Note: I submitted using the article's subtitle instead of the title, because the title was much less informative. The title is "EXCLUSIVE: Walmart EV Charging Network — Save Money, Charge Better".
I did have to shorten the subtitle to fit. The full subtitle is "Walmart plans expansive EV Charging network which will blanket the US within a few years".
I doubt they'd get away with it. If they thought they could they'd already have done it, but it'd probably result in a lot of legislation and companies don't want regulation. The only reason Walmart can get away with it is that very few people have an electric car.
Even aside from that, many charging networks _do_ require "membership", "running the app", and often even require a pre-established balance on the account for the most convenient charging process.
It seems Walmart is also planning to follow this strategy, which is the point of the original objection.
Add to tourism gatekeeping checklist - a verified US phone number or local bank account (popular in Europe). Oh and the "app is not available in your country".
I've driven EVs since 2013 across several states and I've never once encountered a functioning public charging station in the US that has a credit card reader and does not require payment and/or access via an app. I'm all in favor of it, and I understand they technically exist, but perhaps your specific locality requires that? It's in no way my experience.
I think the app will be for plug-and-charge users, while they'll have credit card readers for everyone else.
I do agree that chargers requiring an app are a royal pain. We're an all-EV household and I don't bother with local chargers that don't have readers or support plug-and-charge. There's a lot of Shell chargers in our area that require an app to work and almost no-one uses them because of how clunky it is.
The article says the app is the primary way to activate the charger (scan a QR code on the dispenser) while they'll have credit card terminals for states that require it.
It will likely work for Walmart because as of 2021 the Walmart app had 120 million active monthly users [1]. That's almost half of the US adult population.
For all of those people, using the chargers won't require downloading some new clunky app that they only have because of EV charging.
It will be that an app they already have and use regularly and already have their payment information adds EV charging to the list of Walmart goods and services that they already use it for.
Teslas do not need any app for charging. I mean sure, they do have an app, but no need to even have the app on the phone or with you to charge. No need for a phone or a credit card or a code or a password or a chip or a retina scan or interacting with a screen or tapping a keypad or anything. Just plug the plug into the car at the supercharger and it charges. Or, do it at home, cheaper.
I don't know and I don't think an EV driver has to care. Maybe it's not all intercharge, maybe there are more networks in the background.
The salient point is the consumer perspective: I can have one generic app to handle charging payments for basically any public charge point and I interact the same way with all of them, I put the plug in my car and scan a QR code.
The debate in that unified market is more about price discrimination, because prices at a given charge point may vary depending on who operates it versus who your e-mobility provider is. Which is quite annoying in itself and should be fixed. But paying 59 ct/kWh vs. 69 ct/kWh is quite different from having a dedicated "car charging apps" folder on your phone.
The app says that credit card access will be available in the future “at least” in states that require it.
> This is an accessibility issue and as such should be illegal...
Assuming it was app-exclusive, you would have a hard time convincing anyone that someone might be capable of driving an EV on the road while also having enough of a disability to make it impossible for them to use a phone app.
There are already members-only gas stations such as the ones attached to Costco. This would be following the same pattern but with an app instead of a card, which is actually far more easy to acquire than a paid Costco membership.
Vulture capitalists want to know where you live and your income level so they can sell your profile on to other data brokers. Cash is practically a communist plot to give people freedom and liberty.
Makes a lot of sense from my amateur perspective. It takes a bit of time to charge a car, and you might as well use it to buy your groceries. Plus I'm sure WM can get a sensible bulk discount on electricity.
Add to that, you can make people use your app and show them targeted adverts. You can get them to buy any bulk goods for pickup when they are charging the car.
Only trouble is, the cars charge too fast now days! An 800V vehicle like the Ioniq 5 can often be topped up in under 15 minutes, barely enough time to buy a coffee and use the restroom, let alone do any grocery shopping!
And some charging networks apply idle fees if you don’t move your car quickly when charging completes.
Of course, a car can only charge as fast as the charger, so maybe it makes sense (and certainly saves money) to install slightly slower ones at locations where customers are likely to want to spend longer times.
Fast charging degrades the battery. Obviously you will choose a slower charger if you know you will be gone for 45 minutes.
Walmart is also unlikely to have these charges, since they obviously do not want people to rush through their stores. (Obviously charges after a couple of hours might be there.)
True, but in practical terms this is not worth worrying about for most of us. Saw a recent article where a Korean driver had done over 600,000km (~ 375,000 miles) in his Ioniq 5 on the original battery. He'd only ever used DC fast chargers, typically charging to 100%!
