A Tesla, a Lucid and a Rivian walk in to a bar...

Shot on iPhone 14 Pro

That hoodie: http://shop.MKBHD.com

https://www.youtube.com/@StateOfChargeWithTomMoloughney

MKBHD here, and today I'm gonna try something a little different.

See, up until yesterday, there were basically 2 types of electric cars.

And I say that because as far as charging, when you leave your house, you go on a road trip.

The charging network you have available to use as you move.

For Teslas, they can use Tesla superchargers, which are extremely reliable, plug and play, super fast, optimized for the car, or a public charger as a backup.

See a Model 3 Charger, that's a public charger.

And then for every other electric car, it's public chargers.

Now I did my video recently about this, about the public charger experience, which is not exactly ideal.

There are issues with uptime, there are issues with reliability, showing up at a charger it's broken, showing up at a charger you're not sure if it's gonna be full or not.

There's less than optimal experiences there.

But today is the first day that that is actually a little bit different because Tesla has opened up a couple of select superchargers to be used by non-Tesla EVs.

So I'm in the Rivian R1T today as you can tell and I'm gonna go find 1 of these because I looked on the map and 1 of them is kind of close to me.

And we're going to figure out what that's like and sort of answer the questions around it.

So what's going to have to happen is if you have a non Tesla EV, you open the Tesla app, you make an account and you scroll all the way over and you can see there's charge your non Tesla and you hit that.

And as of right now, there's not a huge list I don't know why I defaulted to Africa just now interesting But when I zoom in it starts to show me non Tesla chargers in my area or near me and as you can see Some of these are like regular not super fast chargers, but there are some super chargers that have popped up.

A lot of them are in the New York area and 1 of them right here looks like it has 3 stalls available.

It's a 250 kilowatt charger and I'm going to arrive there with 98 miles of range left so I'm gonna go I'm gonna plug in and we'll see what happens okay so we've arrived There are a bunch of chargers here, 8 of them, someone else is charging, got here with 30% battery left.

And already you can see a little bit of a difference.

There's a sign here that says scan for instructions to charge a non Tesla.

And what it's going to do is take you to instructions on how to sign up for an account, get in the app, and do what we're about to do here.

So hopefully there's no reflections here.

I'm gonna have to talk about where I've parked in a second.

This is a concern, but we'll get into this.

This is the charger that we're at Brewster, New York, 250 kilowatts shows.

It's 39 cents per kilowatt with a membership 49 without charge here.

And this is going to ask me which stall I'm at.

So instead of just plug and play like a normal Tesla, I gotta go, okay, that's 1A, this is 1B.

And now let's look at what happens with the retrofit.

So the front of the R1T is where our charge port is.

And for these select chargers, Tesla has retrofitted this built-in CCS adapter on the end of the plug.

So typically with a Tesla, you just pop this cable out and plug it in.

But with the Rivian or any other CCS charger, it looks like that, which won't fit.

So a built in adapter needs to be unlocked and I hit unlock.

Push the handle into the dock, then pull out to remove.

I heard the pin lock already, which is good.

And ideally, that is the closest thing to a plug-and-play experience we'll have with a Rivian.

60 miles an hour, 34 minutes to full charge.

And we are moving 100 miles an hour of charging.

1, if this was a Tesla, it would be plug and play.

You just hit the button, plug into your car, and your car tells you everything about the charging experience.

Here, this car tells me some stuff, but also the app is telling me some other things like right now with my current cold battery I have a hundred and 43 kilowatt charging speed, which is pretty good It's gonna tell me how much this charge session is costing and I can always stop charging at any point if I want to But there are a couple other things to note.

Now, as I mentioned, the charge port on the R1T is front left.

Most Teslas, and as you saw before when that person was over there, actually every single Tesla has the charge port on the back left.

So currently this truck is parked in a spot that would actually be occupied by someone who's over here.

If I was sitting parked here, I would charge here, but now I'm blocking that spot.

So if there were more cars here, I would actually have needed 2 free spots to charge with this car where the port is on the wrong side.

And that's really the theme of the charging with a non Tesla experience.

I mean it's working which is amazing and that's already pretty sweet.

This cable length, this parking grid layout, you can see back here, it's optimized for someone to pull in here and plug in on the park left, on the back left, and everyone else will plug in facing out.

You also won't have your battery preconditioned and warming up on your way to the charger for optimized super fast charging.

And also it's not gonna be the fastest charging potentially even able to be accepted by your vehicle.

This Rivian is capable of more than what it's accepting right now, but with this 400 volt setup with what's designed for a Tesla, you're not going to max out the Rivian or some other really fast charging EVs.

6 kilowatts delivered, charging at 325 miles an hour.

