U.S. have an average reliability score of 78 percent, which means that roughly one in five don’t work. To help drivers navigate this finicky charging landscape, Rivian pushed out a new software update in April that enables their cars to send data anonymously to the company about how well the location’s ports are operating. Once the team has sufficient data, they can upload a letter grade for that charger—whether it is through Rivian or other infrastructure. 

As far as the Tesla adapter hold-up goes, the wait continues for many customers from companies like Rivian, Ford Motor and General Motors, The New York Times reports. But some car owners don’t mind. 

“The wait hasn’t inconvenienced me at all,” Heller Gregory, a Rivian owner based in California, told me at the end of August. Her adapter arrived in the mail on Wednesday after she put in her order more than six months ago. “The EV world in general is all about patience.”