His battery did fail around the 600,000km mark, but most vehicles never get anywhere close to that sort of mileage. And apparently it still retained 87% of original capacity up until that point.
And despite being far out of warrantly, Hyundai replaced his battery as a goodwill (good publicity!) gesture.
My guess is that this will be less of a problem for Walmart than it is for other EV charging networks because with the other networks all their app is good for is EV charging at their network.
With Walmart the EV charging is just going to be another thing managed from the Walmart app. I'd guess that a significant majority of people who will be wanting to charge there already use Walmart for other things and have the app.
The State of Charge YouTube video that covered the announcement and visited a site in McKinney, TX indicated it did need the Walmart app[0].
Sigh. Plug and pay charging is so much better. It’s not like this is a Tesla only feature. Ford has thousands of chargers beyond SuperChargers that just work for plug and pay.
This is rates at DCFC. You're paying for far more than just the price of electricity. Those chargers and dispensers aren't free, they're often empty, they need to recoup costs in a few year horizon.
> This is rates at DCFC. You're paying for far more than just the price of electricity. Those chargers and dispensers aren't free, they're often empty, they need to recoup costs in a few year horizon.
I'm very aware you pay a premium for DCFC. Presumably Texas' regulatory structure would help with all of that.
> Charging at home it costs me about $0.135/kWh.
So you're paying more than I pay to charge at home with my municipally owned and operated power company in California.
FWIW, I used to pay more like 8.5-9c/kWh before the big freeze. Things got way more expensive after that. The TDSP (Oncor) had a big rate hike for all the upgrades/replacements coupled with an extra rider the state enforced to pay the stupid high gas prices of that time.
Chaotic good, I could imagine Walmart deciding to sell a miniature EV for around $12,000.
Imagine something like a two-seater City car, while I'm dreaming I imagine this type of vehicle completely taking over for most City commuting. Since these would be smaller and slower than normal cars, they would be phenomenally safer.
Especially when they are at Walmart to purchase it with a grocery cart full of groceries that you’d be hard pressed to fit in the E-Smart Car equivalent.
A 2 seater is never going to work in America. But electric trucks and vehicles definitely can if charging stations are ubiquitous and there is no range anxiety.
>Chaotic good, I could imagine Walmart deciding to sell a miniature EV for around $12,000.
There have been many, many car projects like that from large and small companies. All of them failed to get any kind of mainstream audience.
People want general purpose cars and they will not buy anything else.
>Since these would be smaller and slower than normal cars, they would be phenomenally safer.
City driving at 50kmh is already dangerous in regular cars. Either you limit traffic to something like 25 kmh or you have to accept that crashes are now more dangerous.
For your consideration, the Smart Fortwo electric drive. They really tried. Not a success. While I never owned one, I drove them several times and I liked them!
Indeed, the Smart was a highway-legal car. In the US, it's been possible for years and years and buy a golf cart functional as a "city car" for far less than $12k that you can only use on residential streets or in planned communities. They're very widely available. Virtually nobody actually does this. At least in the US, it's an existing option that is not a viable market segment whatsoever.
Most larger cities in the USA have expressways/interstate highways through the core or as beltways or both. Yes you can get around on surface streets but most people will want the option to use the faster roads.
At least in the Pacific Northwest most Electrify America installations are in Walmart parking lots. These have caused me to spend more time at Walmart the past two years, honestly its a pretty good experience - aside from EA reliability issues, which seem to have improved but still far short of Tesla.
I have a hard time just picking up and plugging that heavy fatass CCS connector. And then I have to try plugging it in 3 times because it waits for the car and the car waits for it and one gives up before the other succeeds.
Used an EVCE charger yesterday that my wife struggled to pick up. The cable its self was just enormous and heavy compared to more modern chargers. Hopefully they go back and retrofit older chargers with newer cables when swapping over to NACS.
> honestly its a pretty good experience - aside from EA reliability issues, which seem to have improved but still far short of Tesla.
Going from the Tesla Supercharger network I can't share this sentiment at all. Virtually every time I charge at an EA station (which is admittedly only a few times a year) there is either random power degradation with no notice or one or many totally dysfunctional stalls. This latest time a few days ago the only open stall was busted because the terminal said to unplug from the last session over an hour ago.
The flakiness is compounded by the lack of chargers per station. Superchargers often have 10 or even 20 chargers, EA chargers often have 2 to 4 chargers so a charger going out is much worse.
Every time I've used an EA charger there was an open one and all I had to do was just drive up and plug in. The car negotiated payment and it worked fine with reasonable charging rates.
