Somewhere around 33 percent state of charge, the Rivian R2 stops drawing 600 amps. Out of Spec Reviews is unambiguous about why, and it is not the battery. His reading is that the cells would keep taking it. The cable will not, and by his count no public DC charger for passenger cars in America goes higher unless you are a Tesla plugged into a Tesla. The car asks for 650. It gets what the wire allows.
Four of today's five stories are that sentence in different clothes. In Norway, Out of Spec Roaming plugs an XPENG X9 into a Tesla V4 dispenser and watches it pull roughly 715 amps for a peak near 478 kW, adding about 91 kWh in fifteen minutes. He points out the cable was still cold. Same physics, different continent, and a ceiling hundreds of amps higher for reasons that have nothing to do with chemistry.
Story four is what sits behind that dispenser. At the Aral pulse hub in Mönchengladbach, Siemens is not selling chargers. Its case study counts up to 600 local grid stations under central management, a medium-voltage link at each site, and software whose headline claim is that faults clear without anyone driving out. The charger is the visible part of a much larger machine.
Gigatons is the same constraint one level up. Toddington Harper, who ran Gridserve, says a new large data centre now waits five to ten years for a grid connection, so his company is building its own: solar and battery microgrids sized at five megawatts of continuous output each, clustered until they can hold five nines of uptime. He is not solving a generation problem. Sunlight is not scarce in Abu Dhabi. He is solving a connection problem by opting out of it.
Telo looks like the odd one out and is not. Forrest North argues the battery defines everything about an electric vehicle, then describes a pack built around equipment that already exists: 2170 cells, because he says the newest chemistries reach that format first, and two 400 volt halves that wire in series or parallel so the truck pulls full current at the 400 volt stations dominating the installed base. Engineering aimed at the network as it is, not the one on the roadmap.
What to watch is whether the installed base moves. The R2 story turns entirely on how many 500 amp cabinets get retrofitted, and Out of Spec Reviews notes Tesla already allows higher current for non-Tesla cars in Europe while holding North America at 500. That is not a battery problem or a range problem. It is a procurement decision inside a few companies, and it currently sets the top of the curve for everyone else.
Gridserve's Founder Is Building Solar Grids for AI
Toddington Harper has stepped back from the chief executive role at Gridserve, where he says he remains on the board, and moved to Abu Dhabi to start Gigatons. His pitch on the Everything Electric podcast is data centres powered directly by solar and storage rather than by a grid connection nobody can obtain. He says a new large facility now waits five to ten years for one, which is why so many are being built alongside gas turbines instead.
The product is modular and, inevitably, named in gigas. A gigablock is a microgrid of solar, batteries, trackers and clean-fuel backup, sized for 5 MW of continuous output around the clock. A gigapod is the compute module. Together they make a gigacentre, deliverable he says in under twelve months against a five nines target, roughly five minutes of downtime a year.
Harper says the world has just crossed 100 GW of data centre capacity and expects between 500 and 1,000 GW within a decade, using the UK's roughly 30 GW of consumption as his yardstick. He has announced a partnership with Schneider Electric, and points to air-to-water generators and closed-loop liquid cooling as his answer on water. The unglamorous half of this is what Siemens sells at Aral pulse in story four: the medium-voltage plumbing, not the box people photograph.
Telo's Plan Is 500 Trucks, Then 5,000
InsideEVs editor-in-chief Matt Hogan interviews Telo co-founders Jason Marks and Forrest North about the part that historically kills EV startups: production. Their answer is deliberately small. Marks says year one is 500 units and year two is 5,000, citing Tesla's Roadster-then-Model-S sequence, with Tesla co-founder Marc Tarpenning on Telo's board pushing for the leanest path to market.
The MT1 as described in the interview is 152 inches long, roughly four feet shorter than a Ford Maverick, on a 111.5 inch wheelbase and 64 inch track. Up to 106 kWh, a claimed 350 miles, up to 500 hp and 8,000 lb of towing, at about $41,000 rear-drive and $46,000 dual motor. Marks says that tow figure is rated to SAE J2807, the voluntary industry standard, and that Telo hired Tesla's former head of crash safety to make a truck with almost no front overhang survive frontal impacts.
