7-11 is opening 500 EV charging stations by the end of 2022

it seems restaurants, movie theaters, grocery stores, are the types of experiences where an EV charger is appropriate. This is like offering an EV charger in a drive thru like McDonalds.

I assume 7-11 management is aware of things like parking constraints, and that could be why this is only being rolled out to 250 stores in North America (out of 10,000). I'm sure that there are more than enough 7-11s that do have good parking, are in the right areas where charging stations would turn a profit, etc. If even 1 out of 5 7-11s met those conditions, they can later increase that to 5,000 EV stations in 2500 stores. Remember, there's over 100K gas stations and if we count pumps, you're in the ballpark of a million, so there is lots of room for companies to enter the charging market before it gets too crowded. Might as well set up a beachhead now.

I love more charging stations, but I agree with this skepticism, 7-11 tend to be very quick stops ? If 7-11 builds chargers at my nearest location, I'll occupy them happily and walk home while charging. And perhaps I'll enter 7-11 on the drop-off or pick-up trip ?

I have a plug-in hybrid (Volt) and live in an apartment complex without chargers, and I use the abundant shopping mall chargers at Valley Fair mall in San Jose, CA as you describe. I live close enough to walk home 1 mile from the mall, so I'll drop car off, then go into mall to pickup a meal at the nice food court or browse around. Probably as 7-11 hopes: I'll readily spend $10-$15 on food, while charging $5.

My unique fit here is that Valley Fair is an urban mall: it's close to my apartment in healthy walking distance, and it has dense multi-level parking structures, so I'm not walking out and back through a vast mall parking lot.

Movie theaters in malls map well to charging stations because of the 2 hour duration you are inside, for when people go inside movie theaters again ($AMC?) Offices and workplace charging work well for me too (when not WFH)

Probably target interstate highway locations.

These are DC fast charging stations, you can get a decent charge in ~10/min on newer EVs.

Very few cars are stopping for an hour. The typical stop time is between 20 and 30 minutes.

Most shopping malls (at least that I've seen) already have EV charging.

IMO it's kind of useless though. If I'm traveling I need a DC fast charger and if it is a DC fast charger, probably won't have much time to go in the mall before it's done (and have to move my car to open up the spot). If I'm near home I almost never need to charge outside.

7-11 is actually better since I won't be too far away from my car. Run in, grab a snack, chill for 5-10 minutes and be on my way. Only problem is they never have bathrooms.

They could enforce a time limit. Cars are also starting to charge to a usable percentage much faster. Tesla was talking about charging at 1000mph or ~ 83 miles range in 5 minutes of charging.

Also, at a 7-11 near a freeway exit, I would assume it's a different story than an urban 7-11.

There are quite a few combination 7-11 gas stations that I’ve seen on road trips. I’d guess those are the targets.

it's DC fast charging. lets say you're in the store for 10 minutes. lets say its chargepoint's new 24kw charging. That means in 10 minutes, a user would get about 4kwh of energy. i'd estimate that's 10-20 miles depending one how one drives (15-20 if slow stop and go city driving, probably between 10-15 if speedy highway driving). But, if this is an around town driving and there are many places where 10-20 minutes here and there you can pick up miles like that, it all adds up.

with that said, malls are also a great place to have charging.

The big question is, within the next 5yrs how much charge will you be able to get in 10 minutes.

Buying EV chargers from random sellers on AliExpress seems like a great way to get sued after somebody's car catches on fire.

there are probably electrical hookup limitations.

You can buy your own and pop it on PlugShare.

There are zillions of free-as-in-free-beer charging locations.

Edit: https://www.plugshare.com/

There seem to be two categories of gas stations; the ones where you fill up and go, with a minor convenience store attached, and the larger ones where they seem to want you hanging around.

With the first category, I imagine they just don't want people hanging around. The dollars per car per hour ratio drops off a cliff when you have EVs just sitting there for 15-40 minutes clogging up the limited space.

There are more chargers than (most people) you think.

Having more is a good thing, but gas stations adding them wont move the needle any time soon.

A friend was telling me recently that there aren't many chargers. He lives in Boulder, of all places. There are a million public chargers around Boulder, but they're relatively invisible compared to a gas station, especially if you aren't actively looking for them. When I showed him the plugshare map he couldn't believe it, he thought this stuff was a decade away.

In my experience owning five EVs, public charging isn't really an issue, especially for Tesla and J-1772. If anything, I worry for chargepoint et. al. in the face of so many free chargers in the short term.

That said, there are some weird spots between superchargers if you have a tesla. And if you rely on CCS with the coming onslaught of F-150 lightnings... I wish you good luck and to reconsider. Slow charging speed and crappily maintained CCS / CHaDeMo are really going to suck the life out of you on road trips compared to superchargers. But if you can get by with J1772 then life is good.

Here in Norway the main limitation seems to be cost, not for the chargers but for the connection to the grid.

Installation might require increasing the local transformer station, which whoever wants the capacity has to share the cost for. This can be very expensive, usually hundreds of thousands USD from what I understand.

Also the running costs can be significant, as there's a separate grid charge based on the peak kW used per month. This can add up to a lot if multiple chargers are used simultaneously.

Anything involving modifying parking stalls or electricity quickly becomes expensive, and these require both. Signage, striping, curb and walkway alterations, burying cable and permits quickly add up. The installation may also require security considerations since the charger is worth something.

