Rivian is pushing a new software update that will give its customers better insight into which EV chargers to visit — and which to avoid.
Technology
Rivian’s new software update will help you avoid all the broken EV chargers
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24852359/rivian_autocharge_press_release_2.jpg?ssl=1 "Rivian’s new software update will help you avoid all the broken EV chargers")
EV charging reliability remains a serious sore spot for a lot of owners of plug-in vehicles, leaving the companies selling the cars scrambling to boost their confidence. Rivian’s solution is to use their vehicle fleet to gather data about broken chargers, which then get downranked in the company’s software algorithm.
“Our North Star is charging and trip planning in EVs should just work,” Wassym Bensaid, Rivian’s head of software, told The Verge. “You should not think about it.”
“Our North Star is charging and trip planning in EVs should just work.”
I had the chance to test out Rivian’s new software update during a recent road trip in an R1S SUV. Inputing a destination brought up dozens of chargers on the vehicle’s navigation, each of which displayed a letter grade. An “A” grade is a sign that the charger was in good working condition, while an “F,” well, speaks for itself.
“Surprisingly, actually, there’s multiple chargers rated F,” Bensaid said. “That was one of the ‘a ha’ moments as we went through the data.”
The new ranking system is determined by a host of data collected by Rivian’s customers, Bensaid said. Each vehicle is connected and constantly sending data back to the company’s headquarters, which then gets processed to remove “noise” that’s not essential to the decision-making algorithm.
“Every time one of our vehicles interact with the charger, we have a number of data which are uploaded to the cloud and that give us a very accurate understanding of the health of the session that the vehicle is having,” he said. “So we get data related to not only the number of successful sessions, but then how many trials did you make? How was the payment? What’s the speed of interaction? What’s the overall peak performance that you have within a session? What’s the thermal derating behavior?”
The data is coalesced with a number of weighting mechanisms to provide Rivian’s engineers with an accurate reading of each charger’s overall health. The company is looking for data related to successfully completed charging sessions as well as high-performance charging in order to recommend the charger to its customers.
Every electric vehicle exchanges data protocols with third-party chargers when they plug in, but most EV charging operators don’t voluntarily provide real-time information on reliability and uptime — leaving EV owners to roll the dice every time they navigate to a public charger. In surveys, EV owners often cite charging reliability as the biggest pain point in their ownership experience.
As such, EV companies have had to develop workarounds. Some use crowdsourcing to determine whether a charging station is worth the trip. Rivian’s solution is to gather as much information as it can about charging from its own vehicles in the hopes of presenting some sort of coherent picture of EV charging in America. The company has been gathering data about EV charging performance for over a year before pushing this latest software update, Bensaid said.
The company needs a certain number of “statistically relevant” charging sessions before it can accurately recommend (or not recommend) a charger, he said. As such, Rivian is limited to data it collects from its own vehicles. The company’s customer fleet isn’t monolithic; it’s produced less than 100,000 electric trucks, SUVs, and vans since October 2021. But Bensaid acknowledged that its algorithm can’t portray a complete picture of charging in the US — at least, not yet.
Rivian is also working on a parallel customer-based feedback system that it plans to eventually roll out in another software update. That way, Rivian’s vehicle owners can also submit their own scores that can be taken in alongside the company’s algorithmic scoring process.
Rivian is also working on a parallel customer-based feedback system
EV charging in the US is getting better but still has a long way to go before it can be called an adequate system. The charging network today is plagued by buggy software, frayed cables, confusing payment systems, and is often prone to extreme cold or heat.
But charging is getting better! Rivian, like every other company that makes EVs, recently began offering access for its customers to Tesla’s vastly superior Supercharger network. Adapters will be needed until Rivian’s own vehicles start rolling off the assembly with the Tesla port natively built in. But when that happens, you can picture a world in which charging is not quite so Sisyphean. Rivian has said it also plans to install hundreds of its own DC fast chargers across the country — 600 locations over the next few years.
But charging is still a dicey prospect. Given the current state, Rivian is doing what it can to help its customers navigate the treacherous waters. “Charging should just work,” Bensaid repeated. “And the more we get happy customers, the more we remove charging anxiety as a barrier for adoption.”
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When Oregon resident Isabelle Reksopuro heard Google was gobbling up public land to fuel its data centers in her home state, she didn’t initially know what to believe. “There’s a lot of misinformation about data centers,” she said. “Google has denied taking that land.”
Technically, she explains, The Dalles, a city near the Washington state border, sought to reclaim that land, “and Google is just a big, unnamed power user.” The city had in fact asked for ownership of a 150-acre portion of Mount Hood National Forest, claiming it needs access to Mount Hood’s watershed to meet municipal needs as its population — 16,010 as of the 2020 census — grows. But critics, including environmentalists, say the city is trying to secure more water for Google, which has a sprawling data center campus in The Dalles that already consumes about one-third of the city’s water supply.
This controversy made Reksopuro curious about the backlash to data centers being built in other communities. So Reksopuro, a student at the University of Washington who studies the connections between tech and public policy, decided to map it out. Using information collected by Epoch AI and data scraped from legislation on data centers, she built an interactive map tracking AI policy around the world. She designed it to be simple enough for anyone to use. “I wanted it to be something that my younger sisters could play through and explore to understand what are the data centers in the area and what’s actually being done about it,” Reksopuro said. She hoped to shift their opinions that way, “instead of like, through TikTok.”
Four times a day, the map searches for new sources and checks them against the existing database Reksopuro built out. “Once it does that, it will write a new summary, add it to the news feed, and populate it on the sidebar,” she said. “I wanted it to be self-updating, since I’m also a student.”
Reksopuro isn’t against data centers, but she thinks tech giants benefit from a lack of transparency around data center policies. “Right now, it’s this really opaque thing — and all of a sudden, there’s a facility,” she said. “I think that if people knew about data centers beforehand, it would give them leverage. They would be able to negotiate: ask for job training programs, tax revenue, environmental monitoring, things to improve their community.”
UCF commencement speaker Gloria Caulfield (University of Central Florida via Storyful)
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Microsoft Edge is adding a new feature that will allow its Copilot AI chatbot to gather information from all of your open tabs. When you start a conversation with Copilot, you can ask the chatbot questions about what’s in your tabs, compare the products you’re looking at, summarize your open articles, and more.
In its announcement, Microsoft says you can “select which experiences you want or leave off the ones you don’t.” The company is retiring Copilot Mode as well, which could similarly draw information from your tabs but offered some agentic features, like the ability to book a reservation on your behalf. Microsoft has since folded these agentic capabilities into its “Browse with Copilot” tool.
Several other AI features are coming to Edge, including an AI-powered “Study and Learn” mode that can turn the article you’re looking at into a study session or interactive quiz. There’s a new tool that turns your tabs into AI-powered podcasts as well, similar to what you’d find on NotebookLM, and an AI writing assistant that will pop up when you start entering text on a webpage.
You can also give Copilot permission to access your browsing history to provide more “relevant, high-quality answers,” according to Microsoft. Copilot in Edge on desktop and mobile will come with “long-term memory” as well, which can tailor its responses based on your previous conversations. And, when you open up a new tab, you’ll see a redesigned page that combines chat, search, and web navigation, along with the Journeys feature, which uses AI to organize your browsing history into categories that you can revisit.
Meanwhile, an update to Edge’s mobile app will allow you to share your screen with Copilot and talk through the questions about what you’re seeing. Microsoft says you’ll see “clear visual cues” when Copilot is active, “so you know when it’s taking an action, helping, listening, or viewing.”
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