General Motors and EVgo announced today that they plan to add more than 2,700 new fast chargers in supermarkets, retail stores and entertainment centers in 40 metropolitan areas. The project, which will take five years to complete, is an effort to convince tenants and condo residents that electric vehicles are practical. The message is to load quickly in half an hour while completing errands.
GM will make a financial investment and provide data to help determine locations. But the company did not give details on the amount of the investment. The new chargers will be open to all EV controllers.
Cathy Zoi, EVgo CEO, explained today at a media roundtable that the prices of the new stations will not be discounted for GM vehicle owners. She said:
Today, a typical EVgo session costs between $ 5 and $ 15. It will be the same in the future.
The first of the new chargers will be online in early 2021. The charging rate will be between 100 and 350 kilowatts.
A GM press release states that the new EVgo chargers “will triple the size of the country’s largest public fast” and “unlock new EV customer segments.” But Sam Abuelsamid, lead e-Mobility analyst at Guidehouse Insights, told me: “Compared to the Tesla Supercharger network, it’s still a relatively small amount.”
Accurate numbers for chargers can be difficult to pin down. Here’s Abuelsamid’s count:
Tesla has more than 8,200 chargers at 855 locations right now. There are currently 6,639 non-Tesla fast chargers in 3,028 locations, but most of them are limited to around 50kW. Of these, 1,769 are from Electrify America at 441 locations.
Adding another 2,700 chargers with a capacity of more than 100 kW will absolutely help and make quick charging much more convenient.
Guidehouse Insights projects that there will be 66,000 DC fast chargers in North America by 2025 and 144,000 by 2030.
EVgo will continue to launch new charging locations outside of GM’s collaboration. The company says it currently has more than 800 fast-charging locations in 34 states.
In the roundtable session, Zoi explained the reasons to focus on fast charging at local shopping malls:
We have identified approximately 40 metropolitan areas. The focus of this program is on the metropolitan areas. It is not in the corridors or in rural areas. Because you do that? Because we are seeing an increase in purchases of electric vehicles by people like me who live in apartments that do not have access to charging in our buildings. We need to trust public charge.
We have also seen an increase in the use of electric vehicles by carpool drivers. A personal vehicle driver may need to charge once a week. A carpool driver needs to charge every day and needs convenient and fast charging because every moment of his day spent charging is not really driving people or delivering food in this pandemic world.
So what we are seeing as part of this program is increasing that comfort in existing, new and emerging areas of EV augmentation.
The underlying concept of the GM-EVgo connection is that General Motors wants to market its electric vehicles, such as the GMC Hummer EV and Cadillac Lyriq, to people who rely on street parking. If that strategy works, it will represent a significant gain in the number of EV drivers who are primarily dependent on regular (even daily) fast charging.
Abuelsamid said GM is preparing for this change by designing the thermal and chemical management of its future electric vehicles to mitigate the damage from daily fast charging. He told me:
GM obtained a great deal of useful data from the Bolts used in the Maven Gig about the performance of the battery when charging quickly and incorporated it into the design of the Ultium batteries.
This move to offer local fast charging is part of GM’s broader strategy for charging infrastructure. In March 2020, GM announced plans to expand the employee workload with 3,500 new plugs at GM facilities in the US and Canada.
The taking of Electrek
This announcement reveals GM’s desire to market its electric vehicles to a wide demographic, including people who won’t have a plug at home. That makes sense. The inhabitants of the apartments should not be neglected.
However, when you look at the first new deals on GM electric vehicles, big, expensive models like the Hummer and Lyriq, it’s hard to imagine those buyers parking their cars on the street. At the same time, we are generally wondering if luxury shoppers are rushing to a local grocery store and hanging out for 30 minutes while a charge is completed.
Yes, the following best solutions for household charging should be launched for apartment and condo dwellers. But would this effort and investment be better placed on increased workplace burden, as well as load balancing solutions for multi-family homes?
Unfortunately, relying on public charge undermines two of the most significant benefits of owning an EV. Charging at home is incredibly convenient and cheap. It only takes about a minute to plug it in every night, and the cost is a fraction of what people pay for at the pumps.
Today’s announcement would have been more important if GM had promised a discount or even a free charge at the new locations. As it stands now, you can expect the price of public electric vehicle charging to be much closer (or almost the same) than buying gasoline for an ICE car.
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