Tesla engineer says Rivian should move NACS port to the front, CEO mentions ‘cost-saving’

Tesla engineer Wes Morrill said that Rivian should move its NACS charge port up to the front of the car where it can charge seamlessly with the existing Superchargers infrastructure.

On Thursday, Rivian released three new electric vehicles – Rivian R2, R3 and R3X and all of these come with a rear passenger side North American Charging Standard (NACS) charge port.

Among these, Rivian R2 has a NACS charge port on the bottom of the rear right. This change suggests that the car will require users to use NACS to CCS charging adapter.

“There is still time to move the charge port location. It will take some re-engineering but the tools are not kicked off yet. This location will forever doom all Rivian owners”. Wrote Morrill on social media site X on Friday.

Last year, Rivian announced its partnership with Tesla to adopt the NACS standard for its upcoming vehicles. Rivian R2 is the first non-Tesla and the first EV to announce a native NACS charge port.

It will expand NACS support for its R1T and R1S models using a CCS to NACS adapter in Spring 2024. These models produced in 2025 will also get NACS charge ports.

Cost Saving:

Rivian CEO, RJ Scaringe revealed why the company moved the charging port to the new position in R2 in an interview with Electrek.

He said that the decision is related to the cost savings.

“It was a cost decision, all of the R1s are all-wheel drives there’s always a motor in the front there’s always high voltage in the front and so the battery pack has to have high voltage coming out of the front but in R2, its base variant has rear-wheel drive and so we didn’t want to have to run high voltage cabling up to the front of the vehicle.” He explained.

Scaringe added that the scenario makes it possible for the company to use a very short high-voltage cable to run to the charger.

“We’ve extreme focus on cost for R2 which means we’ve to make those kinds of decisions in a way that isn’t compromising the product experience,” Scaringe concluded.

Earlier this day the company announced a pause in the construction of its Georgia plant to boost R2 production at its Illinois factory. This new decision could save the company around $2.25 billion.