EV prices are just way too high. As a father of three, I can decide between a used BMW 2 which goes 1k km on a full tank, for €17k, and a Kia EV 7 seater for €70k. Guess which one I went with. There are some other, cheaper, EV models with 7+ seats (40k+), but they charge so slow and need so much power in winter, you‘d get max 200km out of them and then need to charge 1h.
Generally, most EVs you can buy in the EU are just 10-20k more expensive than their ICE counterparts, and incentive programs don’t make up for that difference.
The Touran is quite a bit pricier than the 2er Grand Tourer, not sure why you are bringing it up. It’s an expensive car.
> You are also comparing used car prices to new car prices which is pretty insane.
I don’t care if the car is used or new tbh, I need 7 seats. I get that that’s not a super common situation, and that the comparison is unfair. The 2er was 40k when new. The thing is, there‘s basically no usable used 7 seater EVs in the non-crazy price range.
I only had this choice though, because the EV family van market has been underserved from the start, and there are no usable used EVs that qualify. I know it’s an unfair comparison, but a pragmatic one.
I don't get the false equivalence. You are comparing compact car vs 7 seater.
Besides 7 seaters are only must for families with 4 kids, AKA less than 10% of households.
I have both - decent sized EV and an old 7 seater. I'd never want to take it for a road trip as EV is just far more comfortable and easier to drive (autopilot 90%+). Its sole purpose is to deal with family visits and when I need to tow something like twice a year.
Very true. My first EV went about 80 miles, in the summer. Fast charging was the name of game! It was the difference between the trip being possible or not. Now I have a car that can go 350+ miles in the summer (280-300 in the winter) and I basically never fast charge it. I guess we don't "road trip" much, but we do drive around our state quite a bit, and 300 miles is just so much range. We went to the coast last weekend, my son asked how the charging was, and I replied that I hadn't bothered to look because it wasn't at all needed. It almost takes the fun out of it.
All because VW ID series flopped due to awful software while keeping pretty high cost when compared to competition (and Germans generally buy German cars).
While I really hope that they do a great job with it, I have no faith in Walmart to offer an effective charging network. Doing everything on the absolute cheap leaves a lot to be desired.
They were great when they were expanding and had great stores to lure you away from the competition, but now they operate under maintained not well staffed stores with confusing self checkout and obtrusive surveillance everywhere. It’s just a total race to the bottom at their stores.
Hopefully it will encourage better players like Target to follow suit.
Anyways, reality is that people buy EVs to charge them at home most of the time. At least thats what I think the reality is.
The quality of store management seems to affect a lot when it comes to Walmart. I have been to some Walmart stores where I have never seen any unfolded clothing. I have been to some Walmart stores where I have never seen any folded clothing.
An organization as large as Walmart has the wherewithal to put together an effective charging network if they decide it is a priority. One of the nice things about being first-party is that they will likely have a preventive maintenance program and emergency maintenance program for the chargers, and some of that can be done by the company electrician.
I have a Tesla, and due to various factors (apartment living, other family members with Teslas), I almost exclusively use public chargers. I have some opinions of what amenities I want at a charger (bathroom, cold diet coke), but in general the chargers at gas stations, grocery stores, and Walmarts are the best for me. Restaurants and malls are actually not great amenities because that's often not the mood you are in when you arrive at the charger.
This is what made the charging infrastructure in Finland boom.
We have two major grocery chains (a duopoly pretty much), and they started competing for the growing EV customer base by installing chargers at every store of theirs.
Now just one of them has over 300 charging stations with about 2000 plugs, 5 years ago they had next to nothing.
Turns out it's good for business when families stop to charge for 30 minutes, they drop a bunch of money for other services while they're at it.
And I'll rather stop at a store to grab cheap snacks and ready to eat meals vs. paying through the nose for gas station prices. (We actually have some cups, plates, and cutlery in the car just for this)
I wonder how this will affect their relationship with Electrify America, which has like 30% of its charging locations in Walmart or Sams Club locations.
I’m surprised they can find the transformers. As I understand it even without any government subsidy transformer production backlog is through 2030. We had a Tesla super charger site near us sit idle for over a year waiting for a transformer. A family member is a lead on transformer manufacturing at hitachi and they can’t build transformer production capacity fast enough to keep up with the rate of change of orders.
I hope they pair this with solar panel awnings in the parking lots. 30 acre parking lots in Central Texas (and I am sure elsewhere) are a killer. I am not sure why more big box stores (HEB, Home Depot, etc.) have not been a little more active with this sort of thing.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadI did have to shorten the subtitle to fit. The full subtitle is "Walmart plans expansive EV Charging network which will blanket the US within a few years".
