kurtlikevonnegut
Well-Known Member
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Had a work trip that required me to travel to PCB for a few days so I decided to bring the family with me and make a week out of it. It also made for a great first attempt on a true road trip with our 2 year old. The drive is about 7.5 hours under ideal circumstances to go 450 miles, so it's a trip that's effectively a full day of driving with charging stops required. For the drive down we had 3 adults and a 2 year old in a front facing car seat with the associated gear for a week at the beach. For the drive down I was pretty conservative with charging stops because Plugshare made the final stop at Chipley sound like it was unreliable and I didn't know how well I would be able to charge once we got to PCB. We probably could have shaved an hour off the drive down with 1 less top and higher cruising speed. First stop was mostly a bathroom break prior to hitting the Atlanta metro (I told my wife in no uncertain terms that we weren't stopping once we got close to Midtown, so if she needed to use the bathroom it needed to happen now).
Second stop was for lunch and to get the backseat ready for nap time. My wife McGuyver'd up a blackout sleep tent situation for the 2 year old to nap in that needed to be "installed."
Final stop was at the aforementioned Chipley EA Station, which ended up being pretty decent all things considered. This stop was unnecessary because we had sufficient SoC to get to the house we were staying at without stopping.
Once at the house, we were fortunate that the dryer was very close to the carport (close enough for the mobile charger to reach the dryer plug without an extension). I purchased the CircleCord NEMA 10-30p to NEMA 14-50R dongle and it worked fine. For anyone curious, I saw quite a bit of debate about this, but I was able to charge without any issues at 24A from the NEMA 10-30 dryer plug with this adapter. It would be great if Rivian did what Tesla has done and offered other plugs for the mobile charger so you don't need to go on Amazon to get an adapter dongle.
Weather on the return trip was not great (45 degrees, headwind, uphill, some rain) so the efficiency hit was real. Used a different route since I didn't go all the way to 100% on the way out, and we had enough juice to get to Auburn to charge and have lunch.
That charging stop got us almost enough juice to make it home, but with the weather it was too risky so we popped in at Commerce (the last DCFC before Greenville) to get enough kwh to make it home.
In summary, the R1T is more than capable for this type of trip and did great. Total cost of public charging came out to about $45 or $.04 per mile. If you add in the $30 for the adapter plug it comes to $.07 per mile. We didn't encounter any charging issues and maintained good speed for the entire trip. Required charging didn't require us to linger around any longer than we would have or stop more frequently than we would have with a 2 year old. The truck bed allowed us to bring a ton of stuff that we never would have been able to bring in our Mazda or any other midsize SUV. The frunk and gear tunnel give you a ton of flexibility for different storage options that just don't exist in other trucks so you aren't 100% reliant on the bed. For cruising, the truck is very comfortable on longer trips. My wife and mother in law rode in the back the whole way with a front facing car seat between them and were comfortable for the entire drive. There are certainly areas of the country where this type of trip would have been more daunting due to charging availability but it didn't become an issue for us at all and it's good to know that it will only get better from here as more chargers come on line.
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