I mean, it's as simple as that It's it's awesome that this now works and if you are a driver of a non Tesla EV you now have this choice of Going around working with public chargers and risking it because let's be honest, it's a little bit risky, or the reliability and uptime of a potentially slightly more expensive per unit Tesla supercharger, which I think I would pick every time.

So this changes for me, this changes a lot of EVs and how and how likely I would be to recommend or buy them really the idea I think with Tesla doing this in such a small amount of chargers is Roll it out slowly and see how it goes because I do think this charging spot thing is going to be the biggest question mark the biggest issue like this is a pretty empty charger this is 1 that's kind of up in New York in the sort of more rural areas I would say this is not the busiest charger in the world.

I wonder what would happen if they went to 1 of their busiest superchargers that has a line for Teslas in California or something like that.

And you suddenly have a truck like this, you have a Bolt, you have an Eurovion, you have an EV6, you have an Ioniq, and they're all messily parked and not optimized because now suddenly you're taking up 2 spots for what would normally be 1.

I feel like we kind of just have to see how it goes.

If I was like a huge Tesla person, I would probably be worried about, you know, my own Tesla experience.

Will it get worse because more people are charging Potentially you'll have more people waiting in line more people taking up more spots But like I said for right now It's only a few there's maybe a dozen of these superchargers retrofitted with this magic dock all in the US right now.

And I think it's a pretty clever integration.

This just made my Rivian a better truck but I think that's the strategy roll it out to a few and we'll see how it goes look I'm not the only 1 trying it today it just lit up on the app so definitely worth a shot all right I'm here with a couple of fellow chargers now because you're with a model 3 all 3, right?

There is another model 3 an F-150 lightning and the Rivian r1t and the lucid and this is the thing we're gonna we're gonna start noticing is when more Non-teslas start to charge.

I think the etiquette is gonna have to be, you have to ask someone to move over.

Because at this point, if now we get 1 more F-150 Lightning or somebody with the charge port on the left, there's a spot, but they can't use it, And there's a spot, but they can't use it.

They also removed the charger from over there from the corner.

If you look, you see they're not like a staggered as they normally are.

Right, they put that 1 as like a pull in.

And so now the Lucid's like sticking out.

So you you've got the last available spot that this could park.

so that's 150 lightning is parked as far up as it can possibly get for this front left charging spot.

This is what we're talking about right here.

That's just barely, I mean, you could theoretically pull up 2 inches, but that's.

Otherwise, you're gonna have to go sideways.

I think if I get 2 inches closer this way and then 2 inches up and just tap the front, it's gonna work, but right now it's not gonna work.

This is gonna be a huge problem for a lot of people.

So yeah, that's what we're talking about.

This is probably the first time and not the last time that you're going to start to see this like shuffling of who can charge where.

Maybe you move over so I can charge here.

But there's going to be a little bit of an etiquette question when you've got cars that are not exactly optimized trying to figure it out.

I could possibly push it in but it's not good.

You've got a little push of maybe 3 4 or 5 inches.

Oh, this is a snowbank here makes it kind of tough That's as close as you can get right there.

That was enough to lock it now All right, This is not ideal.

You don't want to strain your cable like this.

Alright so you're charging, you've got it plugged in.

Where can they find your video when you publish it?

So I have a YouTube channel called State of Charge.

It's completely dedicated to electric vehicle charging.

So that's the end of my charge and I guess the beginning of the experience of non-Tesla's charging at Tesla superchargers.

You know I ended my charge I went from 30 to 85 percent in like half an hour.

But let me know what you think of this sort of a game changer.


Speaker 0: Hey, what's up y'all? MKBHD here, and today I'm gonna try something a little different. See, up until yesterday, there were basically 2 types of electric cars. Teslas and non-Teslas, basically. And I say that because as far as charging, when you leave your house, you go on a road trip.

The charging network you have available to use as you move. For Teslas, they can use Tesla superchargers, which are extremely reliable, plug and play, super fast, optimized for the car, or a public charger as a backup. Kind of like this 1. See a Model 3 Charger, that's a public charger. And then for every other electric car, it's public chargers.

Now I did my video recently about this, about the public charger experience, which is not exactly ideal. There are issues with uptime, there are issues with reliability, showing up at a charger it's broken, showing up at a charger you're not sure if it's gonna be full or not. There's less than optimal experiences there. But today is the first day that that is actually a little bit different because Tesla has opened up a couple of select superchargers to be used by non-Tesla EVs. So I'm in the Rivian R1T today as you can tell and I'm gonna go find 1 of these because I looked on the map and 1 of them is kind of close to me.