The division of labour is the interesting part. Body-in-white comes from Michigan tier one Schwab Industries, with an unnamed second supplier on exteriors and interiors, but Marks says Telo owns all structural and crash engineering and North says packs are assembled in San Carlos. We covered the 8,000 lb tow rating when it was announced. Marks declines to give a launch date, citing supplier slips on parts already paid for.
The R2's Charging Limit Is the Cable, Not the Cell
Out of Spec Reviews compiles several R2 sessions and lands on an unusual conclusion for a charging video: the car is not the limitation. The launch edition performance car, supplied by RivianTrackr with logging from Rivian Roamer, runs 400 volts, 97 cells in series and eight in parallel, 776 LG 4695 cells in total. Rivian quotes 87.9 kWh usable and the host says he pulled closer to 90.
On an Alpitronic HYC400 delivering 600 amps he records a peak near 225 kW with full current held to roughly 33 percent state of charge. On a Tesla Supercharger, capped at 500 amps for non-Tesla vehicles, the peak falls to about 190 kW with 500 amps held to around 43 percent. Above roughly 40 percent the curves converge and the choice of charger stops mattering. Zero to 80 percent took 29 minutes on the faster hardware, which he says beats Rivian's own estimate.
The car requests up to 650 amps during handshake, which he believes is capped nearer 630. His advice: seek 600 amp sites, arrive low, and prefer V4 dispensers with liquid-cooled cables if a Supercharger is the only option. He also flags adapter heat as a real concern at these currents. Worth knowing while watching: the video carries sponsorship from Ionna, one of the 600 amp networks it recommends.
What Siemens Is Actually Selling at Aral Pulse
Siemens' film from the Aral pulse gigahub in Mönchengladbach runs barely ninety seconds, and the substance sits in the case study behind it. The site is Aral pulse's first dedicated charging park in Germany, built from 14 ultra-fast chargers carrying two charging points apiece, for 28 bays rated up to 400 kW. The chargers are not the point of the piece.
What Siemens sells is the layer underneath: an intelligent substation with a sealed transformer, gas-insulated switchgear and a low-voltage board feeding up to six high-power chargers, plus a platform called Electrification X managing the estate centrally. Its figures for the wider programme are up to 600 local grid stations centrally managed, 400 kW per car and 1,000 kW per truck bay. Aral, on the same page, says over 300 substations are already connected and that it is investing in more than 650 stations across Germany.
The claimed benefits are unglamorous and probably the real ones: remote diagnostics, dynamic load management so a busy forecourt does not exceed its connection, and NIS2 compliance. Read alongside story three, this is the other half of the same problem. A car that wants 650 amps is worth nothing without a substation that can deliver it on a wet Tuesday.
715 Amps Into an XPENG, and the Cable Stayed Cold
Out of Spec Roaming drives an XPENG X9 from Bergen to Oslo and finishes at a Tesla V4 Supercharger to find out what the van will take. According to his on-screen readouts, the answer is roughly 715 amps at peak, a rate near 478 kW, and about 91 kWh in fifteen minutes. He says the cable was still cold afterwards, and calls the V4 dispensers the only public installations in Europe giving numbers like that. Set against the Rivian R2, which cannot pass 500 amps on the same brand of hardware in North America, that is the day's clearest data point on who decides charging speed.
The rest of the trip is less flattering. He reports the route planner predicted a 16 to 17 percent arrival, then degraded to 4 percent and a cannot-reach warning while climbing over the mountains, where he measured close to 30 kWh per 100 km. Running back down, the figure fell to about 15.6. His read is that the planner does not properly account for elevation, which matters more in a vehicle this heavy. He does credit the car for preconditioning the pack even at a 4 percent predicted arrival.
Bottom line: If you are buying an R2, today's honest advice is the boring kind. Plan around 600 amp sites, arrive low, and stop worrying past 40 percent, because nothing you do above that changes the curve. The bigger question is who pays to fix an installed base full of 500 amp cabinets, and none of these five suggests anyone is rushing. Which is why Gigatons is the most interesting bet on the board: it is the only one that stops waiting for a connection and just builds the grid.
Commentary on third-party videos. Figures and claims are as presented in the sources and have not been independently verified. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it.