Your Old Charging Adapter Could Fail on the Rivian R2

If you own an R2 and are carrying an adapter you bought a couple of years ago, or one you grabbed cheap off Amazon, replace it. Tom Moloughney at State of Charge melted a pin on an older Tesla adapter while recording his R2 charge curve.

If the R2 is your first EV, here is the quick background. The R2 features a NACS charge port, the same one Tesla uses, so you can pull up to a Supercharger and plug straight in. But a good chunk of public fast charging in North America still uses the older CCS1 plug. That is what the adapter is for.

Here is why the R2 is harder on them than most vehicles. Rivian kept the R2 on the same 400-volt system as the R1 to keep the price down, which makes sense at $45,000. But charging speed comes from volts times amps, so with the voltage staying put, the only way to charge fast is to push a lot more current through the cable. Rivian told Tom the R2 accepts up to 630 amps, and that is more than nearly anything else you can buy here. It is also why Rivian is building the Adventure Network out to 650 amps, since most public networks are capped closer to 500 and cannot feed the R2 everything it wants anyway. If you mostly charge at home and use Superchargers on trips, you may never bump into this.

Tom’s melt happened at a Walmart in Colorado Springs on hardware that does deliver 600 amps. The session finished, but the pin was cooked, and the adapter came off tight enough that it had started fusing itself to the station connector. That is the kind of failure you want to avoid.

Tom then swapped to a Lectron adapter, and the R2 told him charging had slowed down because the adapter was getting warm, which is what a proper certified adapter should do. It watches its own temperature and backs off before anything seems off. That kind of protection is the point.

So what should you look for in an adapter? UL 2252 is the safety standard written specifically for these adapters. If you live in one of the 13 CARB states, Rivian includes the adapter free with the vehicle because state law requires it, and that one is made by Lectron and tested against exactly this kind of draw. Outside those states, buying the Rivian-branded adapter is the simple answer.

A2Z is the other one I trust. They hold more UL 2252 certifications than anyone on the market, and their Thunderstorm adapter held a continuous 600-amp load for over two hours in testing before the thermal protection fully kicked in. Disclosure: RivianTrackr does partner with A2Z, and readers get a discount through us.

The thing to avoid is sorting Amazon by price. A $70 adapter will work fine for a while, and then one day it will not, and melted pins can fuse the adapter into your charge port. That repair comes out of your pocket, so replace the bargain adapter before it fails.

Chargers keep getting more capable, and vehicles keep pulling more current than the accessory market was built around. If you already have an adapter, it was probably not designed to handle the draw required by newer vehicles, so replace it.

Jose Castillo Founder and Editor

Jose Castillo is the founder of RivianTrackr and has owned and driven Rivians since early in the brand's consumer history. He currently drives an R1S and an R2 in Florida and uses Universal Hands-Free every day. As a credentialed Rivian journalist, he has covered the R2 First Drive in Park City and SXSW firsthand and has spoken directly with Rivian's software and autonomy leadership.

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