And we're going to figure out what that's like and sort of answer the questions around it. So what's going to have to happen is if you have a non Tesla EV, you open the Tesla app, you make an account and you scroll all the way over and you can see there's charge your non Tesla and you hit that. And as of right now, there's not a huge list I don't know why I defaulted to Africa just now interesting But when I zoom in it starts to show me non Tesla chargers in my area or near me and as you can see Some of these are like regular not super fast chargers, but there are some super chargers that have popped up. A lot of them are in the New York area and 1 of them right here looks like it has 3 stalls available. It's in Brewster, New York.

It's a 250 kilowatt charger and I'm going to arrive there with 98 miles of range left so I'm gonna go I'm gonna plug in and we'll see what happens okay so we've arrived There are a bunch of chargers here, 8 of them, someone else is charging, got here with 30% battery left. And already you can see a little bit of a difference. There's a sign here that says scan for instructions to charge a non Tesla. And what it's going to do is take you to instructions on how to sign up for an account, get in the app, and do what we're about to do here. So hopefully there's no reflections here.

Let's do it. Charger non-Tesla. I'm gonna have to talk about where I've parked in a second. This is a concern, but we'll get into this. This is the charger that we're at Brewster, New York, 250 kilowatts shows.

It's 39 cents per kilowatt with a membership 49 without charge here. And this is going to ask me which stall I'm at. So instead of just plug and play like a normal Tesla, I gotta go, okay, that's 1A, this is 1B. So I'm gonna hit 1B. And now let's look at what happens with the retrofit.

So the front of the R1T is where our charge port is. And for these select chargers, Tesla has retrofitted this built-in CCS adapter on the end of the plug. So typically with a Tesla, you just pop this cable out and plug it in. But with the Rivian or any other CCS charger, it looks like that, which won't fit. So a built in adapter needs to be unlocked and I hit unlock.

Push the handle into the dock, then pull out to remove. Okay, let's try it. Sure enough. That worked out for me. Let's plug it into the car.

I heard the pin lock already, which is good. And ideally, that is the closest thing to a plug-and-play experience we'll have with a Rivian. And wow, it's actually already working. 60 miles an hour, 34 minutes to full charge. And we are moving 100 miles an hour of charging.

Solid. That was really quick. Okay, let's talk. So a couple of things to note here. 1, if this was a Tesla, it would be plug and play.

You just hit the button, plug into your car, and your car tells you everything about the charging experience. Here, this car tells me some stuff, but also the app is telling me some other things like right now with my current cold battery I have a hundred and 43 kilowatt charging speed, which is pretty good It's gonna tell me how much this charge session is costing and I can always stop charging at any point if I want to But there are a couple other things to note. Now, as I mentioned, the charge port on the R1T is front left. Oh, you can hear the fans going. This is what supercharging is like.

Most Teslas, and as you saw before when that person was over there, actually every single Tesla has the charge port on the back left. So currently this truck is parked in a spot that would actually be occupied by someone who's over here. If I was sitting parked here, I would charge here, but now I'm blocking that spot. So if there were more cars here, I would actually have needed 2 free spots to charge with this car where the port is on the wrong side. And that's really the theme of the charging with a non Tesla experience.

I mean it's working which is amazing and that's already pretty sweet. But yeah, it's non-optimized. This cable length, this parking grid layout, you can see back here, it's optimized for someone to pull in here and plug in on the park left, on the back left, and everyone else will plug in facing out. It's not optimized in that way. You also won't have your battery preconditioned and warming up on your way to the charger for optimized super fast charging.

And also it's not gonna be the fastest charging potentially even able to be accepted by your vehicle. This Rivian is capable of more than what it's accepting right now, but with this 400 volt setup with what's designed for a Tesla, you're not going to max out the Rivian or some other really fast charging EVs. All right, what are we at now? 146 kilowatts still. Nice.

6 kilowatts delivered, charging at 325 miles an hour. Nice. I mean, it's as simple as that It's it's awesome that this now works and if you are a driver of a non Tesla EV you now have this choice of Going around working with public chargers and risking it because let's be honest, it's a little bit risky, or the reliability and uptime of a potentially slightly more expensive per unit Tesla supercharger, which I think I would pick every time. So this changes for me, this changes a lot of EVs and how and how likely I would be to recommend or buy them really the idea I think with Tesla doing this in such a small amount of chargers is Roll it out slowly and see how it goes because I do think this charging spot thing is going to be the biggest question mark the biggest issue like this is a pretty empty charger this is 1 that's kind of up in New York in the sort of more rural areas I would say this is not the busiest charger in the world. I wonder what would happen if they went to 1 of their busiest superchargers that has a line for Teslas in California or something like that.