But you are completely right; stations that become conspicuous charging destinations are going to do a lot of convenience store business. It'd be smart of well located towns to work on making it easier to add charging infrastructure so they can continue to be popular stops.

The $1K chargers that wouldn't stress an existing electrical panel aren't worth it for EV users unless they're in a dire emergency. It takes 6 hours for a full charge on one of these. Great for a hotel, but not for a gas station.

The ones that charge a car in 30-60 minutes generally have their own dedicated transformer, the size of a fridge. Two cars can pretty easily use 300KW with older tech, 600KW+ with newer stuff. If my math is right, that's 2,500 amps on traditional 240V service. My house has 100A service for comparison.

It's a different scenario. Charging vs fueling has different constraints, and a facility designed for one is not necessarily designed for the other.

Probably more effective for some restaurant franchise to add EV charging as part of their branded setup. E.g. Every IHOP in the country has EV charging.

Putting in DC fast chargers can mean a lot of new infrastructure and red tape:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyv7my/building-an-electric-...

Battery integrated chargers can help with the infrastructure side:

- VW: https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/vw-group-components-e-on-...

- Freewire: https://freewiretech.com/products/dc-boost-charger/

- Jolt Energy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v33Dy3AKf6g

Most gas stations don't have a lot of extra space. If a car sits there for an hour, they need twelve times the parking area in order to serve an equal number of gas cars, assuming the latter can refuel in five minutes.

Some gas stations may have extra room and would be able to offer up some parking spots for charging, but I'd assume that for most of them it doesn't make sense.

Another consideration is that throughput is a lot higher with DC fast chargers, and those are a lot more expensive than the cheap L2 AC chargers. And they might require some significant electrical infrastructure upgrades.

Because running a gas station is really about running a convenience store with an item sold near cost to reel people in (fuel).

It's a numbers game and it's all about throughput. You might convert x% of fuel buyers into people who buy a coffee or lotto ticket any one day. EV chargers are very low throughput so they're not very attractive. There's other better ways to improve that money widening the customer pipe or improving conversion ratio.

50KW chargers are typically closer to $80k for an install than $1k.

If you run gas station you'd start thinking about 200-350kw setups + battery storage. That's a lot of power costing a lot of money.

I dunno how many years these chargers can last, but 50kw chargers will be obsolete in 5-10 years time.

Here's how Circle K does it in Norway:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TVohXHjLro

At that rate, you'll spend as much per mile as gasoline.

Chargepoint are shit. I can't wait for chargers to become ubiquitous enough to drive Chargepoint into bankruptcy.

Chargers in parking spaces makes sense for urban areas. Dedicated charging locations make sense for highway driving.

A couple of examples of dedicated charging locations:

- Circle K in Norway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TVohXHjLro

- Gridserve in the UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoN4WCpuxHY

The power requirements to run, say, 100 chargers, potentially all at once, are potentially bananas. If there's going to be large-scale charging, there's also going to have to be some kind of load-orchestration system involved, too.

With a battery swap out model, you could have spots where you pull in and swap a drained / semi-drained battery (or batteries) for a fully charged one. Maybe like the way it's done with propane tanks in some places, but more complicated.

Quality control, general standardization and ease of access would need to be solved, but if done right this could be automated by pulling up to a vending machine and maybe eventually (super futuristic) on the fly like the way they can do in-flight fueling for aircraft.

The initial overhead could be worth it to not sit around charging, but I could also see other interests winning out here (bored people spend money, standardization isn't necessarily win-win, enabling third party service is less profitable for the car makers, &c).

I think the ideal end-game is that we have chargers in most residential parking spaces and plenty at workplaces and commercial property, plus we've either electrified sections of the interstate highway system (or the equivalent in non-US countries) so that cars can recharge without stopping or batteries are big enough and can charge fast enough that charge times on long trips don't matter.

The electrification of highways is something I'd love to see happen, but so far I don't think there's much interest or even consideration of that as a possibility. (There are a couple pilot projects in Sweden, one using overhead lines and another that uses slots cut into the road surface with high voltage rails underneath.) The payoff would be huge though in terms of reducing the cost and carbon emissions from long-haul trucking.

It really is time for Tesla to switch to CCS in North America.

Tesla switched to CCS in Europe two years ago. The European Teslas are better cars purely because they have a plug you can use with more fast chargers with no need for an adapter.

Not all electric cars are 80k Tesla units.

In Europe, they recently launched a ShitEV called Dacia Spring. You can buy it in Germany for around $14000 [0]. The world has enough room, and will have enough EVs in time, for regular charging stations for regular people, or even "standard hangout figures" ... we won't all be driving hype.

[0] https://www.carscoops.com/2021/03/dacia-spring-ev-prices/

If the charging station can deliver the juice, like at least 150KW, then a 10 minute stop will give you another few hundred kilometers if your car can handle that.

At that point it becomes a nice spot to stretch your legs and grab something quick to bite before you're back on the road again.

I never charge at anything less than 75KW if I am driving long distance. I have 22KW at home for slow charging.

> Wow five whole hundred?

The best way to think of it is five additional hundred. That's the advantage of using a common standard like CCS. Drivers of CCS cars can make use of all CCS chargers with no need for adapters.

7-Eleven's 250 new charging locations will be added to the existing 4,414 CCS locations in the US and Canada:

https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electricity_locations.html

most 7/11s are franchised. While the brand should be interested in such pieces to help their brand, the reality is that sometimes bad batches show up, or local franchisees stretch their dollar a bit in unscrupulous ways.