Rivian Just Made A Big Promise About Vehicle-To-Home Charging Its Electric Truck Owners Will Like
Electric vehicles are essentially giant rolling batteries, and they allow owners to do a few different things with all of those electrons. Obviously, the battery's primary purpose is to move the vehicle and get the driver from Point A to Point B. The battery can also charge devices like your phone or power something like a television or extra lights if you're out camping.
Some vehicles like the F-150 Lightning from Ford can power vital parts of your entire house when there are disruptions to the power grid or inclement weather that knocks out power lines. This is through Ford's proprietary V2H (vehicle-to-home) charging system. That feature elevates EV capabilities from being conveniences to being figurative and potentially literal lifesavers. Rivian, the other EV manufacturer with a truck on the market, confirmed via Reddit that not only do its vehicles have the ability to feed power back into the house, but they may also be compatible with other future V2H systems.
Rivian's next power move
As of now, the V2H system that Ford uses with the Lightning is entirely proprietary and requires its own charging architecture through Ford's Intelligent Backup Power system. When installed correctly — and everything is working as it should — the system is great to have around. But the proprietary nature of the system excludes any EV that doesn't have a big blue oval badge.
Rivian confirmed in April 2022 to TechCrunch that its existing vehicles (both the R1T and R1S) already have the capability to feed power back into a house and other EVs. Yesterday, a Rivian spokesperson confirmed in a Reddit post that the company intends to not only update existing vehicles to make use of its V2H hardware, but Rivian also won't use a proprietary connection system once standards become available. This means that once there are standards in place, you won't need a Rivian-specific home system for it to work. As of now, there is no existing timeframe for when the standards are available or when Rivian intends to update its vehicles.