8-(
I've _never_ been required to "join the club", or "run the app" to purchase gasoline.
Why does charging an EV require use of an app?
This is an accessibility issue and as such should be illegal...
It doesn't. Almost all DC fast charging I've done has been plug and charge or with a normal credit card terminal.
Meanwhile when I buy gas at QT or Sam's Club I pay through an app.
* Donwload the Walmart app
* Scan the QR code
So a valid response to "Why does charging an EV require use of an app" is, it doesn't, other places don't require it.
Even aside from that, many charging networks _do_ require "membership", "running the app", and often even require a pre-established balance on the account for the most convenient charging process.
It seems Walmart is also planning to follow this strategy, which is the point of the original objection.
As mentioned, the vast majority of my public DCFC experiences haven't used an app at all.
(I should note that I have occasionally encountered charging stations that had integrated credit card readers, but they have all been out of service.)
I do agree that chargers requiring an app are a royal pain. We're an all-EV household and I don't bother with local chargers that don't have readers or support plug-and-charge. There's a lot of Shell chargers in our area that require an app to work and almost no-one uses them because of how clunky it is.
For all of those people, using the chargers won't require downloading some new clunky app that they only have because of EV charging.
It will be that an app they already have and use regularly and already have their payment information adds EV charging to the list of Walmart goods and services that they already use it for.
[1] https://www.appsrhino.com/blogs/walmart-grocery-delivery-app...
Teslas do not need any app for charging. I mean sure, they do have an app, but no need to even have the app on the phone or with you to charge. No need for a phone or a credit card or a code or a password or a chip or a retina scan or interacting with a screen or tapping a keypad or anything. Just plug the plug into the car at the supercharger and it charges. Or, do it at home, cheaper.
Planning long journeys means having an app for every stop.
It really shouldn't.
Last time I looked into it InterCharge (OICP) was still just 1 of 4 competing protocols along with OCPI, OCHP and eMIP.
Has OICP displaced the others now or are they still fighting it out?
The salient point is the consumer perspective: I can have one generic app to handle charging payments for basically any public charge point and I interact the same way with all of them, I put the plug in my car and scan a QR code.
The debate in that unified market is more about price discrimination, because prices at a given charge point may vary depending on who operates it versus who your e-mobility provider is. Which is quite annoying in itself and should be fixed. But paying 59 ct/kWh vs. 69 ct/kWh is quite different from having a dedicated "car charging apps" folder on your phone.
> This is an accessibility issue and as such should be illegal...
Assuming it was app-exclusive, you would have a hard time convincing anyone that someone might be capable of driving an EV on the road while also having enough of a disability to make it impossible for them to use a phone app.
There are already members-only gas stations such as the ones attached to Costco. This would be following the same pattern but with an app instead of a card, which is actually far more easy to acquire than a paid Costco membership.
EV charging stations that take cash are not going to be common.
Card or app allow unattended use. Cash does not.
Add to that, you can make people use your app and show them targeted adverts. You can get them to buy any bulk goods for pickup when they are charging the car.
And some charging networks apply idle fees if you don’t move your car quickly when charging completes.
Of course, a car can only charge as fast as the charger, so maybe it makes sense (and certainly saves money) to install slightly slower ones at locations where customers are likely to want to spend longer times.
Walmart is also unlikely to have these charges, since they obviously do not want people to rush through their stores. (Obviously charges after a couple of hours might be there.)
True, but in practical terms this is not worth worrying about for most of us. Saw a recent article where a Korean driver had done over 600,000km (~ 375,000 miles) in his Ioniq 5 on the original battery. He'd only ever used DC fast chargers, typically charging to 100%!
His battery did fail around the 600,000km mark, but most vehicles never get anywhere close to that sort of mileage. And apparently it still retained 87% of original capacity up until that point.
And despite being far out of warrantly, Hyundai replaced his battery as a goodwill (good publicity!) gesture.
(Many cars allow you to set a reduced charging speed on AC, but not for DC fast charging, AFAIK)
With Walmart the EV charging is just going to be another thing managed from the Walmart app. I'd guess that a significant majority of people who will be wanting to charge there already use Walmart for other things and have the app.
Sigh. Plug and pay charging is so much better. It’s not like this is a Tesla only feature. Ford has thousands of chargers beyond SuperChargers that just work for plug and pay.
[0]: https://youtu.be/_UIVp8Upvj8?si=eX9EMWKi6sho4DnT
DCFC is a good bit more expensive than a L2 charge.
Charging at home it costs me about $0.135/kWh.