And you suddenly have a truck like this, you have a Bolt, you have an Eurovion, you have an EV6, you have an Ioniq, and they're all messily parked and not optimized because now suddenly you're taking up 2 spots for what would normally be 1. I feel like we kind of just have to see how it goes. If I was like a huge Tesla person, I would probably be worried about, you know, my own Tesla experience. Will it get worse because more people are charging Potentially you'll have more people waiting in line more people taking up more spots But like I said for right now It's only a few there's maybe a dozen of these superchargers retrofitted with this magic dock all in the US right now. And they all look like this.

And I think it's a pretty clever integration. It's worked clearly super well. I'm charging. I don't have any complaints. This just made my Rivian a better truck but I think that's the strategy roll it out to a few and we'll see how it goes look I'm not the only 1 trying it today it just lit up on the app so definitely worth a shot all right I'm here with a couple of fellow chargers now because you're with a model 3 all 3, right?

There is another model 3 an F-150 lightning and the Rivian r1t and the lucid and this is the thing we're gonna we're gonna start noticing is when more Non-teslas start to charge. I think the etiquette is gonna have to be, you have to ask someone to move over. Because at this point, if now we get 1 more F-150 Lightning or somebody with the charge port on the left, there's a spot, but they can't use it, And there's a spot, but they can't use it. So that's gonna be kind of interesting. That's the first time that's ever.

Speaker 1: You know what? They also removed the charger from over there from the corner. If you look, you see they're not like a staggered as they normally are.

Speaker 0: Right, they put that 1 as like a pull in.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 0: And so now the Lucid's like sticking out. Yeah. Cause it's got the charger on the front. It's interesting. It's never been like this.

You're making a video too, right? So you you've got the last available spot that this could park. Yeah, because it's now

Speaker 2: I don't think it's gonna reach

Speaker 0: so that's 150 lightning is parked as far up as it can possibly get for this front left charging spot.

Speaker 2: Hold it out. There we go. It worked.

Speaker 0: And does the cable reach for that F-150?

Speaker 2: Oh, this is going to be tight.

Speaker 0: This is what we're talking about right here.

Speaker 2: Oh, the flap. I don't think so, Marques. No, that's not gonna reach.

Speaker 0: That's just barely, I mean, you could theoretically pull up 2 inches, but that's.

Speaker 2: Is it 2 inches?

Speaker 0: Yeah. It's 2 inches. If you want me to spot you, I can try. Otherwise, you're gonna have to go sideways.

Speaker 2: I think I'm gonna have to get closer. I think if I get 2 inches closer this way and then 2 inches up and just tap the front, it's gonna work, but right now it's not gonna work. This is gonna be a huge problem for a lot of people.

Speaker 0: So yeah, that's what we're talking about. This is probably the first time and not the last time that you're going to start to see this like shuffling of who can charge where. Maybe you move over so I can charge here. Hopefully people are nice about it. But there's going to be a little bit of an etiquette question when you've got cars that are not exactly optimized trying to figure it out.

Speaker 2: We pull up as far as I possibly could. This can't be good for

Speaker 0: this cable. I don't like stretching it like that.

Speaker 2: I think I just...

Speaker 0: You got a click?

Speaker 2: No. No? I could possibly push it in but it's not good. Now do I have any room up front Marquis? I'm here with Marquis Brownlee.

He's charging his Rivian R1T.

Speaker 0: You've got a little push of maybe 3 4 or 5 inches.

Speaker 2: Let's try that.

Speaker 0: If you're bold.

Speaker 2: Could you hold this for me?

Speaker 0: I got

Speaker 2: it again. Yep It's

Speaker 0: a little further back. Oh, this is a snowbank here makes it kind of tough That's as close as you can get right there.

Speaker 2: That was enough to lock it now All right, This is not ideal. You don't want to strain your cable like this. This is definitely not what you want. We're doing it now and we are charging.

Speaker 0: Alright so you're charging, you've got it plugged in. Where can they find your video when you publish it?

Speaker 2: So I have a YouTube channel called State of Charge. It's completely dedicated to electric vehicle charging.

Speaker 0: Got a nice little logo too.

Speaker 2: There we go.

Speaker 0: Perfect, so check theirs out. F-150 owners, take note. Until then, I'm gonna head out. So that's the end of my charge and I guess the beginning of the experience of non-Tesla's charging at Tesla superchargers. You know I ended my charge I went from 30 to 85 percent in like half an hour.

It cost 30 bucks. It worked as expected. It improves the truck. But let me know what you think of this sort of a game changer. I kind of think it is 1.

Thanks for watching.

Speaker 2: See you

Speaker 0: in the

Speaker 2: next 1.

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Charging a non-Tesla at a Tesla Supercharger!