A Better Route Planner in takeover talks with Rivian

16 June 2023

If you own or have ever driven an EV, then you know ABRP, the simple, intuitive, and ingenious route planner. A Better Route Planner is a brainchild of a group of EV owners from Sweden who believed planning a route for an EV should be as easy as making a toast. They got together in 2018 and became ABBA of the electric car world.

If you haven’t tried the ABRP, its ingenuity will make you question the purpose of every other route planner out here. Just like any sat-nav, it’ll show you the best route, but unlike any software out there, it will tailor the route to your vehicle. It will calculate the remaining battery status at arrival, and it will find the best charging stations for your battery and the best locations to suit your EV’s range.

Sounds complicated? Well, it isn’t - all you gotta do is put your destination in and choose the vehicle you’re driving. The software does the rest for you, and honestly - it is the best thing ever since we came up with sliced bread. ABRP will not just randomly find charging stations along the route, it will work out the best charging plan for the entire route with the shortest possible stops.

It takes the planning part away from the driver, it makes any cross-country road trip in an electric car as easy as driving an ICE vehicle. Since ABRP became available, it has become the world’s most popular EV route planner, and big investors have been circling around the company for a while now.

According to Electrek’s exclusive report, the company has been approached by Rivian, and the talks have been going on for a while. Rivian plans to keep the service going and support it to grow bigger and better. Currently, Rivian is using Mapbox as its mapping engine, and it is very likely that this will be implemented into the ABRP.

Taking over ABRP is a shrewd move from Rivian, the company is expanding its network of chargers available in rural and off-grid locations. It plans to double its fleet of vehicles this year and then every year after, and getting its hands on ABRP makes a lot of sense. Rivian R1T and R1S owners will benefit from much easier route planning just as much as other users will benefit from improved software - it’s a win-win situation for the EV community.

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