I'm very aware you pay a premium for DCFC. Presumably Texas' regulatory structure would help with all of that.
> Charging at home it costs me about $0.135/kWh.
So you're paying more than I pay to charge at home with my municipally owned and operated power company in California.
Most of California pays a rate 2x what I'm paying, which is a pretty typical rate.
Yup, and they can charge a premium for fast charging, because it is really convenient when you need it.
> Most of California pays a rate 2x what I'm paying, which is a pretty typical rate.
Yeah, all the private companies in California charge a fortune for power. It's ironic that the municipal services are so much more cost effective.
Imagine something like a two-seater City car, while I'm dreaming I imagine this type of vehicle completely taking over for most City commuting. Since these would be smaller and slower than normal cars, they would be phenomenally safer.
All of these cars are highway capable. The cars OP describes are extremely niche in Europe.
There have been many, many car projects like that from large and small companies. All of them failed to get any kind of mainstream audience.
People want general purpose cars and they will not buy anything else.
>Since these would be smaller and slower than normal cars, they would be phenomenally safer.
City driving at 50kmh is already dangerous in regular cars. Either you limit traffic to something like 25 kmh or you have to accept that crashes are now more dangerous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_electric_drive
Obviously it isn't great there, but it is not a car you can only drive in the city.
Going from the Tesla Supercharger network I can't share this sentiment at all. Virtually every time I charge at an EA station (which is admittedly only a few times a year) there is either random power degradation with no notice or one or many totally dysfunctional stalls. This latest time a few days ago the only open stall was busted because the terminal said to unplug from the last session over an hour ago.
The flakiness is compounded by the lack of chargers per station. Superchargers often have 10 or even 20 chargers, EA chargers often have 2 to 4 chargers so a charger going out is much worse.
Driving a Mach E around Texas.
This will not change much. Charging infrastructure is only a small part of making EVs appealing, although it is obviously a necessary prerequisite.
Generally, most EVs you can buy in the EU are just 10-20k more expensive than their ICE counterparts, and incentive programs don’t make up for that difference.
I assume you are talking about the family van 2 series? And not the sporty 2 door 2 series. (Why didn't you buy a Touran?)
You are also comparing used car prices to new car prices which is pretty insane.
>EV prices are just way too high.
Sure.
> You are also comparing used car prices to new car prices which is pretty insane.
I don’t care if the car is used or new tbh, I need 7 seats. I get that that’s not a super common situation, and that the comparison is unfair. The 2er was 40k when new. The thing is, there‘s basically no usable used 7 seater EVs in the non-crazy price range.
A used lower end model from one manufacturer vs a new high end model from a different one doesn’t seem like a fair comparison.
Besides 7 seaters are only must for families with 4 kids, AKA less than 10% of households.
I have both - decent sized EV and an old 7 seater. I'd never want to take it for a road trip as EV is just far more comfortable and easier to drive (autopilot 90%+). Its sole purpose is to deal with family visits and when I need to tow something like twice a year.
The IDs right now are also selling quite well, with VW Brand leading the manufacturer charts.
They were great when they were expanding and had great stores to lure you away from the competition, but now they operate under maintained not well staffed stores with confusing self checkout and obtrusive surveillance everywhere. It’s just a total race to the bottom at their stores.
Hopefully it will encourage better players like Target to follow suit.
Anyways, reality is that people buy EVs to charge them at home most of the time. At least thats what I think the reality is.
An organization as large as Walmart has the wherewithal to put together an effective charging network if they decide it is a priority. One of the nice things about being first-party is that they will likely have a preventive maintenance program and emergency maintenance program for the chargers, and some of that can be done by the company electrician.
I have a Tesla, and due to various factors (apartment living, other family members with Teslas), I almost exclusively use public chargers. I have some opinions of what amenities I want at a charger (bathroom, cold diet coke), but in general the chargers at gas stations, grocery stores, and Walmarts are the best for me. Restaurants and malls are actually not great amenities because that's often not the mood you are in when you arrive at the charger.
We have two major grocery chains (a duopoly pretty much), and they started competing for the growing EV customer base by installing chargers at every store of theirs.
Now just one of them has over 300 charging stations with about 2000 plugs, 5 years ago they had next to nothing.
Turns out it's good for business when families stop to charge for 30 minutes, they drop a bunch of money for other services while they're at it.
And I'll rather stop at a store to grab cheap snacks and ready to eat meals vs. paying through the nose for gas station prices. (We actually have some cups, plates, and cutlery in the car just for this)
I just hope something like the blue rhino propane tank for batteries to offer a Battery drop in.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/electric-transformer-shorta...