Rivian CEO reacts on Tesla Supercharger team layoff

Rivian CEO, RJ Scaringe has reacted to the recent layoff of the entire Tesla Supercharger team and his company’s stand on the future of this partnership.

“We are really excited about the way we approached our partnership with Tesla. We have a great technical relationship with the teams within Tesla” Scaringe said in an interview with CNBC after Q1 Earning Report.

Tesla CEO, Elon Musk has recently increased runtime at the EV company and made some new changes especially cutting the top leadership. Earlier this month, Musk internally announced the departure of Supercharger group head Rebecca Tinucci, and Daniel Ho, head of new products. These two are leaving alongside their team of 500 people.

Tesla has the largest EV charging network in North America with over 15,000 superchargers with fast DC charging capability. Last year, It opened its supercharger network to other companies.

Rivian formed a partnership with Tesla for North American Charging Standard (NACS). It became one of the first companies to partner with Tesla on this matter after Ford and GM. A month ago, Rivian officially opened vehicles for Superchargers and announced a free CCS to NACS adapter for R1T and R1S vehicles.

The company’s upcoming R2 and R3 series have pre-installed NACS ports. Aside from relying on Tesla, Scaringe mentioned that his company is expanding its charging network.

“We’re building out our own charging network, called Rivian Adventure Network” he added.

Rivian has more than 3,500 chargers at 600 sites across the US and Canada. In late April, Rivina announced opening of the Adventure Charging Network for non-Rivian cars. That’s in line with Tesla’s strategy to open North America.

Currently, Rivian owners can find adventure network chargers from the mobile app and charge on the go. Similarly, the Tesla mobile app enables Rivian users to navigate and charge through the NACS adapter which is currently shipping for the first wave of users.