Rivian’s CEO confirmed that the electric truck startup is going to enable vehicle-to-vehicle charging so R1T electric pickup truck owners will be able to share power.

RJ Scaringe, CEO of Rivian, made the comment in a new interview with The Drive:

“You’re starting to get into the long tail of use cases, but even there we’ve designed the vehicle so you can have auxiliary battery packs. You can also charge Rivian-to-Rivian, which is a neat thing. You connect the two vehicles and then I could hand you some electrons. That takes us to the limit, and of course you can always find a corner of the world where it won’t work, just like you can’t find a gas station in Antarctica. You won’t be able to find a plug in Antarctica, so there are natural limitations.”

We already learned about the auxiliary battery packs that Rivian plans to offer through a patent that they filed earlier this year, but the vehicle-to-vehicle charging is a new feature.

Last year, we took a close look at Rivian’s electric platform, which gave us a good idea of the specs of its flagship electric pickup truck and SUV. The startup claims they can have a range of up to 400 miles.

But over the last few months, we have been learning more about other configuration options and accessories that the company is planning to offer to customers.

We recently reported on a camper version of its R1T electric pickup truck with incredible features and they are also working on some modular box systems to offer many different options for owners to find different use cases for the electric pickup truck.

The Rivian R1T will start at $69,000 before incentives in the US and it will go into production next year.

Earlier this year, Rivian announced investments from Ford and Amazon to help bring the vehicle to market.

Electrek’s Take

I feel like vehicle-to-vehicle charging plays well into Rivian marketing its trucks as “adventure vehicles’.

You can imagine a scenario where for whatever reason a Rivian truck gets stranded on an adventure and you can send another truck to help it out with some extra charge – maybe even from an auxiliary battery pack?

It’s a nice addition to the vehicle’s already extensive features, but it’s not going to be something owners use all the time.

Unless maybe they can expand to other electric vehicles. RJ is talking about Rivian to Rivian right now, but what if you could charge an electric dirtbike that you transported with your electric pickup truck? That would be neat.

What do you think? Let us know in the comment section below.

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